Windfall

by McKenzie Funk

  It was the same view out the window as before. Green. Heilberg’s million acres were in the opposite direction, but the soil was similar—just fewer stones. Nuer tribesmen liked to boast about how fertile the land was. Plant a mango tree, they said, and it would be waist-high in six months. Plant green beans, and the vines would be waist-high in weeks. Plant anything, and it would grow. There might be more war before Heilberg tilled his first seeds. He could wait for it. Demand for food was inelastic.

  “Which do you think matters more in Africa?” he asked me. “Military power or political power?” He was sweating in his seat, wearing a baby-blue Lacoste shirt with an alligator on it, and had just been listening to Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” on his iPod.

  “Military,” I said. He nodded. “People say it’s going to be north versus south,” he said. “I say it’s going to be a free-for-all. It’s going to be a free-for-all for about a week. Mass hysteria. Juba burned to the ground. Khartoum burned to the ground. Then we’ll look around and see who’s still standing. They’ll form a new government. A period of chaos isn’t a bad thing. It’ll release that tension. You can’t escape the physics.”

  Like Greenland, South Sudan would soon vote yes in its referendum—an overwhelming 99.57 percent in favor of independence. In the months that followed, northern forces occupied Abyei, burning tukuls and hospitals and driving thousands of civilians from their homes, and launched a brutal bombing campaign in the nearby Nuba Mountains. Less noticed outside Sudan was Peter Gadet’s post-referendum rebellion in Unity state, fought against the fledgling South Sudanese government in the very fields that Heilberg may someday farm. It was chaos.

  “The reason I’m so open with you is so you can see I’m not a bad man,” Heilberg told me on the plane. “I’m a guy with a big heart who also wants to make some money.” He put his headphones back in. “You know what I give them? I give them hope.”

  EIGHT

  GREEN WALL, BLACK WALL

  AFRICA TRIES TO KEEP THE SAHARA AT BAY; EUROPE TRIES TO KEEP AFRICA AT BAY

  The main highway out of Dakar, a band of blacktop linking the crowded Senegalese capital and the empty Sahel, was dusty and clogged on a summer day—jammed not only with cars but with people. Young men walked against the flow of traffic hawking peanuts, inflatable airplanes, steering wheel covers, oriental fans, telephone cards, and shrink-wrapped apples. Others stood where the sidewalks would have been, manning makeshift kiosks that sold French-language versions of Yahtzee and Monopoly, posters of sheikhs and imams, and drinking water in plastic sandwich baggies. The highway led to the desert, and the youths of Senegal were doing what they could to go in the opposite direction. Sell enough in a day, and they might be able to afford rice, the national staple, which now cost twice as much as six months earlier. Sell enough in a year, maybe two, maybe five, and they might be able to pay a smuggler to take them to Europe. Every minute or two, a new group approached our jeep, waving their wares expectantly. My host, Colonel Pape Sarr, a thin man who greeted everything else with a cavernous smile, wore a blank expression, staring resolutely ahead into the haze.

  I was across the waist of Africa from Heilberg’s Sudanese tracts, some three thousand miles west, in the country that imports more food per capita than any other on the continent. Senegal gets three-quarters of its staples from abroad, including 150 pounds of rice a person each year—even as it, too, is a target of foreign farmland buyers. India would soon announce a 370,000-acre deal with Senegal’s Ministry of Agriculture, while Saudi Arabia’s Foras International would lay claim to 12,000 acres of rice paddies in the fertile Senegal River valley, the first piece of a planned 500,000-acre megafarm. But the scheme that drew Pape Sarr and me to the Sahel, the arid borderland between Africa’s humid tropics and the encroaching sands of the Sahara, was something else entirely: the Great Green Wall, Africa’s own response to climate change, a forty-seven-hundred-mile-long, ten-mile-wide barrier of trees meant to keep the Sahara at bay. If completed, it would cross eleven countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea, from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east. Pape, a camouflage-clad officer of Eaux et Forêts, Senegal’s directorate of water and forests, was one of its architects. We were driving to see his men put the first seedlings into the ground.

