Lettuce: The Green Gold of Niger

By Lane Hartill

In the damp depression below their village, Issa and Habibou are busy bucking the world's financial meltdown.

It has found its way into their lives, that's for sure. Prices have doubled, even in this forgotten corner of Niger. But at their feet, the solution is sprouting. It's lowly lettuce, but they might as well be growing greenbacks. Here, in one of the poorest corners of one of the poorest countries in West Africa, it's the green equivalent of gold.

Millet, anyone will tell you, is master in Niger. Cigar-thick and soft as pipe cleaners, thousands of millet plants line the roads on the baking southern fringe of the country. They shake their fingers—bristling with hundreds of millet pearls—at you as you rush by. It's the staple food here. Mix it with water, cow milk and sometimes sugar; millet porridge feeds the country's 13 million people. It thrives in the sandy soil here with only some animal manure and a little rain. There's just one problem: Everyone is doing it. This time of year, donkey carts deliver stacks of it, forcing the price down to less than $3 a bundle.

"The soil here is very poor," says Habibou. "If you don't have a cart and organic fertilizer, you can't harvest anything. And if you don't have the means to buy [chemical] fertilizer, you will harvest nothing."

For Habibou and Issa, millet wasn't cutting it. They had families to support, children to keep healthy. Many families here eat millet for every meal, and children don't get the micronutrients they need.

So when Catholic Relief Services came to Takouidawa and proposed the idea of growing lettuce, along with other vegetables, Habibou and Issa were willing to try. It didn't matter that Habibou had never even tasted lettuce before. "We grew up in the culture of millet," he says, taking off his sandals and curling his toes into the sand. "Only the white people ate lettuce."

Habibou grew up farming millet. Every dry season, he went to northern Nigeria to study. As the years went by, they struggled to make ends meet selling millet.

Spiking Prices

Things got particularly difficult this year. Both Habibou and Issa heard about the financial crisis on BBC Hausa radio broadcasts. And while the U.S. mortgages and credit markets don't mean much to them, Dogondoutchi, the nearest major town, is being hit in its own way. "There's been a big jump in prices here," says Habibou. Bean prices are up 50 percent over last year. Rice is up nearly 50 percent—a major spike for poor families.

But the lettuce sprouting behind them will be ready to harvest in a few weeks. It will help them buy animals—sheep and cattle—which they will fatten up and sell at a later time. Something as humble as lettuce is providing them a major financial cushion.

It doesn't matter that business classes weren't part of the curriculum at his school up north. Habibou, 27, didn't need to study Smithian supply-and-demand curves to know that lettuce was going to sell. Nobody was growing it. And with restaurants in the capital, Niamey, needing to meet the demands of their Western clientele, there was a niche to exploit.

CRS sunk several wells in the swale below Habibou's village. They gave him a plot of land. They taught him how to spread organic waste from the cattle and sheep over the ground. They taught him how to plant the seeds. And in 45 days, he had some of the best lettuce you've ever seen. In a country that is dominated by dust and multiple shades of brown, the villagers' bright green plots of lettuce offer welcome contrast.

But the best part: the buyers. They're coming to him in droves. They drive from Niamey. They even come from across the border in Nigeria.

"With the market gardens," says Habibou, "everyone can get something out of it."

Health and Wealth

Now, he makes close to $150 from one cycle of lettuce growing. He's ahead of the other lettuce growers, so he can get top dollar. Then he moves on to growing carrots, peppers, potatoes, watermelon, cauliflower and tomatoes. He sells most of his vegetables, but he eats some of them too. The families who rely exclusively on millet to feed their children still take them to the nutrition center. But not Habibou: His kids never get sick.

All of it was made possible by CRS. "Before, we pulled water by hand from the well," says Habibou. They didn't have watering cans, or a pumping mechanism that worked like a StairMaster. Habibou hops up on it and starts a workout that any gym rat would find familiar. But he's pumping the water into a holding tank. And Issa is scooping it out with watering cans. It's much less tiring than the hand-over-hand reeling of years past.

The simple concept of a garden has changed the complexion of the village. No more trips to the feeding center for the children. No millet porridge for weeks on end. They get to eat salad, a luxury they never thought possible. During the hungry season when the millions of Nigerien farmers struggle to ignore hunger pangs, Issa and Habibou have dried cauliflower to eat, money in their wallets and animals to sell.

"Before, not everyone had a parcel of land," says Issa. "With the arrival of CRS everyone has something to feed their family with. They have seeds and materials."

For Issa, the off-season meant pushing a wheelbarrow around Niamey, hawking bananas. In three months, he'd make around $60. But this year, he's staying put. He's got vegetables to grow. And green gold to harvest.

Lane Hartill is the West Africa regional information officer for Catholic Relief Services. He is based in Dakar, Senegal.