The Most Fabulous Way to Stimulate the Economy

What would you say if I told you that New York State lawmakers could amend a certain legal regulation in a way that would stimulate additional consumer spending, foster more sales opportunities for small businesses and create thousands of new jobs? What if I told you that this policy would not add a dime to the deficit; in fact, all of the sales tax on the resultant commerce, additional income tax revenue and processing fees for these new contracts would actually help state and local governments balance their budgets? According to any credible economic analysis, this policy would only foster business growth so benign that it is almost inconceivable that it could lead to negative externalities in health, the environment, culture or anything at all.

What is this miracle policy of which I speak? What could possibly put some spring into the step of this dreary, moribund economy? Well, when people think of ways for the government to prime the pump, they usually imagine burly construction workers re-paving the highway. But we should also think of the police officer who got to keep his job thanks to the Recovery Act, the sailor who is bravely serving his country in the US Navy, and also the cowboy, the Native American and the motorcycling leather daddy…

This economic miracle policy I’m talking about, of course, is legalizing same-sex marriage. Nowadays even those with money to spare are so afraid of the market that they are just sitting on it in the bank; but if there’s ever a time to splurge, wouldn’t it be when your daughter has fallen madly in love with the perfect woman and you want to give her the wedding of her dreams? ...and if your son wanted to marry someone else’s son, wouldn’t you do the same? Some people have been waiting to be able to do this their entire lives.

In this time of economic crisis let’s forget for a moment about the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the sexual ethics expounded by the Book of Leviticus and think about marriage solely in terms of dollars and cents. The average wedding in New York State costs around $32,000 – but in New York City where all goods and services are more expensive the figure is nearer to $37,000. However, the average wedding ceremony between two men or two women in New York State will most likely cost significantly less – circa $27,000 – largely due to the facts that 1) same-sex couples are less likely to receive support from their parents to pay for their weddings; and 2) same sex couples are more likely than opposite-sex couples to opt for no-frills City Hall marriages.

But even with the most conservative estimate that accepts continued social discrimination as a given, each and every additional marriage will nonetheless serve as a micro-level stimulus package. If the New York state legislature were to act this spring to modernize our discriminatory marriage laws, then the summer and autumn of 2011 could be punctuated by tens of thousands of additional weddings and a wave of additional commerce from Montauk to Buffalo.

At the very least, marriage equality would trim the budget deficit by adding revenues. For all of those couples who simply want to get it over with and get a City Hall marriage, in New York City it will cost them $35 for a marriage license payable to the Office of the City Clerk. Everyone who lives outside the five boroughs who wants to have a marriage certificate will have to make a credit card deduction, money order or write a $30 check payable to the New York State Department of Public Health, they will also have to pay for a $7.25 vendor processing fee, $15 for priority mail postage, and if they opt for next-day shipping the married couple would pay for an additional UPS fee of $12. With every marriage license issued, New York State would receive a bit more revenue to help mitigate our $10 billion budget shortfall.

Though it would be fair to say that a fair number of New York’s gays and lesbians and bisexuals and transsexuals would probably go for something more extravagant than a mere City Hall wedding… Seriously, if you’ve ever attended a Long Island bat mitzvah, just imagine how opulent Long Island gay marriages will be! Legalizing same-sex marriage will open the floodgates to the greatest, gayest shopping spree that New York has ever seen!


For starters, marriage usually starts with a proposal – and an engagement ring usually costs around $3,125. Jewelers will be so inundated with orders that there would be increased demand for every precious gem on the market – as well as the labor of goldsmiths, silversmiths and diamond cutters. Though the Hasidic diamond dealers of 47th Street might be amongst the most vociferous opponents of marriage equality, they would be amongst the greatest financial beneficiaries!

Then with time most of these same-sex fiancées are going to buy wedding bands and the jewelry industry would surge again (according to The Wedding Report, the average American wedding entails $3,631 of spending on jewelry for the day of the marriage ceremony).

