Everything is left to chance

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Sandrine Chetail

I started the long overland journey to Bouar from Bangui, the capital city of the Central African Republic. Bouar, a small town not far from the Cameroonian border, is where Mercy Corps is intervening in response to the global food crisis. The rainy season has turned the road into a muddy sludge alternating between potholes the size of craters and the occasional brief respite of a comparatively smooth ride due the remnants of what was once a paved road. After seven hours on this roller coaster of a ride, including a short stop to taste the “mechoui,” the local meat grilled with spices — quite tasty in fact — we finally arrived in Baoro, which marks the end of the official “paved” road.

From there, the road is not paved, and we can see the long red dirt snaking before us, making its way through the bright green landscape. Preparing myself for the last hour of the journey, I fell asleep. I was jolted awake by the noise of a crowd and our vehicle slamming to sudden stop. In front of us, a long line of maybe 30 pachyderm-like trucks: immobile, buried in mud, unable to move one way or the other.

This is how it works in the CAR! Everything is left to chance. The lack of maintenance of the infrastructure, due to a combination of unbridled corruption and general lack of money, is a major hindrance to the development of the country. Custom checkpoints and tolls, legal or not, are paving the way, making it long and complicated for even the bravest to transport the goods from one part of the country to another. Trade is limited, and towns like Bouar — once a flourishing agricultural hotspot — are being slowly cut off from the rest of the country and reduced to subsistence farming.

Mercy Corps, in its response to the global food crisis, is striving to help local farmers become more self-sufficient. Through the revival of forgotten and innovative locally-based solutions (i.e., establishment of their own seed systems, home-made compost, and strengthening of community-based relationships between farmers, traders, and transporters), farmers are gradually recovering and reconstituting their assets and resilience to the shocks that life in the bush throws at them daily.