  The Great Green Wall was proposed in 2005 by Nigeria, where officials claimed desertification was consuming some 900,000 acres a year, and in 2007 it was officially endorsed by the African Union (AU). But in every country except Senegal, it so far existed only on paper. Standing before the press at the Copenhagen climate conference, Senegal’s president at the time declared that his nation would be like “the old Greek philosopher” Diogenes, “who proposed that you could prove the existence of motion” by standing up and walking. Senegal wouldn’t wait for AU studies or UN approval or World Bank funding. It would prove the viability of the wall by going out and planting—and was hoping that the money would catch up. The government framed the Great Green Wall as a matter of national survival. “Rather than let the desert come to us,” said the minister of agriculture, “we will take the fight to it.”

  It was convenient to think of the Sahara’s advance as being like that of a slow-moving army, a single front line against which another easy-to-imagine line—of trees—could form the perfect bulwark. But in the roughly ten billion acres of slowly degrading dryland regions around the world—not only in West Africa, but also in Spain, China, Australia, Mexico, Chile, and nearly sixty other climate-threatened countries, rich and especially poor—desertification is usually a messier process. “The Sahara spreads rather like leprosy,” wrote the Briton Wendy Campbell-Purdie, one of the first to try to check the Sahara with large-scale plantations, in her 1967 book, Woman Against the Desert. “Little bad spots here and there go unnoticed, until suddenly the whole area is infected.”

  As a barrier to such an insurgent threat, most scientists agreed, a phalanx of green was largely futile. As a symbol, however—of the protective crouch the world was beginning to adopt in the face of warming, of Africa’s particularly lonely position, of how much money rich, high-emissions countries would pay to save themselves from warming’s effects versus how little they would pay to save poorer countries—the Great Green Wall was much more potent. For me, it represented a shift toward the third stage of humanity’s response to climate change: engineering as refuge, when talk of opportunities rings especially hollow and we begin erecting our defenses. For developing, mostly agrarian countries, closer to nature, this means defenses against what nature is becoming. For richer countries, it means the same thing, plus something more: defenses against migrants and other spillover.

  We drove east and then north in Pape’s jeep, the land becoming increasingly yellow, the traffic increasingly thin, and began passing billboards celebrating the president’s other prestige projects: Plan GOANA, announced after street protests during the food crisis, aimed to expand domestic rice production fivefold by 2015. Plan REVA, or Retour vers l’Agriculture—“Return to Agriculture”—was GOANA’s controversial predecessor. Funded in large part by Spain, which in 2006 saw its Canary Islands deluged by more than thirty thousand boat people from Senegal, REVA aimed to turn unemployed youths into agricultural workers rather than illegal migrants. REVA’s test cases were planeloads of deportees recently returned from Spain under an arrangement with the Senegalese government. Street-smart young men were promised a hundred hectares and subsidized seeds, expected to remake themselves as farmers, and were so angry at the government’s complicity in their forced return that they formed the National Association of Repatriated People. The Great Green Wall was seen in the context of these other make-work projects—especially as it picked up international support. “Failure to act now,” wrote the authors of a joint 2009 European Union–African Union study, “could result in many land users becoming environmental migrants—potentially transferring problems north.” Whatever else it was, it was in part a scheme to keep A
fricans out of Europe.

  In Touba, a Sahelian boomtown founded by the country’s most famous Sufi mystic, Pape stopped to confer with another Eaux et Forêts official. I took a moment to walk amid the minarets and madrassas on the city’s dusty streets, where I met boys selling stacks of tapes and CDs to passing cars. “Take me to America,” said one. “I will go to Europe,” said another.

  Pape and I drove onward through the garrison town of Linguère and into the Ferlo, an expanse of featureless savanna named after a long-dry riverbed, where Fulani nomads made their encampments and parrots flitted through sparse trees and yellow grass. The paved road became a dirt road, and the dirt road became a pair of faint tracks, and the jeep began bucking like a horse. At dusk appeared dozens of parallel ditches running through the red earth, some dotted with faint tufts of green. Pape turned proudly toward me. “This,” he said, “is the Great Green Wall.” The trees were eight inches tall.

