Mauritania slowly suffocating in sand
Pastor Dale Morgan
Mauritania slowly suffocating in sand*
POSTED: 1305 GMT (2105 HKT), April 5, 2007
Story Highlights
• Saharan dunes shifting at about 2 to 3 miles per year
• Entire cities in Mauritania have been buried under sand
• Less rain, cutting of desert vegetation cited as causes
CHINGUETTI, Mauritania (AP) -- On nights when the wind hisses across the
dunes, the old man sits on his straw mat, draws a blanket around his
shoulders and counts his money.
In the morning, Sidahmed Ould Magaya, 75, will be trapped inside his
concrete house, the wooden door sealed shut by a wall of sand
accumulated overnight. In exchange for 1,500 ougiya (about $6), workers
will liberate him, hauling the yellow sand away in burlap bags.
At that rate, he has to sell a goat a month to pay for the mounting cost
of keeping the desert at bay in a country where the dunes are said to be
shifting at an estimated rate of 3 to 4 kilometers (about 2 to 3 miles)
per year, according to government data.
Throughout Mauritania, a desolate, dune-enveloped country twice the size
of France, men and women wage a daily battle against the sand.
With less rain falling now than in years past, the dunes have become dry
and unstable. Global climate change bears part of the blame, as does the
local practice of uprooting the scraggly trees that once dotted the
landscape to use as camel feed, firewood or for insulation, leaving
nothing to hold back the mountains of sand.
When the winds whip the land, the dunes advance like fingers, overtaking
walls, forcing their way into courtyards and creeping under doors. Whole
houses are swallowed. Entire cities have been abandoned.
"I've sold my goats and my sheep to pay for this," says Magaya of his
modest, one-room house still free of sand in spite of its precarious
position at the foot of an advancing dune. "When I built my house, I
chose this spot because it was flat. Now there's a mountain outside."
His front door opens onto the face of the dune. It rises sharply upward,
arching its back like the tracks of a roller coaster and cresting just
above the roof from where it bears down on the old man like a yellow giant.
A wave of sand has crashed into his neighbor's home, swallowing the
front door, forcing the family to use the back entrance. In the most
buried towns, families go in and out of their windows. Snow plows
crisscross the national highway, pushing the sand to the shoulder to
make way for passing cars.
While hurricanes and tornadoes plague America and snowstorms
periodically bury Europe, encroaching sand is the natural disaster
shared by the band of nations lying across the Sahara, not just
Mauritania, but Mali, Niger and the southern edges of Libya, Algeria and
Egypt.
Although the people of the desert have long battled the dunes, global
climate change has made the sand more unpredictable.
Surface temperatures have risen by 0.7 degrees Celsius over the last
century which has resulted in a decrease in rainfall, said Patrick
Gonzalez, a climate scientist on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. A fifth less falls today than it did in the 1950s.
Without water, there is no moisture to keep the sand in clumps. It moves
freely, dissipating in a yellow mist.
"It's a vicious cycle, brought on by the changes in our climate and
worsened by the actions of mankind," said Moustapha Ould Mohamed, who
heads the National Research Center on Desertification.
Although it is now illegal to cut much of the vegetation, desert
dwellers refuse to live without some plants -- for example a shrub
called "alfa," commonly used by masons as roof insulation. Those living
here say that at night in spite of the ban on the cutting of the shrub,
they often see the silhouettes of loaded donkeys tiptoeing into town,
their gait uneven under the weight of desert plant.
In a 109-page national action plan written by the Ministry of the
Environment last year, the Mauritanian government proposed a series of
measures from the creation of a green belt around threatened cities to
projects meant to stabilize the dunes by planting sticks in formations
designed to halt the flow of sand.
Although the proposed plan was commissioned by the government, it's so
far received no funding in Mauritania's budget. It's an omission that
underscores the country's inability to grasp the threat, said Mounkaila
Goumandakoye, the acting director of the U.N. Development Program's
Drylands Development Center.
"What's happening in Mauritania is dramatic," he said. "Politicians are
used to doing things to improve their country's GDP. They haven't yet
understood the link between the advance of the dunes and their economic
health."
In the arid interior of the country, where the dunes undulate like the
surface of the sea, that link is all too obvious.
Palm trees, which bear dates, are the backbone of the desert economy and
like real estate, they grow in value over time as the tree matures,
producing fuller dates. But cones of sand now surround some of the
oldest palms. Once the cone reaches the height of the fronds, the palm
tree slowly suffocates.
Chinguetti used to have 29 kilometers (18 miles) of date-bearing palms.
"Now, not even 2 hectares (5 acres) remain," said the town's Mayor
Mohamed Ould Amara, adding that more than 300 out of around 1,000 homes
in Chinguetti have been abandoned.
Among the palms that are still standing are a dozen or so owned by
Magaya. He's running out of goats to sell to pay the workers who free
his door each time the wind blows. He takes comfort in knowing that if
need be, he can still sell his palms to finance his old age at the foot
of a yellow-colored dune.
He also takes comfort in the fate he knows awaits him, whether or not
the dune gets to him first.
"When I die, I'll be put in a coffin and that coffin will be buried in
the sand," he said. "So I can't be upset. Either way, I'll end up in the
dirt."