I'm always fascinated by what people do or don't know about the world outside their own country.

Mind, I've seen shanty towns on the Texan border that looked little better.

Seriously, people live like this in parts of rural China, which is a fast progressing country.

The US has a GDP per head of $40k. I would think the richest African nations have GDP/head of around $2k, and the poorest around $100.

So how would you expect people to live?

Relatively speaking that's not bad. Take a look at the West Point slums in Monrovia, Liberia.

So where is the "pure squalor" in the video?

I have never been to Senegal, but it is a popular tourist destination - especially to the French and to gays.

Anyone who has been to West Africa for a while will appreciate that the ex-French colonies are much pleasanter than the ex-British colonies. The people are much more friendly and civilized. The French like to claim that it was due to their benevolent (ahem) policies and the British like to say that the French grabbed the places with nicer tribes. Perhaps the slave trade (by the British) brought out the worst in the peoples who they traded with - let us not forget that it was the coastal tribes that enslaved the populations of the interior before selling them on.

The pictures show a place that is a good deal better off and safer than is most of Lagos (the commercial capital of Nigeria) - probably because Senegal has no oil. Indeed, I am sure it is much pleasanter than slums in a lot of other places such as Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. They do not have the gun and drugs culture that is so prevalent in the Americas.

The article misses out on the two main problems in the Senegal - population-growth and desertification (which is linked to oil consumption).

The population of Senegal has increased by a factor of 3 over the past 40 years. If the US's population had increased at a similar rate, it would now be around 600 million. In fact, the US's population, if immigration is removed, has barely changed over this period.

How wealthy would the average American be today if the US's population were 600 million? So much investment would have needed to go into schools, hospitals and infrastructure that there would have been little left over to go towards technology, research and higher education.

On this website, and elsewhere, I have repeatedly seen the assumption that when people are hungry, they rebel and revolt. Not true. If you read carefully books by the famous French historian Fernand Braudel, you will see that the French revolution had somewhat more complex causes. To take an American example, the revolt against the British was not caused because the British in America (the colonisers) could not afford to pay the tax on tea from India. Quite the opposite.

Hunger causes weakness and apathy. Just try going on a serious diet for a while and you will see for yourself. Indeed, dictators like Stalin and Kim Jong-II use hunger to control entire populations - something that you cannot do as easily by force. Hence the reluctance of North Korea to make deals that include food in exchange for disarmament.

Personally, I think that places like Senegal are going to go through a severe form of "population destruction" rather than "demand destruction" - through hunger. Their populations drift to the cities because the urban population control the politics and are able to grab resources from the rural hinterland - for example, by having a grossly inflated currency, taxing food exports and subsidising imports. This will eventually come to an end and people will have to go back to the land. They will have to relearn all the tricks needed to keep the desert at bay.

Sadly, I think that their population will eventually stabilize at around one third of its current number.

I was born on the other side of Africa and love the place and its peoples so this makes me really sad.

Bring business to Dakar? Business has gotten to Dakar. That's why the local economy has been trashed there and in much of Africa. The technology/culture/terms of "business" is a big part of what's sucking Africa empty.

cfm in Gray, ME

I just read your article and saw the video, DISMAL is the best i can say about the place. The place is a pure squalor!

Huh? It looks like an ordinary third world city... better than many. The cars looked recent and in good condition in many cases.

You think you can fix things easily and that the whole thing will look like suburbia in a few years just by bringing business to Senegal? Why don't you dig into some details. Go to Senegal and try and start a business. You will see that developing economies are enormous gordian knots of inter-related and sometimes very politically incorrect problems that you probably never expected. You'll also see that in warm countries, as long as people get enough to eat, they get by for the most part and don't suffer greatly by not having pretty fixed up buildings and brand new clothes.

There is a whole field devoted to studying the problems of developing countries. If you're interested in a business oriented take I'd suggest "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando De Soto.

the ancien Regime, the old French Monarchy may have been corrupt, but what followed it, during the Revolution, was far far worse.

