SAKABAL, Niger — In a part of the world where the worth of a man is measured by his animals, Tuareg nomad Soumaila Wantala has come to this market to do the unthinkable: sell his last camel.
He crouches in the shade of a thorn tree as traders haggle over the 4-year-old male animal, Yedi. When the sale is complete, Yedi rears his enormous neck and lets out a cry. It takes three men to drag the camel out of the arena, as if he understands the fate that has just befallen his master.
In markets all over Niger, hungry people are selling hungry animals for half their normal value, giving up on the milk and money of tomorrow so their children can eat today. Their plight is a sign of how far the economy of the desert has broken down amid drought after drought.
This is a community so tied to its animals that children play with miniature camels or cows cut from rock. It’s in livestock that a man settles disputes, pays the dowry for his future bride and leaves an inheritance to his sons.
So to see a nomad sell his last camel is like watching someone sell their house and car, liquidate their 401(k) and empty their bank account all at once, just to buy groceries.
Such fire sales are happening with frightening regularity in cattle markets like this one, poised on the edge of the massive grasslands that run like a ribbon across the neck of Africa.
In a normal year, an adult camel like Yedi could sell for as much as $1,600. After spending all day under the thorn tree, Wantala, a 35-year-old who looks like a human stick, was forced to accept half that price. Across the plains, his wife and six children were waiting for him under an animal-skin tent, their bag of grain nearly empty.
“It’s a deep shock. It’s like I’ve fallen into a hole,” Wantala said. “But right now, I’m hungry. And I need first of all to remove the hunger.”
Animals in the Sahel act as a buffer, a cushion against hunger. In times of need, a cow or camel provides milk, and is an asset that can be traded for food.
Eighty percent of people in this landlocked nation, and virtually all in its rural areas, depend on livestock for some part of their income, according to Niger’s breeders’ association.
In a time of drought, the animals lose weight, and nomads literally see their assets shrink. At the same time, the cost of grain goes up. The price of millet, a local staple, is at record levels.
In March of last year, a goat could be traded at a market in Niger’s Tahoua region for 394 pounds of millet, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. By March this year, it took two goats to fetch the same amount of cereal.
“For the herders, it’s a double whammy,” said Paul Sitnam, West Africa director for humanitarian emergency affairs for World Vision, which works in Niger’s pastoral region. “The animal represents their capital. Their savings.”
Animals can feed children over time. UNICEF estimates that 1 million children in the Sahel face life-threatening malnutrition this year due to the drought, more than a third of them in Niger. The familiar period without rain in this former French colony of 16 million is so painful that it is called the “soudure” — French for “soldering” lips shut.
Aid groups have saved lives by trucking in food and setting up feeding centers. It’s an expensive fix, though, that does not mend a broken food chain. It’s a tough sell to get donors to save the goats which could prevent a child’s hunger.
“Pictures of starving goats do not attract aid in the same way as images of dying children,” said Maiga Ibrahim Soumaila, a representative of the United Nations Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
