Rice paddies bring food, hope to Mali's Timbuktu

TIMBUKTU, Mali, Nov 13: Driving down a tree-lined avenue winding through lush paddy fields, it is hard to believe you are just a few kilometres (miles) from Timbuktu, the fabled gateway to the vast Sahara.

The land here used to be parched earth, one of the last stretches of Mali's barren savannah before it gives way to the dunes and rocks of the desert just to the north.

Now women wrapped in bright cloth tend hundreds of hectares of rice fields, their slender green leaves a shock of colour against the dusty landscape that surrounds them.

Long dependent on expensive food imports, Timbuktu has become self-sufficient thanks to a foreign-funded irrigation project which donors hope can be replicated across one of the world's poorest countries.

The city, founded in 1100 by Tuareg nomads, was once the richest in the region, where merchants would trade gold from West Africa in exchange for salt mined in the remote oasis of Taoudenni deep in the desert.

But times have changed in the sun-blasted city of mud-brick mosques and sand-covered streets.

''Before, the riches of Timbuktu were the salt coming down from Taoudenni,'' Mali's President Amadou Toumani Toure told Reuters in his palace in the capital, Bamako.

''Today its riches are the irrigated plains, the rice production.

They manage two harvests a year,'' he said.

Small motor pumps drive water from the Niger river, which winds its way lazily along the southern fringe of the desert, into channels where it is shared by smallholders who allow it to flow through sluices to neighbours' plots.

The result is 1,600 hectares (3,950 acres) of irrigated land spread across seven villages around Timbuktu. They produce 6,640 tonnes of rice a year, enough to feed the local area and to export as far afield as Burkina Faso.

''There was no cultivation here before. It used to be just hard mud. Now we can feed the population with locally produced rice,'' said Abdoul N'Diaye, head of rural development in the area.

Behind him, women bent over in water-logged plots picking out weeds in preparation for the next harvest, due to begin in two months' time. US PLEDGES 0 MILLION Agriculture accounts for 80 percent of the active labour force in Mali and a fifth of gross domestic product. Yet less than 2 per cent of Mali's vast surface area, which is more than twice the size of former colonial power France, is cultivated.

Donors including the European Union and United States are pushing for aid money to be focused on irrigation projects, seeing improving agricultural productivity as key to lifting countries like Mali out of poverty.

''I know that Mali is an agricultural country, that the countryside is the heart of Mali,'' the deputy head of the International Monetary Fund, John Lipsky, told villagers during a visit to the country last week.

He pledged to fight for fairer access for their products on international markets -- a sore point in Mali, whose cotton farmers say US domestic subsidies keep them poor.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation, set up by U S President George W Bush to promote foreign aid, will sign a 1 million package with Mali on Monday to be invested in developing agriculture on the banks of the Niger river.

''It will be used to put in place a very important project which is going to help develop 15,000 hectares around the Niger river to produce cereal, fruits and vegetables,'' Mali's Finance Minister Abou-Bakar Traore said.

Much of the population of the Sahel region, spread across Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad on the southern edge of the Sahara, rely on farming to survive.

But the region is one of the most inhospitable in the world.

More than 3.6 million people in Niger, about a third of the population, were short of food last year after a locust plague.

A three-decade drought has accelerated desertification, making valuable grazing land even more scarce and leading to clashes between herders and pastoralists in some areas.

The desert has even encroached on the centre of Timbuktu, where some lintels over doorways in its 14th century mosques now stand at knee height. But as the sand buries its past, its people are looking to a new future.

''Before, people did not even have the means to buy food in the market. Look at this now,'' said Lansina Diarra, an economic advisor to the governor of Timbuktu, proudly sweeping his arm across the verdant vista behind him.

REUTERS