Read up on Danton, Robespierre and the Terror. Or see the movie Danton with Gerard Depardieu. Or the TV series The Scarlet Pimpernel with Richard E. Grant.

The Committee for Public Safety and its Terror was the model for Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia.

Honestly? Squalor? My reaction to the YouTube video was 180 degrees away from yours. I saw healthy looking people walking along a bright, lively street. Commerce, pervasive reuse and recycling, women walking safely unescorted with or without full Islamic covering, children playing outdoor games, people engaging in honest manual labor, etc.

You want to see a pit of desperation? Visit my neighborhood of greater Boston. It's one of the few places near the specialized technology work that I do in which a family can rent instead of buy, and we have staunchly refused to get suckered by the modern-day equivalent of tulip mania by taking on a creative mortgage time bomb.

So where can a well-educated, young, single-income family afford to live in Boston without adding credit card debt to our hefty educational loans? I should post some photographs of our neighborhood (hint: they don't call it Slumerville for nothing). As seen from street level, the primary business activities appear to be selling lottery scratch tickets, waiting tables at the local stuffyourfaceteria, and writing parking tickets.

When the house we occupy was built 100 years ago, it was a nice, comfortable single family house in a thriving, walkable community like the one seen in the footage from Senegal. Now it is subdivided into five separate apartments housing a dozen renters who don't care one whit about this place as it rots and falls apart around us. The slum lord who collects our rent doesn't either. There was a tram rail down the center of the main street two blocks away which has since been paved over. I've never seen children playing double dutch here. The streets are filled with trash and potholes and the sidewalks are cracked and shifted like tectonic plates. A family of squirrels have bored into and taken up residence inside the structure of the house across the street, which is now three different shades of peeling paint where it has been subdivided. The side wall bulges out in a slow-motion structural failure. The house around the corner that caught fire in the fall is still boarded up. Graffiti abounds, as does chain link fence.

To be fair, there are also libraries, numerous well-appointed parks, and high-end products and services for the well-to-do or deep-in-debt. For the right price, we have year-round access to fresh organic vegetables, which is a lavish luxury by world standards. We walk to the farmers' market to buy local produce in season. The public transportation is Dickensian and irregular but pervasive. We have easy access to several cinemas playing excellent independent and foreign films that are unavailable to most of the U.S. We have access to a top-notch automotive recycler for used car parts to keep our old car running. We have many high-quality lessons and activities for children in affluent parts of Cambridge. So we make it work, but the fact remains that large swaths of Boston have degraded into places not worth caring about (in the parlance of J.H. Kunstler).

Compared to the deplorable condition of U.S. cities, I'm extremely impressed that Dakar is thriving on a tiny fraction of the energy we use in our squalor. It gives me hope that in the wake of peak oil, we can reconfigure our neighborhoods in ways that will make them better than they are now, in which neighbors communicate in ways other than hand gestures and horn blasts exchanged across traffic lanes choked with pollution from SUVs. From the looks of the U.S. today, we need (little 'd') democratic revolution more than Senegal.

And yet...
Chris, would you say that the folk on the streets of Dakar spent more of their time smiling, talking with their their friends, making music, dancing than counterparts in the rich world?

Writerman

Since you bring up morality, I will go ahead and write something I have been noticing for a while here. It seems quite popular to 'religion bash' here when the topic comes up. Many people here like to support evolution, to say we are nothing more than cells and chemicals that climb out of a pool of 'gooh'.

The way I see it, people have to make a decision. There is a God who gives absolutes and sets morality, or there is not and we are all just nothing more than a bunch of chemicals.

If we choose that we are nothing more than chemicals evolved out of some pool millions of years ago, why should we care about if we use more resources than someone else. Hey, eat drink and be merry, we have it better than everyone else! Too bad for them if they can't survive! Suvival of the fittest, remember? So what if PO is about to happen, as long as we can take over the oil, or build a survival bunker and live, who cares about the other guy. If our emotions or thoughts are nothing more than neurotransmittors, then you are being completely irrational by worrying about us using more than our share of the resources.