  • • •

  ON A MAP, Senegal, almost as close to Brazil as it is to the Spanish mainland, is not an obvious launching point for sub-Saharan Africans trying to reach Europe—not even for reaching the Canary Islands, which sit in the Atlantic due west of Morocco. But GPS technology had turned everyone into a navigator, the Canaries had unpoliced flights to the rest of Spain, and seemingly easier routes—across the Mediterranean via the heavily patrolled Strait of Gibraltar, over the newly heightened fences from Morocco into the Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla—had been successively sealed off. In the months before I reached Senegal, migrants set out daily from the beaches of M’Bour and neighboring fishing towns, each paying nearly $1,000 to be ferried nearly a thousand miles to southernmost Europe. The boats were fishermen’s pirogues: brightly painted wooden canoes equipped with two engines and two GPS units and packed with dozens of young men. The passengers’ mantra, a mashup of French and local Wolof, was “Barça ou Barzakh”—“Barcelona or Death.” Some pirogues capsized in storms; some simply disappeared. The weeklong crossing sometimes stretched to two weeks when captains got lost, leaving boats desperately short of food and water. In record-breaking 2006, thousands died en route—as many as six thousand, according to a Spanish estimate, meaning that one out of every six migrants got death, not Barcelona.

  There were idle fishing boats in towns like M’Bour because Senegal was running out of fish. The country was running out of fish in large part because industrial trawlers from France, Spain, Japan, and other foreign countries had been scouring the coast of northwest Africa since at least 1979, when the European Union negotiated its first fishing deals in the region. Over the course of twenty years, Senegal had signed seventeen different agreements with the EU, the most recent one the same week an EU-commissioned study found that the biomass of key fish species had declined by 75 percent in Senegalese waters. Gone were the schools of lucrative tuna, gone were the sharks, and left behind were smaller herring, along with unemployed fishermen, who found new work as human traffickers. In 2009, a University of East Anglia study of the effects of climate change and warming oceans on fishing economies suggested a further problem: Out of 132 nations surveyed, Senegal was the fifth most vulnerable.

  Whether the men fleeing for Europe should be considered some of the world’s first climate refugees was debatable. If creeping sands and emptying oceans were pushing them out, cities and distant countries, with their promises of electricity, jobs, and education, also exerted a pull. Senegal’s greatest population flow was internal—from rural to urban, hut to slum—and it followed a pattern being repeated across the globe in the new millennium, the first time in human history when more people have lived in cities than in the countryside. Rare was the Senegalese migrant who went directly from Sahel to pirogue. Rarer still was one who could point to a single cause—the changing climate—in explaining his move. But the many factors, in aggregate, were exactly what Europe feared. Africa would warm 1.5 times faster than the rest of the world, warned the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)—and the Western Sahara region would warm the most. “Climate change is best viewed as a threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability,” wrote the Spanish diplomat Javier Solana, the EU foreign relations chief and former head of NATO, in 2008. “There will be millions of ‘environmental’ migrants by 2020 with climate change as one of the major drivers of this phenomenon . . . Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure.”

  Today’s boat people could be but a hint of what was to come. And the Continent’s response, notwithstanding its efforts at emissions cuts in Copenhagen and at other climate summits, was also a hint of what was to come. It was creating a “Fortress Europe,” in the words of Amnesty International—an “armed lifeboat,” in the words of the journalist Christian Parenti.

  Senegal, Africa’s testing grounds for the Great Green Wall, was also Europe’s testing grounds for a virtual wall to keep Africans out. The European effort was not as conspicuous as the new fence I saw near the All-American Canal along the United States border with Mexico—where by 2080, according to a recent Princeton study, climate change’s effects on agriculture will cause the exodus of up to 10 percent of the adult population. Nor was it as conspicuous as the twenty-one-hundred-mile fence India was completing around sinking Bangladesh or the twin fences Israel announced in 2010 to seal off the Sinai from sub-Saharan migrants. But it was comprehensive: Spanish and Italian patrol boats, emblazoned with the logo of Frontex, the new, pan-European border agency founded in 2005, were already cruising the Senegalese coast by the time I arrived. European planes and helicopters ran aerial surveillance. Soon, a satellite link would connect immigration-control centers in Europe and Africa to help track boat people, and the Continent would be secured by the proposed European Border Surveillance System: a complex of infrared cameras, ground radars, sensors, and aerial drones. The European Parliament would pass its controversial Return Directive, a common deportation policy that allowed migrants to be held without charge for up to eighteen months before being shipped home.