For anything more elaborate, they are going to hire a wedding planner for $1,940…

Wedding announcements, invitations, reply cards and thank-you notes on personalized stationary will cost $1,117…

Your average marrying couple will spend $345 on hair styling, facials, makeup and spa treatment…

The best man or bridesmaid will throw down an average of $2,189 on the bachelor/bachelorette party…

The grooms will spend about $1,858 on their tuxedos…

Or the brides will spend $1,858 on their dresses…


…or the brides will spend $1,858 on their tuxedoes…

…or the grooms will spend about $1,858 on their dresses…

The sartorial possibilities are endless, and any permutation of bow-ties, tiaras, corsets and cummerbunds that the marrying couples, best men, bridesmaids and guests would buy would nevertheless serve as the greatest one-time boon to the high-end fashion industry that New York has ever seen!

Marrying couples typically spend around $2,036 on the ceremony itself; i.e. renting the location, hiring an officiate, paying for an aisle runner, a pillow box and a ketubah, etc…

They will spend an average of $1,276 on flowers and décor…

The big ticket item, however, is almost invariably the wedding reception – which costs an average of $11,863. Can you even imagine how many more job openings would be created for caterers, chefs, waitresses, busboys and bartenders?

More demand would be created for bakers as well, as the brides or grooms spend $469 on each wedding cake…

…$1,244 on limousine and chauffeurs…

… and of course a honeymoon, which usually rings up to a total of $5,027 (though chances are the bulk of this money would stimulate the economy of Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands – not New York)

Subsequent growth in consumer spending would not be confined to the brides and grooms and their families. According to the Association of Bridal Consultants, married couples receive an average of 75 gifts and that the average amount of money spent on each wedding gift is $113. So for every time that a pair of men or a pair of women marry in New York, they will spur their guests to go out and spend approximately $8,475 on gifts that might have otherwise just sat in the bank and accumulated infinitesimal interest.

Out of town wedding guests are going to stay in New York hotels, and even if they are going to stay with friends for the weekend they are probably going to go out with their hosts to a restaurant on Friday night or at least stop at the liquor store and buy them a bottle of wine. No matter how you crunch the numbers, marriage equality is going to encourage people – and especially people from out of state – to go out and spend more of their money on New York goods and services.

Of course, we do not know exactly how many same-sex couples there are living together in New York because the 2010 Census which is still being tabulated was only the first census since Massachusetts’ landmark Goodridge decision in 2004, and this data only counts same-sex couples who are already legally married – thus providing an incomplete picture of how many same-sex couples there are who would be married if New York amended its family law code. So in the absence of more sound Census methodology the best we can do is refer to scientific estimates; according to a study by the Williams Institute, as of 2005 there were approximately 50,854 gay and lesbian couples living together in New York State.

However, that does not mean that legalizing same-sex marriage in New York State would necessarily result in exactly 50,854 weddings. Approximately 43 percent of those couples – 21,867 of them – have already married somewhere else. Since 2005 the population of same-sex couples has certainly risen. And there are of course a good number of couples who would prefer to marry in some other jurisdiction, to simply apply for a domestic partnership, or to not marry at all. The Office of the New York City Comptroller estimates that – based on the experience of Massachusetts – roughly 51 percent of the remaining nubile 28,987 couples would marry over the first three years after marriage equality has been achieved; in other words, around 14,783 New York resident couples would marry. After that initial surge, the rate of same-sex marriages would probably taper off significantly and eventually achieve something close to parity with the rate of opposite-sex marriages. According to the NYC Comptroller, resident weddings would generate almost $110 million in additional consumer spending over those first three years…

…and that’s only taking into consideration New York State residents; based on the experience of other states, the big money maker would be in out-of-state residents who would come from all across the country and all around the world to have their weddings in tolerant and accepting New York. The NYC Comptroller’s Office estimates that in the first three years of marriage equality, more than 56,000 couples would travel from out of state to marry in New York. Keep in mind that New York State law requires a minimum of 24 hours between the issuance of a marriage license and the performance of a wedding ceremony, so out-of-state residents would either have to make two day trips or (much more likely) stay overnight. Even the estimated 6,845 couples from mostly New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut who simply drive across the border for two day trips would bring in an additional $1 million. But those who come all the way from Florida, Texas, Japan or South Korea for destination weddings would spend almost $60 million, their guests would spend another $77 million on transportation, lodging, etc.

