April 05, 2007 — By Rukmini Callimachi, Associated Press CHINGUETTI, Mauritania -- On nights when the wind hisses across the dunes, the old man sits on his straw mat, draws a blanket around his shoulders and counts his money.
In the morning, Sidahmed Ould Magaya, 75, will be trapped inside his concrete house, the wooden door sealed shut by a wall of sand accumulated overnight. In exchange for 1,500 ougiya (about US$6; euro4.50), workers will liberate him, hauling the yellow sand away in burlap bags.
At that rate, he has to sell a goat a month to pay for the mounting cost of keeping the desert at bay in a country where the dunes are said to be shifting at an estimated rate of 3 to 4 kilometers (about 4 to 6 miles) per year, according to government data.
Throughout Mauritania, a desolate, dune-enveloped country twice the size of France, men and women wage a daily battle against the sand.
With less rain falling now than in years past, the dunes have become dry and unstable. Global climate change bears part of the blame, as does the local practice of uprooting the scraggly trees that once dotted the landscape to use as camel feed, firewood or for insulation, leaving nothing to hold back the mountains of sand.
When the winds whip the land, the dunes advance like fingers, overtaking walls, forcing their way into courtyards and creeping under doors. Whole houses are swallowed. Entire cities have been abandoned.
"I've sold my goats and my sheep to pay for this," says Magaya of his modest, one-room house still free of sand in spite of its precarious position at the foot of an advancing dune. "When I built my house, I chose this spot because it was flat. Now there's a mountain outside."
His front door opens onto the face of the dune. It rises sharply upward, arching its back like the tracks of a roller coaster and cresting just above the roof from where it bears down on the old man like a yellow giant.
A wave of sand has crashed into his neighbor's home, swallowing the front door, forcing the family to use the back entrance. In the most buried towns, families go in and out of their windows. Snow ploughs crisscross the national highway, pushing the sand to the shoulder to make way for passing cars.
While hurricanes and tornadoes plague America and snowstorms periodically bury Europe, encroaching sand is the natural disaster shared by the band of nations lying across the Sahara, not just Mauritania, but Mali, Niger and the southern edges of Libya, Algeria and Egypt.
Although the people of the desert have long battled the dunes, global climate change has made the sand more unpredictable.
Surface temperatures have risen by 0.7 degrees Celsius over the last century which has resulted in a decrease in rainfall, said Patrick Gonzalez, a climate scientist on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A fifth less falls today than it did in the 1950s.
Without water, there is no moisture to keep the sand in clumps. It moves freely, dissipating in a yellow mist.
"It's a vicious cycle, brought on by the changes in our climate and worsened by the actions of mankind," said Moustapha Ould Mohamed, who heads the National Research Center on Desertification.
Although it is now illegal to cut much of the vegetation, desert dwellers refuse to live without some plants -- for example a shrub called "alfa," commonly used by masons as roof insulation. Those living here say that at night in spite of the ban on the cutting of the shrub, they often see the silhouettes of loaded donkeys tiptoeing into town, their gait uneven under the weight of desert plant.
In a 109-page national action plan written by the Ministry of the Environment last year, the Mauritanian government proposed a series of measures from the creation of a green belt around threatened cities to projects meant to stabilize the dunes by planting sticks in formations designed to halt the flow of sand.
Although the proposed plan was commissioned by the government, it's so far received no funding in Mauritania's current budget. It's an omission that underscores the country's inability to grasp the threat, said Mounkaila Goumandakoye, the acting director of the U.N. Development Program's Drylands Development Center.
"What's happening in Mauritania is dramatic," he said. "Politicians are used to doing things to improve their country's GDP. They haven't yet understood the link between the advance of the dunes and their economic health."
In the arid interior of the country, where the dunes undulate like the surface of the sea, that link is all too obvious.
Palm trees, which bear dates, are the backbone of the desert economy and like real estate, they grow in value over time as the tree matures, producing fuller dates. But cones of sand now surround some of the oldest palms. Once the cone reaches the height of the fronds, the palm tree slowly suffocates.
Chinguetti used to have 29 kilometers (18 miles) of date-bearing palms. "Now, not even 2 hectares (5 acres) remain," said the town's Mayor Mohamed Ould Amara, adding that over 300 out of around 1,000 homes in Chinguetti have been abandoned.
Among the palms that are still standing are a dozen or so owned by Magaya. He's running out of goats to sell to pay the workers who free his door each time the wind blows. He takes comfort in knowing that if need be, he can still sell his palms to finance his old age at the foot of a yellow-colored dune.
He also takes comfort in the fate he knows awaits him, whether or not the dune gets to him first.
"When I die, I'll be put in a coffin and that coffin will be buried in the sand," he said. "So I can't be upset. Either way, I'll end up in the dirt."
Source: Associated Press