One thing I can tell you is that the reason that poorer countries are often more religious is that organized religion is one of the few institutions that truly sincerely cares about the poor unconditionally.

Certainly you can translate and redistribute.

Could you email me at chris@vitaltrivia.co.uk.

Hi Juan Jesús - I'm familiar with your webpage and the main Spanish ASPO site at www.crisisenergetica.org. The situation in the Canary Islands will indeed be interesting/challenging in a post peak oil world. As far as I know the Canary Islands depend on imports for practically everything, and the whole economy is based on tourism as you say. As PO starts to hit, future "visitors" to the islands will change from being temporary money-spending holiday makers to permanent refugees from places like Senegal and Mauritania etc. I think a large part of the power generating capacity in the Canary Islands is also based on petroleum products, isn’t it? At least until the regasification terminals get built in Tenerife and Gran Canaria (which will of course mean switching to a dependence on gas instead of oil…)

But on the brighter side I see that the Canary Islands are advancing well in terms of promoting renewables and peak oil awareness. On the one hand there is a plan for the electricity grid of the smaller island of El Hierro to become 100% renewables based, and also I heard recently that the Cabildo (local government authority) of the Island of La Palma has just approved an energy planning document in which the peak oil issue is recognised unanimously by all of the island’s political parties.

Anyway, this is getting a bit off topic. Just thought I’d reply to your post to say hello! (o mejor dicho, para mandarte un saludo desde aquí en Madrid!)

These countries are already only half a step above where they were 100 years ago before oil. Why would you assume that taking that step back will result in war? Who would they fight and for what purpose? It's not like they have the wherewithal to take Nigeria to control the remainder of the oil being produced there.

Refrigeration is not critical for their food supply as precious little is refrigerated (ever been to a West African market? I have). This is a silly projection of the situation in the highly developed West on to an undeveloped nation.

You asked for my opinion, so here goes. Please bare with my rather simple English.

Once electricity is no longer available in Senegal I assume their will be war. And eventually this war will spread.

That seems likely, but in my opinion, it's not the only possible scenario. The Senegalese people are generally very peaceful, and their history as a nation proves this, too. Also, they have relatively warm relationships with their neighboring countries.

This leads to a question. If there's going to be a resource war in the poor countries such as Senegal, whom they're going to fight with? Who is their enemy? Is there even one? And why would they start a war with their even poorer neighbours?

A civil war is more probable, but I can't see how it would benefit Senegal's situation either. What's the point in war if you can't gain anything no matter if you win or lose? Oil won't get any cheaper anyway, so why bother?

In conclusion, Senegal (and other poor African countries) certainly have a severe problem. And what makes it worse, is that they don't have any real means to fix it. They can just see what the rest of the world does and try to cope. In my opinion, African countries' best chance is to unite and make survival plans. If they start fighting with each other it will just deepen the crisis.

Once electricity is no longer available in Senegal I assume their will be war. And eventually this war will spread.

War in a postpeak environment will be subject to pre-oil age constraints. Power projection requires energy reserves and food reserves.... both of which are greatly diminished without oil inputs.

The path down may be more war like... as some areas retain energy reserves while others lose them.... but the absolute level of violence may ultimately (in the famous "long run") be lower due to premodern constraints on the movement of military force on land and sea, and the need to feed armies, and so on.

Can you comment on my post about losing electricity leading eventually to war? I'd love to hear your insight.

I wonder if part of the electricity shortage is actually *economic growth*?

In a lot of places in Africa, the economy is growing as fast as it has since the 1970s (for example South Africa) and energy production cannot keep pace.