When you put it all together; New York residents, cross-border commuters and out of state same-sex marriage tourists would generate an additional $247 million in additional economic activity over the next three years – $175 million in New York City alone. We can only speculate as to how much long-term job creation this boom would generate; most likely, most of the additional business would probably be picked up by already-existing florists, bakers, DJs, etc. Though based on the experience of other states, the legalization of same-sex marriage would probably create a few thousand additional jobs mainly in the labor-intensive hospitality and catering businesses. But the sheer amount of consumer spending and job growth alone does not tell the whole story; for a more clear view of marriage equality’s effect on the public treasury we have to crunch those numbers a bit further.

When economists calculate the value of public policy they use the tool of cost-benefit analysis; and even the most liberal proponent of civil rights must concede that there are economic costs to granting marriage rights to gays and lesbians. Namely, firms that offer spousal and family benefits to their employees would be compelled to extend health care benefits to the spouses of their newly-married employees. The study by the Comptroller’s Office estimates that all of the same-sex married couples with one member working for a firm in New York State would cost their employers an additional $63 million in health insurance costs. However, this causes little reason to fear that businesses would flee to other states with discriminatory marriage laws in order to save on human resources; that $63 million in health benefits would be spread fairly evenly across more than 500,000 firms, unless a given business employs a disproportionate amount of nubile homosexuals then their burden would be comparatively negligible, and most small businesses would not be affected at all. In fact, most Fortune 500 companies located in New York – including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, American Express, Chase, MetLife, Citigroup, Bloomberg LP, Time Warner, Barnes & Noble, Eastman Kodak, to name a few – already offer health benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of their employees.

From the perspective of public finance, marriage equality would not generate any additional health care costs because New York State and City agencies are already required to offer health care benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of public employees. If anything, the public sector would actually save on means-tested programs because many newlywed couples’ combined income or assets would bring them above the income and asset thresholds for many social welfare programs; e.g. the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Safety Net Assistance programs, child care subsidies, earned income tax credits, etc. For a good number of people the legal act of marriage per se serves as a catalyst for movement from the class of welfare recipients to taxpaying contributors to the public treasury.

Following that same line of reasoning, marriage equality would in fact lead to a windfall in public revenues. Marriage licensing application fees – 50,458 applications for $35 in New York City and 32,012 applications for $40 elsewhere in New York State – would total $3 million in additional revenue. Sales taxes on all of the aforementioned wedding expenditures would add $4.3 million to City revenues and another $5.5 million to the State. With all the out of state destination weddings expected to be held in the five boroughs (i.e. Manhattan) the City would also collect an additional $767,000 in Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue. If the New York legislature changed the tax code so that same-sex married couples could file their tax returns jointly, so many couples would incur the so-called “marriage penalty” by moving to a higher income tax bracket that New York State would collect $2.1 million in additional income taxes. So it would be fair to assume that New York City would be able to balance its budget with $5.1 million and New York State would be able to plug its gaping deficit with $10.6 million in additional revenues over the next three years. Perhaps if homeownership rises for married same-sex couples, the government might even take in more revenue from property taxes and related real estate transaction-related taxes (though this is purely speculative); if this is the case, New York’s gaping deficit could be trimmed even further.

For a state to maintain discriminatory marriage laws is to practice fiscal insanity – they’re leaving money on the table. Though what we’re currently doing in New York is even more self-defeating; in 2004, then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer responded to the flurry of gay marriages in Massachusetts, San Francisco and New Paltz by issuing a memorandum stating that New York – though we do not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples – would give full faith and credit to the same-sex marriages issued by other jurisdictions. From the perspective of social justice, this might be a pragmatic step in the right direction, but from the perspective of economics it’s the worst policy imaginable as it assumes all of the costs but reaps very few of the benefits. Suppose there is a lesbian couple from Schenectady composed of a pharmacy worker and her unemployed wife and they decide to get married in Northampton; they might add to the health insurance costs borne by New York businesses, but all of the economic activity and tax revenue generated by their wedding would be enjoyed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In other words, New York is exporting our gay marriage jobs to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Iowa, the District of Columbia, all ten provinces and three territories of Canada, Mexico City, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and South Africa.

