Africa: Small farmers take a stand for one of Dakar’s last urban woodlands

According to the new urban plan, 43% of the 150 “downgraded” hectares will be allocated to build new homes, and a further 21% to new roads.

By Francesco De Augustinis
Mongabay
13 April 2022

Excerpt:

Up to 80% of Senegal’s vegetables are grown in the niayes, low-lying areas in the dune systems that stretch 180 kilometers (110 miles) between Dakar and Saint-Louis. Beginning in the late 1940s, filao trees (Casuarina equisetifolia), a kind of pine native to Australia and the Pacific region, were planted to stabilize the dunes, eventually forming a protective strip of wooded land covering more than 9,000 hectares (22,200 acres). But since the 1970s, the filao and the niayes on the outskirts of Dakar have been threatened by the city’s expansion.

The four municipal areas through which the filao strip runs were largely undeveloped in the mid-1980s. But between 1984 and 2019, the proportion of built-up areas grew from just 18% to 75%, putting increasing pressure on the strip of trees, according to researchers Néné Makoya Touré Diop and Giacomo Pettenati.

Dakar is one of the largest cities in Africa, they write in a 2021 study. From a population of 400,000 in the 1970s, its population quadrupled in the space of 20 years, thanks to a rural exodus driven by drought.

The northern districts of the capital received a fresh influx of people in 2011, this time farmers fleeing flooding in other parts of the country. Some began growing vegetables in the filao strip, reaching an agreement with the Senegalese environment ministry’s department of water and forests, the public body responsible for the management of the country’s forests and protected areas.

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