The Terraces Were a Wage
Drought in Cabo Verde has never stopped, and famine has — the last one ended in 1948, and there has not been another since. What changed was not the rainfall but a labour scheme that paid rural people, in wages funded by selling donated food, to rebuild the hillsides they were standing on.
Drive north out of Praia and the hillsides are ruled. Not terraced in the Asian sense, with water standing in them, but lined — courses of dry stone laid along the contour, one above the next, from the road up to the ridge and over it. Down in the ribeira, the ravine bed the water uses on the handful of days a year it comes, there is a wall built across the channel. Then another a hundred metres upstream, and another above that, and so on to the head of the valley. None of them holds a pond. Behind each one is a flat shelf of gravel and silt with maize or beans growing on it.
Every one of those walls was built by hand, by a person who was paid for the day. That is the part that gets left out. The stonework on these islands is usually filed under landscape, or under tradition, and it is neither: it is a public works programme that ran for roughly a quarter of a century, employed a large share of the rural workforce, and was funded by selling food that had been donated as aid. It is the reason drought in Cabo Verde stopped being the same thing as death.
What the famines were
These islands were uninhabited when Portuguese ships found them in the 1460s, and everyone here descends from people who were brought or who came. There is very little soil, almost no groundwater near the surface, and rain arrives in a short season between about August and October, in a small number of downpours, in quantities that vary by an order of magnitude from year to year. Much of the archipelago averages under 300 millimetres; Sal and Boa Vista get a fraction of that. When the rains failed for consecutive years, which they did repeatedly, people died in numbers. The famine of 1941–43 and the one that followed in 1947–48 are together usually reckoned to have killed around fifty thousand people — a quarter or more of a population that never reached two hundred thousand. Lisbon's response was slow, partial and documented, and the standing alternative was emigration: contract labour to the cocoa plantations of São Tomé, crews for American whalers, and later factory work in Portugal and the Netherlands. More Cabo Verdeans live abroad than in Cabo Verde, and that is the accumulated arithmetic of the drought years.
The work fronts
Independence came on 5 July 1975, and the drought that had begun in the late 1960s was still running. The new state's answer had a name that sounds like bureaucracy and describes a machine: Frentes de Alta Intensidade de Mão-de-Obra, high-intensity labour fronts — FAIMO. Rural people, a large majority of them women, were hired in the dry season and paid a daily wage to build stone contour bunds, cut terraces, wall the ravines and plant trees. The money came from a mechanism that deserves more attention than it gets: donated food aid was not distributed, it was sold on the domestic market, and the counterpart funds paid the wages. A hungry household therefore received cash rather than a sack, the local grain trade was not destroyed by free food, and at the end of the day there was a wall on the hillside that had not been there in the morning. Amílcar Cabral, who founded the liberation movement and was assassinated in January 1973 before he saw any of it, had trained as an agronomist in Lisbon and was publishing on the erosion of Cabo Verdean soil while he was still a student there. The diagnosis was in place long before the state that acted on it.
The scarce thing was never the rain. It was time — the few hours between a downpour on a ridge and the same water reaching the sea, and every wall on these hillsides is an attempt to buy some of it back.
What a check dam is actually for
The walls across the ravines are not reservoirs and they are not meant to be. A flash flood in a Cabo Verdean ribeira is short, steep and carrying most of the soil it passes. A low wall across the bed slows it, and slow water drops what it is carrying: the sediment builds up behind the wall until it forms a level shelf of ground that can be farmed, which is where those maize patches came from. More importantly, the ponded water sits long enough to sink. Instead of running off basalt to the sea in an afternoon, a proportion of it goes into the ground and into the aquifer, which is what a well downstream is drawing on in March. Terraces and contour bunds do the same job on the slopes above, holding both soil and water where they land. The trees were part of the same system, planted to hold the surface and break the wind rather than to produce timber. The figure usually quoted is more than thirty million planted since independence, taking cover from around three per cent of the land to something like a fifth — the FAO's own count runs nearer half that, and the gap is mostly an argument about what you agree to call a forest.
The argument about the trees
The trees are also where the programme is most open to criticism, and Cabo Verdean foresters make the criticism themselves. The species chosen were the ones that would survive: Prosopis juliflora above all, an American thorn tree that grows in almost nothing and is known here as acácia americana. It survived very well. It is now invasive across the ribeiras of Santiago, Maio and Boa Vista, it sends roots down a long way, and it competes for exactly the shallow groundwater the check dams upstream were built to recharge. Planting it in bulk was a reasonable decision under the conditions of 1980 and a problem by 2010, and the honest version of the story includes both halves. So does the criticism of FAIMO itself, which by the 1990s was being described as a permanent make-work scheme with a clientelist edge, kept running because the alternative was rural unemployment with nothing behind it. It was wound down through the 2000s and replaced with targeted social transfers, and maintenance of the works — a stone wall needs rebuilding after a big year — became the weak point it remains.
What it did not do
It did not make the islands feed themselves. Cabo Verde still imports the great majority of what it eats, and no amount of terracing changes the fact that there is not enough arable land here for a modern population. What came after the work fronts was infrastructure of a different kind: the first large dam, Poilão on the Ribeira Seca, finished on Santiago in 2006 with Chinese assistance; a state programme converting irrigated land from flood furrows to drip; and desalination, which now supplies most urban water and which is the reason wind turbines went up on four islands in 2011, because desalinated water is mainly a question of electricity. In January 2008 Cabo Verde left the UN's least-developed country list, only the second state ever to do so. None of that would read as a triumph to anyone in a village with a dry cistern in May. But the drought cycle is unchanged, the rain still fails for years at a time, and nobody in these islands has starved since 1948 — which was achieved, in the first instance, by paying people to pick up stones.