Civil unions – another modest half-step towards social justice – are even more limited in their economic stimulus potential. In New Jersey, Illinois, Rhode Island, Delaware and Hawaii where the state issues civil union licenses to same-sex couples, businesses pay ever so slightly more in health insurance costs. But the wedding planners, hoteliers, caterers, florists and diamond cutters of these states have experienced only minimal business growth because hardly anyone throws down $37,000 to celebrate their daughter’s civil union – filing for domestic partnership feels as special as a trip to the DMV.

Likewise, it seems that the only way for a state to reach the maximum fiscal benefit is to establish complete and utter marriage equality under law. When the Comptroller’s Office did its cost-benefit analysis of legalizing same-sex marriages, they calculated that the government of New York State would come out of the red by collecting roughly $8 million in more taxes and saving $100 million on welfare programs, while the City would collect an additional $7 million in taxes and fees and have only negligible fluctuations in spending on anything at all. And though the health insurance costs and the benefits of additional sales will for the most part be paid by different firms, the private sector as a whole would grow on a net basis by $184 million throughout New York State with $142 million of that economic growth in the City.

Marriage equality should also make the New York economy more competitive in the long run by keeping our state among the forefront of social progress. Let’s say that the Acme Widget Company of Des Moines is planning on expanding to the East Coast and has to decide between two potential sites for their new bureau; one in Albany and the other in Hartford. The board of directors might reason that, ceteris paribus, it would be in their best interests to open the new bureau in Hartford because a lot of gay people would prefer to live in a state where they can raise a family, and Connecticut’s inclusive marriage laws might help them to attract a more competitive pool of employees. The most well-dressed, highly productive members of the labor force want to live and work in a state where the law treats them as first-class citizens – why wouldn’t we do everything we can to make them want to live and do business in New York?

The fact of the matter is that gay families are great for the economy; they’re hip, they’re ahead of so many market trends, they are more likely to have two incomes and less likely to have children – and when they do have kids, it kind of has to be the result of a thoroughly-planned, well-thought decision. Families headed by same-sex couples are more likely to pay taxes for schools and less likely to have kids to send to them - but when they do, wouldn't you imagine they would be the most meticulous parents?

To put it more blunty, it is in the direct financial interest of every state, county and municipal government with revenues dependent upon property taxes to attract families with two moms and two dads, because when gay people move into a neighborhood the value of real estate rises. If you’ve ever been to Hudson, New York, you would see before your eyes how an influx of gay antiques dealers, innkeepers and restaurateurs took a rusting, depressed Upstate town and gave it a makeover into a relatively-booming Mecca for weekenders and gentlewomen farmers!


So when the the New York State Senate takes up the same-sex marriage bill, do they really want to take this opportunity to uphold our state's long proud history of welcoming immigrants of all cultures, stripes and hues, upholding the rights of refugees who fled violence and repression... and, by the way, effortlessly improve the state's fiscal standing?

Or will they reject it out of some combination of bigotry, malice or cowardice?
After almost every state in the region has steadily progressed towards marriage equality, do they want New York to be the state that balked under pressure from the Paladino Republicans and the "Christian values" wing of the Dixiecrats? What Grinch of a statesman wakes up, puts on a suite and tie, and stands up before the body public to say "Actually, I object to these tens of thousands of New Yorkers from wedding"? If lawmakers in Albany won't welcome their sisters and brothers in the very state that invented Liberation, they’re going to settle down in Massachusetts or Connecticut and take their money with them.


