“O pride of the home,” begins one love poem from the Somali oral tradition. “Antelope-like she-camel,” the speaker goes on, praising his camel’s furry neck and round belly, abundant with milk. A collection of oral poetry about camels, gathered from desert herders by the scholar Axmed Cali Abokor, was published in 1987 by the Somali Academy of Sciences and Arts in cooperation with the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. “O beloved camel mine,” another poem starts, and then the speaker starts apologizing to his camel; he hasn’t been treating her like the lady she is: “how I wished/ coffee beans fragrant to feed you with/ white cloth your head to decorate.” Another speaks of the pain of his camel’s absence: “The night when I missed you/ or sickness strikes you down/ inflamed is my heart with sorrow.”
Nina Munk’s new book The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, is in some ways the story of how Western economists fail to understand camels. The book tracks the successes and failures of the Millennium Villages Project, a poverty-reduction initiative begun in 2006. Munk’s book concentrates in particular on a desert community called Dertu on the border between Somalia and Kenya. When the project began, Dertu wasn’t a village so much as a well: in 1997, UNICEF had drilled one there, and it had become an important stop on the migratory path of the nomadic herders of the region. Munk writes:
“All day and sometimes through the night, they arrived with their caravans of camels, long-horned cattle, donkeys, and sheep. You could tell they were approaching by the clouds of dust that rose and drifted across the dry savanna—camels piled high with bundles of twigs, cooking utensils, wooden milk bowls, plastic buckets, woven-grass mats, and small children; donkeys loaded down with yellow jerry cans secured with braided-leather ropes.”
Camel’s milk and meat have been staple foods in the region for thousands of years. A 2007 partnership between researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Kenya Camel Association found that pastoralists in Somalia get 30 percent of all their yearly calories from camel milk. “Objects with you comparable God created not/ in butterfat production,” the oral poetry agrees.
According to Western economics, livestock is a commodity. Therefore, easier access to a marketplace for converting camels to cash is bound to improve the lives of herders. One of the ambitious projects in Dertu was to establish a livestock market, so that herders who decided to sell their animals didn’t have to walk three or four days to Garissa, the closest market town. So why did the new livestock market close down only months after it opened? “The whole concept of selling one’s livestock,” Munk writes, “is antithetical to Somali values.”
“You, white-furred she-camel mine,” a poem begins,
late at night
when stars mostly went out
guests unexpectedly arrived
were you called upon then
for a second milking session that night
succour to give and honour mine to save...
The point of camels, in other words, isn’t to sell them—it’s to have them. Even goats or sheep, the less valuable animals, are considered better than cash in hand, but herders sell camels only when they’re in dire straits, or under very specific circumstances. Camels are slaughtered on special occasions; they are given as dowry on a daughter’s marriage; the gift of a camel is a satisfactory way of ending a blood-feud between families.
The Millennium Villages Project has been a hotly contested model within the field of international development. Its basic ethos is that throwing money at a problem isn’t the answer—throwing a lot of the money at the problem is. Investors like George Soros put in millions of dollars to reach the project’s goal of ending extreme poverty in selected villages by 2011. The first prong of Sachs’ plan was to distribute free malaria nets, pay for a schoolteacher and a doctor, and generally improve the health and education of the people in the villages.
But Sachs, a Columbia professor of economics, is given to hurling invective at rooms full of stony-faced lifetime development workers. He says things like, “What I know is you’re letting people die!” and “This is about people’s lives! This is urgent!” The development workers, some of whom had been working on projects to build up a rooted local economy in the sale and purchase of mosquito nets, saw the intrusion of the Millennials as exactly what foreign aid isn’t supposed to be—a hand-out, rather than a hand up.
The second prong of Sachs’ approach was to use Millennium donors’ money to stimulate economic activity in the area—but how exactly this would be done, Munk reports, always seemed a little vague. The livestock market was based on an error in understanding of how trading in camels, sheep, and goats works in Dertu; similar agricultural projects also seem to have made little sense to the villagers. Munk describes the various explanations project managers came up with for the failure of a program to persuade women to grow kale and tomatoes in burlap sacks: “The high saline content of Dertu’s groundwater was to blame, someone said. The women had received no proper training, some else explained. Somalis didn’t like kale, another person told me.”
Poverty is a massive target with a strangely nebulous centre. Some aspects of what makes life hard in an area like Dertu are easy to grasp: the malarial mosquitoes, the unreliable access to clean drinking water, the high risk of dying in childbirth. But for the Millennium Villages Project to be, as Sachs intended, an economic jump-start rather than simply a charity, Munk suggests that its managers may need to figure out how to integrate more community leadership. By 2010, one of Dertu’s most prominent residents, the drug-store owner Ali Adi Mohamed, filed a written complaint against the Millennium Villages Project listing, among other things: “The project was supposed to be community driven, but MVP staff driven project hence this created dependency syndrome,” and “They use divide and rule system of colonials to carry out their interest.” Sachs and his team may also need to lower their expectations. Ending poverty in five years turns out to be harder than it looks.
Camel’s milk, as it happens, is starting to gain a following beyond the desert. The Ritz-Carlton in Abu Dhabi recently hired a “camel milk mixologist” to make non-alcoholic cocktails, and the British chain Costa Coffee in the United Arab Emirates has started offering its customers a camel milk option in their lattes. The FDA is working on legalizing the sale of camel milk in the United States, and in 2010, the dairy officer for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that the industry could soon be worth 7.8 billion Canadian dollars.
Whether a town like Dertu—many hours away from the nearest pasteurization facility, or even reliable refrigeration unit—could ever become a major exporter of camel milk seems like a dream for a different economy. For the moment, maybe it’s enough that the Millenium Villages Project has helped to start an immunization program for Dertu’s camels, thereby safeguarding a major element of local food security. “O blessed camel mine,/ you’re as beauteous/ as the rain,” the poets say. In Dertu, where water is precious, that actually means something.
Every week, Linda Besner reads a new book and writes on a tangentially related topic.
