I am just returned from a little country called Togo, in West Africa. While there, I paid particular attention to the agriculture. Here are some impressions from my time there:
Local Really Does Taste Soooo Much Better: The bananas in Togo were bangin’! I didn’t realize that bananas I’ve eaten in the United States taste like how a mealy, green-picked-and-shipped, industrial-agriculture-ripened tomato tastes compared to the taste of a vine-ripened tomato straight outta gramma’s garden. The bananas in Togo were grown there, picked when ripe, and sold and consumed within days of harvest. They tasted sweet, fresh, complex, and moist. Fresh food (which tends to be local) tastes so much better! I ate so many bananas in Togo that I experienced something new to me – constipation. And then I figured fruit would help so I just ate more and more bananas, not knowing that bananas actually plug up your system, wondering the whole time – ‘where are all these bananas going?!’
Everything We Need Is Here: My Togolese friend, Mati, took me to the farms that stretch along the riverbanks on the south end of the city. Watching how hard the farmers have to work to carry water by hand from the river to their crops, Mati said, ‘God left Africa.’ Afterwards, I spent a lot of time sitting by that river, talking to those farmers, working with them and watching the rhythms of Togolese agriculture unfold. The more I sat at that river, the more I felt this agricultural scene was the most beautiful site I ever beheld, and the more I disagreed with what Mati said. Seeing plants and food springing forth from such lousy, sandy soil, I realized how incredibly generous our earth is. Our world is so ready and willing to give, and all we have to do is pay a little attention and tickle it. Whenever we are ready, the earth already is. I walked up a mountain covered in a forest filled with mango, banana, apple, and avocado trees – a veritable food forest – with people harvesting from the abundance the mountain so willingly, graciously offers.
Woah! Climate change is real: many Togolese people I talked to were concerned about the increasing unpredictability of their seasons due to climate change. Their main concern is that unpredictable seasons will stymie their agricultural success, leaving them to starve. This threat is more frightening for subsistence beings that don’t have stockpiles of food, the economic power to import, or access to resources that will make adapting to unpredictable seasons easier, but these changes nonetheless concern everyone. How are we – the people of any nation or community – going to grow food, going to feed everyone, going to eat, if we can’t rely on the seasons? Climate change is not just an idea wealthy consumers have the luxury to consider at the cash register. Climate change is a global reality threatening people’s lives around the planet!
It’s All Up to Us/Political Will Does Matter: In Togo, there was no pump-irrigation for crops. It was the dry season, and all irrigation happened with watering cans. This limited the size of farms and keept them tethered to rivers. But when I crossed the border to Ghana, all of a sudden the farms were much larger and people were watering with giant hoses. There was infrastructure. The boundary I crossed was a man-made, political boundary, barely representative of any natural geologic or ecological boundaries. This showed me that while land and climate have a say in how agriculture is practiced, people are tremendously influential in creating the form their agriculture assumes. Political priority, funding, availability of resources: these factors are created by humans and able to be revised by humans – by us! – to create something more life affirming.
Gratitude: Even though the farmers by the river worked so hard that Mati claimed God had left them, they were still smiling and laughing and singing. They were grateful to be alive. The greatest thing I took away from my time in Africa is gratitude. I am more grateful just to be alive, just to be able to witness this beautiful miracle happening every day. I am grateful to be able to participate in the dance of life by growing food and by eating it, too!
thanks for reading!
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