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by Molly Wales Cascading waterfalls in a green desert oasis. Camels, glassy-eyed and packed high, leaving a trail of hoof prints in perfectly wrinkled tides of orange sand. Long, dark bodies ornamented with earrings and coins, sparkles added to teeth. Fields of Scotch bonnet peppers dot the barren landscape with—wait, what? Fields of Scotch bonnet peppers? That’s right. Hollywood and National Geographic don’t know about it (yet), but thanks to "Earth Engineer" James Brown of Georgia, U.S.A, a previously un-hyped Nigerien treasure has a new claim to fame. Hot sauce companies in every U.S. state buy pepper mash from Brown’s company, Pedologues, Inc., and 10 to 15 percent (and rising) of the mash he sells comes from Niger (not Nigeria). So, next time you open a bottle of hot sauce, consider this: Located in West Africa’s Sahara region, Niger (pronounced nee-JHAIR) is four-fifths the size of Alaska or, if you prefer, slightly less than twice the size of Texas. It is landlocked and, being situated in one of the world’s sunniest regions, it is also on record as one of the hottest countries anywhere. Niger is mostly desert and sand dunes—dry and dusty—with a band of more tropical climate running horizontally just above its south borders. Rainfall never exceeds 32 inches annually, and even falls to below 4 inches over nearly half of the country. It is a dramatic and beautifully desolate landscape. Unfortunately, and in some cases unavoidably, Niger’s already-precarious environmental health is currently challenged by recurring droughts, overgrazing, soil erosion, deforestation, desertification and threatened wildlife populations. Niger is poor. Harsh climate and inhospitable geography are the realities of an economy based on subsistence agriculture, animal husbandry, re-export trade and (increasingly less) uranium. Only 70,000 of Niger’s 11 million inhabitants receive regular wages or salaries, and 90 percent of those workers are in agriculture—which leaves Niger’s economy at the mercy of the climate’s whims. With hopes of achieving food self-sufficiency, Niger focuses its main food crops on millet, sorghum, peanuts, black-eyed beans, rice, maize, potatoes, sugar cane, and manioc. It is a hand-to-mouth existence, perpetually on the brink of ruin. Yet Nigeriens are not a ruined people. They are resilient, diverse, and resourceful, ranging from skilled craftsmen to matriarchate desert nomads, fisherman and canoers to followers of the cult of beauty, silversmiths with magical powers to cattle herders. Typically they have a strong sense of tradition, family, and tolerance for others. Polygamy is common and families tend to be very large. Despite a high infant mortality rate and low life expectancy (47 years), Niger’s population continues to grow at 2.8% per year. Coming from a crossroads where people of diverse origins have lived together for thousands and thousands of years, Nigeriens today have homogenized into several distinct groups. One of those groups, the Zarma, includes the farmers and businessmen who grow chiles for James Brown. The aristocratic Zarma were great warriors in the pre-colonial era, and today are the largest group in Niger, forming the majority of the population of the capital, Niamey, and its surrounding areas. They are primarily engaged in agriculture and small-scale livestock breeding. However, being the first to benefit from the French education system established in the late 1940s, the Zarma have had strong influence in the central government and many members become civil servants. Others are merchants who travel to distant markets, or potters, weavers, and basket makers. Whatever their skill, the Zarma are generally regarded by their neighbors as a hard-working and honest people. The Zarma’s staple crop is millet, a grain crop like corn. It grows only during the rainy season that runs briefly from July to September, after which it is common for the men to go far from home in search of work, leaving their families behind. And this is where James Brown comes in. Pedologues, Inc. has a total of 340 acres of chile fields in Mexico, Beliz, Guatemala, Niger and the Mississippi Delta of Arkansas (plus trial fields planted in Romania last September), with a grinding capacity of 12 metric tons per day. They grow habaneros, serranos, jalapeños, cayennes, and Scotch bonnet chiles, which are eventually shipped to over 460 customers in the U.S., the Caribbean, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. With clients like Tabasco, CaJohns, Renfro Foods, Salsa Express, and other major food brokers, restaurants and fiery-foods companies, Pedalogues, Inc. is big business. But, having grown from a small environmental/soils consulting firm (the word "Pedologues" is French for a specialist in soils and soils engineering), they haven’t lost sight of their dedication, as their website says, to "promoting wise and long-term use of land, as well as environmental protection of this valuable resource." They are also dedicated to keeping Nigerien families together. In 1985 Brown was hired by the U.S. State Department US/AID to use his soils expertise to help, as he says, to "relocate the drought stricken refugees from the Sahara to the Sub-Saharan region of Niger." (Brown has been "in and out of Africa many times on both U.S. Sate Department contracts and United Nations Development Projects," including soil testing and engineering design for flood control in Rwanda, solving the problem of saltwater intrusion in the rice farming region of Casamance, and evaluating erosion damage in Haiti.) While there, he met missionaries from the International Mission Board who suggested that Niger would be a great place to grow peppers, as it had the appropriate climate and growing season, and a readily available work force. And, by providing these farming families with a year-round crop, Brown would be giving them the means to stay together. "When the growing season (July-September) is over," Brown explained, "the fathers and husbands will leave their families in search of work. They’ll go down to the Ivory Coast and other places in Africa to try to find work and send money home to their family. Most times they don’t send money back. Sometimes they don’t come back at all. So we wanted to do something to keep the families together, and give them hope." Here’s how it works: When the rainy season is over, the traditional millet crop is replaced with chile peppers. By growing the peppers after a grain, soil borne viruses are reduced ("versus rotating peppers with other crops, such as tomatoes, which permit the carry-over of certain viruses"). The biggest pepper production happens during the dry season, after which the fields are either put into rotation (if switched between peppers and millet) or the peppers remain during the rainy season as well. Either way, the farmers are provided with healthy soil, and year-round work. In order to arrange the logistics, Brown emailed back and forth and eventually, in September of 2001, traveled to Niger. "By this time," he said, "we were looking at about 60 farmers from three major metropolitan areas. We selected three Nigerien businessmen to run the grinders we’d set up in Niamey, Ouallam, and Say. And I have an African coordinator over there who oversees everything." All the missionaries had to do was keep the bank account. "We called meetings together in the three different areas and the farmers and village chiefs would come from four or five different villages. Some of them would walk many miles to get there. They all had farming experience and many of them had even grown peppers, other African varieties." Brown provided them with the seeds, start-up money and technical expertise, and they supplied the labor and the land (approximately 2 acres per farmer). According to Brown, the village chief allocates the farmland to individual farmers who, believe it or not, are held in the highest regard. After September, when the rain had stopped, they started nurseries to get plants from seed. The small starts were then planted in fields irrigated by water wells built by the International Mission Board, and come April the Niger Pepper Project was in full production. The peppers were harvested. The mash was processed and taken to regional warehouse locations before ending up at the main warehouse in Niamey. From there the mash was sent down the coast to Contoneu, and across the ocean for delivery in the U.S. Some of that mash may even be in your cupboard—or your stomach—right now. Today the project continues to work so well that word is spreading, fast and far. Brown was recently contacted by a group of Nigerien herdsmen known as the Fulani who are interested in growing peppers for him, and the International Mission Board is setting up pepper fields, again under Brown, in Morocco. The benefits are many: farming families stay together, local businessmen have new opportunities, and James Brown can honestly say that through his work he is enhancing the lives of others. And, best yet, every time you take a bite of hot sauce-smothered fiery-food, you can let your imagination—and your mouth—run wildly around the globe. Top of Page
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