  Spain, known for its comparative tolerance of immigration, was trying to offer carrots as well as sticks. It opened six new West African embassies in four years under its migration-focused Plan África, and its development spending jumped sevenfold. Before Spain’s recession sent unemployment rates to heights not seen since the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, it began a quota program for guest workers. If they came to Spain legally, laborers escaping high food prices and barren seas could win yearlong stints on massive corporate farms or in a still thriving fishing industry. Some Senegalese got contracts with Acciona, one of the world’s biggest builders of desalination plants, which Spain was constructing at a frenzied pace matched only by Israel and Australia, trying to keep up with its own drought and desertification.

  Spain spent millions of euros each year luring northern European tourists to its beaches. At the height of the Canaries crisis, it launched a marketing blitz in Senegal, too. With the help of the advertising multinational Ogilvy, it plastered Dakar’s buses with images of shipwrecks and ran radio ads warning of the dangers of illegal migration. In one television spot, the legendary Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour sat alone in a wooden pirogue, waves crashing in the background. “You already know how this story ends,” he said in Wolof. “Don’t risk your life for nothing. You are the future of Africa.”

  • • •

  IN THE FERLO, planting operations for the Great Green Wall were based in a former German research station in the village of Widou Thiengoly, a collection of mud homes and stick fences surrounded by trampled red earth. Next to a dirt soccer pitch was the village’s communal well, dug by the French in the 1940s, where nomads with donkey-drawn carts spent hours filling water containers made of plastic or from old truck inner tubes. A makeshift nursery of tree species selected by the Great Green Wall’s scientific committee—hundreds of thousands of acacia, balanites, and ziziphus seedlings, their roots wrapped in black plastic ba
gs—was behind the three-room building where Pape and I stayed with the other officers. The building had couches and buzzing flies and ancient electric fans, and in the corners were stacked piles of decaying German pulp fiction, from Unruhige Nächte (Restless nights) to Suche impotenten Mann fürs Leben (In search of an impotent man). We took our meals here, the Eaux et Forêts men arguing the finer points of planting while eating with their hands from a shared platter. After dinner, we cut the lights so we had enough power to run Widou’s only TV. The screen attracted dozens of villagers and hundreds of giant moths, and under the African sky we watched a French-dubbed Jack Bauer fight Middle Eastern terrorists in Los Angeles.

  The officers’ argument the first morning, held over a loaf of bread and a pot of coffee, was about precipitation. The so-called rainy season in this part of the Sahel lasted but a few summertime weeks, making the planting schedule all-important. If the seedlings went in before the last rain, they might live; if they didn’t, they would almost certainly die. Pape, who was forty-eight—he was born two months before Senegal’s independence—laid out an idea for a new planting regimen. “Imaginez,” he said. “Imaginez!” He continued making his point in Wolof, then turned to me to translate. “The problem here is the rain,” he said solemnly. “There is not enough.” A tall captain heartily agreed. “C’est vrai!” he exclaimed. Outside, a truck began blaring its horn, and I went to the nursery to watch dozens of men clamber into the back, then cheer as it took off for the front at a wild clip. Nearby, a bucket brigade loaded a second truck with seedlings, carefully passing them one by one, hand to hand, until the bed was full. It rumbled off after the first, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  Dirt roads radiated out of Widou like spokes, and after the officers dispersed, Pape and I followed one southeast until there was nothing but savanna grasses and baobabs. After thirty minutes, we passed a cluster of army-green tents—forester housing, Pape said—and soon we crossed the parallel ditches of the Great Green Wall, lines in the earth stretching as far as the eye could see. An Eaux et Forêts crew, a hundred or so machete-carrying youths in jungle fatigues, was waiting next to a water truck. Different parcels of the wall were being planted by different groups—from Eaux et Forêts to local villagers to members of the foresters’ union to university kids recruited by the Ministry of Youth—and Pape liked to foster friendly competition between them. It was a contest measured in seedlings used and hectares planted, and naturally he believed that his own men and women were the fastest.