Unfortunately, the numbers don’t evince that legalizing same-sex marriage could be the silver bullet which singlehandedly digs this state us out of this deep recession; to do that, we might have to end the war in Afghanistan, curb the cost of health care by establishing a public option, invest $800 billion into modernizing our energy infrastructure, shift the tax burden from the wages of the working class to the estates, trusts and dividends of the super-rich, found a market for carbon permits, abolish mandatory minimum sentencing and legalize marijuana…

Nevertheless, even if legalizing same-sex marriage would only promise to increase the New York state private sector by roughly $184 million in additional commerce, cut the state deficit by $108 million and create roughly 2,000 additional full-time jobs, that sounds to me like a substantial first step towards economic recovery. Legalizing same-sex marriage might not be more than a modest reform, it might not be the superlatively most comprehensive strategy to vitalize business growth – but you must admit that it would certainly be the most fabulous way to stimulate the economy.

Can Mali be Weaned Off Aid?

Once again, British journalists are kicking their American counterparts' collective bottoms when it comes to asking the tough questions on aid and development. Jonathan Glennie of The Guardian broaches the 9,000 pink sogoba in the room in this refreshingly candid look at why practical solutions to aid dependency might exist, they nevertheless remain politically impossible in one of West Africa's rare democracies.

Roads? Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads!

Mali is one of the best examples of what Oxford economist Paul Collier would categorize as a “non-developing country”; after half a century of the government pushing for industrialization, a thorough IMF structural adjustment overhaul and a steady flow of World Bank development loans and NGO grants, Mali’s GDP now stands at $8.8 billion and has been growing at an average rate of 4.7 percent over the past ten years. This might sound like a fairly decent growth rate, but if you consider that the GDP of this nation of 13 million people is less than half of Michael Bloomberg’s net worth of $18 billion, as far as nations go Mali’s $8.8 billion amounts to peanuts. And when you consider that Mali’s population of 13 million has also been growing 3 percent annually, GDP per capita has only been growing around 1.7 percent per year. And since such a disproportionate amount of these final goods are being bought and sold in the cities, and even in the cities at least 30 percent of the masses are absolutely unemployed and can hardly even buy cheap staple foods, and the vast majority of the rural population is barely eking out a living in the subsistence agricultural economy, that 1.7 percent annual GDP growth per capita really only represents growth in the wealth of the small urban elite. So yes, Mali’s economy is in fact growing – but it is only growing for the handful of bankers and bus drivers and cell phone dealers and government employees who have any money to begin with; meanwhile the rural peasants are reaping smaller harvests, the urban poor are able to purchase less food, and malnutrition and even starvation are becoming increasingly common. Such a trend of nominal financial expansion fueled by growing public indebtedness and deepening inequality surely represents growth in the amount of money changing hands, but it can hardly be described as economic development.

Collier would explain that there is a rational geographical explanation for why Mali’s economy is going nowhere fast, because it is a “land-locked country with bad neighbors”; that the Malian people conduct such little trade because man-made barriers preclude exports to foreign markets. If you look at a map of the region, you should be able to understand how the Niger River has served as the primary trade route between Bamako, Ségou, Mopti, Timbuktu and Gao for more than a millennium – the waterway has been such a vital artery that in Bambara it is known as Joliba, or “the Big Blood”. And likewise, the river should serve as the natural trade route for contemporary Malians to transport cotton, peanuts and shea butter from Bamako up through the northern provinces of Mali, down through Niger, Benin and Nigeria to Port Harcourt and cargo freighters bound for the markets of the world.


But downstream from Timbuktu, the Niger River flows through politically unstable territory prone to unchecked banditry, and even if Malian goods make it all the way to the coast the Nigerian customs agents demand egregiously high bribes in exchange for export licenses. The next best alternative would be to truck Malian goods across Côte d’Ivoire to the seaport at Abidjan – but overland transportation is significantly more expensive, the rebel militias in Northern Côte d’Ivoire demand hefty extortion fees from all vehicles traveling through their territory, and the port in Abidjan is manned by equally corrupt kleptomaniacs. The port in Accra is arguably the most efficient and professionally-manned in all of Africa - but there is no Malian-Ghanaian border so that would require paying customs duties twice. Senegal is relatively stable and bribery at the Dakar seaport is somewhat less rampant – but anything grown in Mali is also grown locally in Senegal and can be trucked to the port of Dakar much cheaper, so Malians have to slash the prices of their own goods in order to compete. Altogether, completely unnecessary transportation costs and institutionalized bribery jack up the cost of running an export-oriented business to such an extent that it is quite challenging for anyone in Mali to sell their goods abroad and make a profit. Even though there are foreign consumers who do want to buy Malian cotton, peanuts and shea butter, with such constrained access to foreign outlets these wares stay to glut brackish domestic markets where the prices of locally-produced goods remain depressingly low.

