Bringing in a harvest for Sudan's war-torn hungry
Canadian volunteers Angus McKenzie, middle, and Mike Somerville, right, work on equipment on their farm in southern Sudan. Geoffrey York/The Globe and Mail
Unconventional Canadian volunteers turn bleak land into a life-sustaining farm
Geoffrey York
Bwereke, Sudan — From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published on Tuesday, Jun. 01, 2010 10:38PM EDTLast updated on Wednesday, Jun. 02, 2010 5:08AM EDT
Angus McKenzie looks at it like this. “People are dying,” he says. “They need food, and we can grow it. It’s pretty simple.”
That’s how he ended up on a 400-hectare patch of thorn trees and barren fields in the south of Sudan, assembling tractors from Canada and trying to turn the bleak-looking land into one of the first modern mechanized farms in Africa’s biggest country.
Mr. McKenzie – firefighter, farmer, bush pilot and amateur bow-hunter – is among a group of volunteers from London, Ont., who are enduring the risks of violence and political instability as they fight to produce a harvest from this war-torn land.
They are breaking many of the conventional rules of foreign aid. They don’t have financial help from any government. They didn’t conduct any feasibility studies or public consultations. They just persuaded the regional government to let them use the 400 hectares, and then they shipped over the Canadian farm machinery in big metal containers.
The work is often exhausting. It took them two weeks of toil in Sudan’s 50-degree heat to assemble a John Deere combine, after dismantling it in Canada to fit into a shipping container for the 55-day journey to southern Sudan. There are poisonous snakes in the scorched land, and they have to abandon their work if they run out of drinking water.
But this year, after two years of effort, the Canadians produced their first harvest: 8,000 kilograms of sorghum, which they distributed to local villagers and other hungry Sudanese through the World Food Program, the food agency of the United Nations.
The crop was harvested from just 12 hectares of land, instead of a planned 60 hectares. A ton of corn and soybean seeds went to waste last year, without producing a crop, because of violence in the region surrounding the farm – illustrating the huge obstacles that the Canadians face in Sudan as they work on their next crop.
When the volunteers arrived here, they collected soil samples and sent them back to Canada for testing. They found the soil as fertile as anything in Southern Ontario. This, after all, is the basin of the White Nile, one of the world’s great rivers. The land is littered with farm machinery from previous attempts to farm the land – abandoned because of the civil war that finally ended in 2005.
Despite the fertile soil, the Canadians lost their first crop last year because of tribal violence in the region. Twelve policemen guarded the farm, but the violence made it impossible to hire local villagers to weed the fields for two months, and the harvest was entirely lost.
As he rides to the farm over bumpy roads from Juba, the regional capital, Mr. McKenzie points to the burned-out huts of villagers who were attacked in cattle-rustling clashes last year. The Canadians still leave the farm every day before sunset, as a precaution against attack. A body was found on the road near the farm a few weeks ago, and nobody seems to know the dead man’s identity or why he was killed.
“If war breaks out, we’re not here to be martyrs,” says Mike Somerville, another Londoner on the farm project.
“The soil here is perfect – but violence is the only obstacle we can’t deal with. We can deal with everything else. If there is peace, I think we will succeed.”
Mr. Somerville, 38, works at a marketing agency in London. But he grew up on a dairy farm near Sarnia and quickly volunteered for Sudan when he heard about the project, which is led by a small group of Londoners – mostly business executives but also firefighters and police, known as Canadians for the Economic Development and Assistance for Southern Sudan.
Its leaders, who had been volunteering in south Sudan since 2005, were disturbed that the region was heavily dependent on food imported from Uganda and Kenya. By some measures, southern Sudan today is still the hungriest place in the world, with nearly half of its children malnourished.
“One of the ironies that struck me, in a country where people are starving to death, was that there was all this good, arable land that could go a long way to feeding the people,” said London-based land developer David Tennant, the group’s founder and main donor.
“Canadians do agriculture better than any country in the world. So we said, let’s transport the Canadian methodology and expertise to south Sudan. Over a period of nine months, we shipped over a fully operational mechanized farming operation.”
The group has a business plan for the farm, trying to make it sustainable by training the local farmers to run the machinery. Up to 100 local people have been employed at the peak of the harvest. The Canadians hope to withdraw in a few years, leaving it entirely in the hands of the Sudanese – although they acknowledge they will need to keep supplying parts for the Canadian machinery even after the Sudanese take over.
While the Canadians are unpaid volunteers, they see the project as very different from a typical aid project. “We’re all business owners,” said Rob Boyer, co-owner of a London marketing communications agency and chairman of the farm project. “We just want to get it done. No offence to any other aid organizations, but we have a vast array of business expertise around the table, and we’ve done a lot in a short period of time.”
Of the 400 hectares on the farm, only 120 have been cleared of thorn trees and brush. But as the project expands, the Canadians and their Sudanese partners are planning to clear more land and expand the harvest.
This year already looks much better than last year. Over the past few weeks, they have planted 60 hectares of sorghum, up from 12 hectares last year. And they hope to plant two crops every year in the future.
Until now, the local villagers have depended on subsistence farming and fishing. Their crops are never enough, so they are forced to buy much of their food in nearby markets – if they can afford it. If they cannot afford it, they go hungry.
They’re enthusiastic about the Canadian project. “With this mechanized system, we expect to get more food to feed more people,” said Tom Drani, a Sudanese agricultural official who has become the farm’s manager. “And it will give us a lot of skills to help produce more food.”