Higher oil prices are painful in Africa, but of course much is wasted:

- roads are poor, so car mileage is bad
- infrastructure like trains are bad, so everything goes by road (or worse, flying)
- people keep backup generators because the power grid is so unreliable

The worst 'energy crisis' in many African countries, I feel, is actually the shortage of fuel for cooking. If we could give those people better, more fuel efficient stoves, and possibly solar cooking facilities, we would reduce the damage on the ecosystem and improve the wellbeing of the average person.

It's worth knowing that Kenya is one of the fastest growing markets for solar cells. A solar powered cellphone charger is a very great thing for an African village, it allows them to stay in contact with the world.

If you look at the spread of mobile phones in Africa (from something like 2 million phone subscribers in 1995, to 100 million now) you realise that change is possible in Africa.

My partner travels extensively in Africa on business. She has been to Eritrea, Kenya, Nigeria, she has worked with people from Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Ghana, Senegal. I have never come away from encounters with Africans, east and west, without a feeling of the tremendous energy, entrepreneurship, resilience in the face of disaster, and great humanity of its people.

Truly in the continent that gave birth to homo sapiens, the home of the human race, the energy of the human spirit burns very brightly.

Although I fear very greatly for the future of Africa in a world of global warming, I believe above all in the transcendant power of the human spirit, and Africa has that in abundance. You only have to walk by the African church in my neighbourhood and hear the singing, to know that.

The 21st century may belong to Africa and its people in ways we in the West cannot even begin to imagine.

Coincidentally $550 million was the amount the World Bank paid initially to bribe Chinese CFC manufacturers not to produce what should have been an illegal product
http://www.china.org.cn/english/6467.htm
Maybe the World Bank could find the money to replace half Senegal's oil fired generation with renewables, then do the same for other poor African countries. It's a start at least.

It's almost criminal when you think about this - the USA has now thrown away about $500 billion invading Iraq. Imagine if just 1/10 that amount had been donated to Africa, used exclusively for building wind farms. For that matter, if nothing had been donated to Africa but if the USA instead used that money just to build renewables for domestic use, it would still benefit Africa since it would make so much more oil available to the poor, rather than being squandered by the rich.

The waste that rich countries so casually throw away would be a goldmine if it was instead spent on Third World development. Just look at what the Senegalese do with old cars that would be scrap metal in the West. We certainly live in an unfair world.

- Robert

The answer is cheap cheap cheap distributed power generation.
This way the government cannot control the source of power.
The costs of a individual unit are very low so a micro payment scheme and a village level power company can be created.

Once stabilized the means of production can be installed locally. ( Teach a man to fish )

The answer to Africa is distributed cheap solutions that cannot be controlled by the rich and powerful.

Hello ic,

Some interesting features on the legal rights of women in Senegal and elsewhere - I wonder if there's more recent news.

http://matrix.msu.edu/iwdo/participants.php

Cause and effect run the other way.

Nations that get richer, and healthier, experience falls in birthrate.

The birthrate in India is half what it was in the 1960s.

(the measure is Total Fertility Ratio or TFR-- number of births per woman in her lifetime. Your population will keep rising even if your TFR is falling)

The birthrate in Japan is something like 1/5th of what it was in 1946.

The reason is that as the market economy permeats the whole society, children become more of a cost, because women could be out earning money. So couples act to have fewer children.

If we can find a way to tackle AIDS, and make Africa richer, then it's population growth rate will start to fall.

The oldhippie is getting old. I meant of course Mansour Seck.

Did anyone else notice that everyone out on the streets was trim and fit. Whereas, in the US, an amazing amount of the McPeople are super sized?

It's really striking, everyone looks to be in great shape, with very few overweight people. The women especially are striking in their almost regal looking clothes. I'm sure there are lots of other problems associated with the relative lack of health care and indigenous risks like malaria but obesity isn't a problem.

This contrast was particularly apparent at a rural hotel we visited about three hours South of Dakar in the nature reserve. The hotel catered mainly for overweight, middle-aged, sunburnt French tourists in shorts and T-shirts. The staff were immaculately dressed, looked in really great shape. I wonder what they made of the overweight lobsters.