Another cause of Mali’s economic stagnation which Collier failed to acknowledge is that the same factors which hinder a “land-locked country with bad neighbors” from participating in the global economy – political instability, insufficient trade routes, institutionalized bribery, graft, embezzlement and outright theft – also play a major role in stifling domestic commerce. Despite being fellow citizens of the same country, the Bamakois urban elite, the Malinke gold miners in Kayes, the Senaful cotton farmers of Sikasso, the cliff-dwelling Dogon of the central plateau, and the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara Desert represent distinct markets effectively more segmented than the nation-states of Europe. And the separateness of the various markets of Mali is not predestined by geography or ethnicity; it is directly related to more human factors like the fact that the 23rd largest country in the world has only 18,709 kilometers of roads – less than Jamaica, Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic.

Part of the transportation problem in Mali exists, of course, in the complete and utter lack of physical infrastructure. There is a modest network of one-lane paved roads known as le guidron connecting the major cities, and there are some decent one-lane dirt roads connecting some of the larger market towns… and that’s about it. In the region of Ségou in which I live, there is a guidron that goes from Bamako to the city of Ségou, down to Bla and San, then up to Mopti and the Northern provinces; there are also two guidrons from Bla and San which converge in the city of Koutiala in the next province South. An equivalent would be if Ohio had a one-lane paved road from Cleveland to Toledo, a second paved road from Toledo to Cincinnati, a third from Cincinnati through Columbus to Cleveland, and the only routes to Akron or Canton or Youngstown were made out of dirt.


Unless it happens to be situated along one of the roads between cities or market towns, a rural village in Mali is effectively isolated from the national economy because there is probably no route to the nearest car-worthy road that can be honestly classified as a “road” in its own right. When I bike to visit my friend in the village of Zamblala 40 kilometers away, I’m going down a mountain biking trail over gullies, through sand traps and around ditches which is only distinguishable from the rest of the scrubland in that other people have traveled this way in the past. Some sections of the “road” from Sanadougou to Zamblala are so completely identical to the rest of the expanse of sun-baked mud that I have to know to go South at the big termite mound and Southwest from the old baobab tree towards the pile of rocks. Parts of the “road” to Zamblala are so narrow and it makes such sharp turns that I couldn’t even drive down it with my late Jeep Wrangler – it is only accessible by bicycle, motorcycle, donkey or foot.

That doesn’t mean that people from Zamblala don’t come to Sanadougou to do business. They do. On Sanadougou’s market every sixth day, Zamblalakaw tie a few chickens to their handlebars or pack a satchel of however many onions they have to spare and bike the nonexistent “road”. Since there is no car that services this little village, what they can sell at Sanadougou’s market is limited to that which won’t be damaged en route – usual market mainstays like tomatoes, mangoes or bananas can only be sold at home. So though the soils and the climate are identical, due to the lack of transportation infrastructure Zamblala’s economy is considerably more oriented towards autarkic subsistence and less towards commerce than the economy of Sanadougou only 40 k away.

And when I speak of commerce among rural agricultural communities, I refer to an exchange so miniscule that American readers might wonder why people even bother. When a Fatimata from the neighboring village of N’jesu ties a satchel of peanuts, balances it on her head and spends the morning walking the 16 kilometers down the “road” to the Sanadougou market, she really only has a window of two to three hours to sell her peanuts before she has to spend all afternoon walking home. And I emphasize that in an agricultural community where everybody has been growing more or less the same crops for generations, the market is flooded with surpluses of the same products that everyone is trying to sell to people who already make these same things themselves. If she’s lucky, after a busy day hawking at market Fatimata will have sold 150 francs (~38 cents) worth of peanuts – enough to buy a box of tea and a small bag of sugar, and then she has to walk the 16 kilometers back the cow path to N’jesu before nightfall. In a rural Minianka village, most people like Fatimata partake in such incipient trade only once every six days.


Sanadougou is a rural market town serviced by a significant dirt road that is relatively well-maintained and large enough that the trucks from the textile company CMDT can come to buy the cotton farmers’ harvest and bring it back to their mill in Koutiala. Sanadougou’s farmers benefit from these roads as they provide the infrastructure necessary for them to sell a cash crop. Farmers come to Sanadougou from smaller villages by donkey cart over the little dirt paths...


... and at the Sanadougou market CMDT agents weigh and buy all of the cotton so the can fill the storage containers carried back to Koutiala by truck. Hence the improved dirt road from the guidron to Koutiala to Sanadougou develops the commercial economy of the market town, and this economic expansion allows global capitalism to at least penetrate the economies of villages like Zamblala and N'jesu.


As consumers, Sanadougoukaw benefit from the improved dirt roads in that they can buy things that no one makes locally; tea, sugar, instant coffee, plastic cups and bowls, black marketed Goodwill clothing, bootleg “medicine” from China and Nigeria, ginger, green peppers, plantains and bread. But local producers who came to market on foot or bicycle now have to compete with vendors from Koutiala selling the same tomatoes, mangoes, onions, cucumbers, yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, etc. that they sell – only they were grown in the more fertile Sikasso region which means that the imported goods are generally larger, richer, and overall superior products to what is grown locally. The net result is a form of domestic mercantilism in that rural farmers earn their modest monetary income by selling their cash crops to urban industrialists, and these cash crop farmers spend all of their money on urban merchants’ cheap manufactured goods – only the most miniscule commerce is conducted between rural villages.

Would economic activity expand and diversify if USAID were to swoop in and pave the road from Sanadougo to Koutiala? Or even the cow paths from Zamblala and N’jesu to Sanadougou? There would be some more money in circulation in the area if USAID were to hire local men to do all of the menial labor – but more than likely they would hire a contractor from Bamako with one of the few steamrollers in this country, and contractors almost always come with their own team of workers. And maybe motorcyclists would be able to drive a bit more efficiently and save ever so slightly on their gas bills. But other than that it is difficult to see how paving the way to rural backwaters is going to carry much economic benefit; road construction per se does not guarantee the arrival of more customers unless it allows for bigger and better vehicles to ship new products that they are willing to buy, fresh blacktop does not necessarily mean that more vendors are going to travel to a particular market with more variety and quality of goods unless there actually exists demand for those goods at the end of that road.

The relationship between economic growth and road construction is not at all like that between the chicken and the egg – economic growth must come first, for there is no way for the benefits of road construction to outweigh the costs otherwise. And those new roads must continue to generate additional economic activity and tax revenues indefinitely, because roads must be regularly maintained in order to remain functional. In this harsh climate which alternates between extreme heat and extreme dryness to torrential rains, a paved road that is never re-tarred will develop pockmarks which develop into potholes and the entire mass of blacktop will crumble into black pebbles and dust in less than 10 years.


So a road cannot just be a one-time cadeau from a foreign NGO, it needs to be necessary infrastructure whose regular upkeep can be justified in the annual budget of the cash-strapped Ministère de l’Équipement et des Transports in order to be sustainable. And the le Ministère de l’Équipement et des Transports is never going to be able to finance road construction and regular maintenance until le Ministère de l’Économie et des Finances receives a greater regular flow of cash into its coffers, and that is not going to happen until the commercial portion of the Malian economy finally experiences sustained growth. Only then will the state be able to recognize the trade routes which facilitate that new economic activity and allocate its scarce resources towards infrastructural development.

The government’s construction of new car and truck-worthy roads would facilitate the more efficient transport of goods to and from rural markets like Sanadougou; nevertheless, Ségou province is a relatively flat and traversable part of Mali where the construction of a road is at least a feasible endeavor – this cannot be said in other regions. The Dogons purposefully established their oldest villages on top of cliffs only accessible by exhausting, hours-long hikes through steep, narrow boulder passes so that they would not have to defend themselves from Fulani warriors on horseback or camelback. Improving transportation is particularly daunting in Dogon Country because this tribe deliberately chose to settle in locations as isolated as possible from the rest of the human population, where road construction is downright impossible. Some Tuareg communities roving in the middle of the Northern desert are so far from the nearest gas station that they can only be reached by camel caravans. And it would be a futile effort to pave roads in the Tuaregs’ desert where the sand dunes can migrate up to 100 meters every year – these people have spent millennia wandering in the desert precisely because they have cornered the Sahara trade routes without any formal transportation infrastructure.


If deficiencies in transportation are standing in the way of economic development and yet roads do not by themselves facilitate more commerce, what else can the government of Mali do to aid the free flow of goods in this country? For starters, the State could strengthen public integrity laws, conduct self-policing sting operations and fire all of those who are caught breaking the laws in order to root out corruption in the gendarmerie.

You see, the government could pave every road, street, bike trail and cow path from Kayes to Taoudenni, but moving goods from the country to the town and from the town to urban markets is still going to remain prohibitively expensive for farmers to participate in the market economy so long as the transport companies are free to gouge their customers as they please. There are laws on the books which regulate trucking and bussing operations, but they carry as much force as the Soviet Constitution so long as the owner of an offending vehicle can flash a wad of bills in front of an unscrupulous gendarme and drive away scot free.

A market town like Sanadougou is the final destination for some country produce, but it serves its most important function in the national Malian economy as a regional hub for rural goods to make their way to the cities. Farmers don’t stand to earn much selling food to other farmers who have food of their own but very little money, but they have the potential to make considerable profits if they can move their goods to the cities where all of those bankers and government employees and cell phone dealers and mill workers live who have to buy their food with their salaries and wages. Urbanites don’t just buy tea and sugar – they even have to buy peanuts and their staple cereals of millet and rice. And a Sanadougou farmer cannot transport 100 kilograms of peanuts 60 kilometers down the road to Koutiala by bicycle – he has to go by car.


There are two cars in Sanadougou; one car belongs to the Commandant who never drives it but keeps it propped up on blocks to flaunt his wealth before his houseguests, the other is driven every day by the “mobilitigi” Issa Sogoba as the most profitable business in the entire Commune. It is a 38-year-old German delivery van that was originally intended to carry two people and a small load of cargo; if this van could have been used in Germany for human transport (and it most certainly would not have) maybe it could have had seats for a maximum of 9 passengers. Issa Sogoba installed four rows of five 12-inch seats so that if one person sits shotgun and another sits with their legs around the stick shift they can sell seats for 22 passengers. I must emphasize that these 12-inch seats are only as wide as seats for small children and they run only 12 inches up the passengers’ backs; it is literally impossible for five grown adults to sit in this row with their backs alongside the seat, so when the car is at maximum capacity – and it almost always is – everyone has to sit at an angle with their arms interlocking and their shoulders in each others’ faces.

The only product that a Malian mobilitigi is selling is movement from point A to point B; timeliness, efficiency, safety and comfort are dismissed as unaffordable luxuries. The engine on the Sanadougou car can only ignite if the car is already moving, so Issa begins each journey with his apprentices and all of the male passengers pushing the overloaded van to a start. There are no functional breaks, so Issa can only stop the car by letting his foot off the gas and coasting to a halt. There are no seatbelts. The tires are so bald that there are no longer any visible treads – but that doesn’t prevent Issa from careening down potholed dirt roads at 60 miles an hour. The windshield is shattered into a hundred pieces but by some stroke of luck it hasn’t fallen yet. The driver’s side-view mirror no longer exists. There is no muffler and the tailpipe belches out plumes of black smoke. By all standards of common sense and Malian law, it is a danger to society for anyone to drive this car and no one should ever be allowed to charge people to ride in it.


But that doesn’t stop Issa from transporting the farmers and goods of Sanadougou and its tributary villages to markets in the nearby cities. Almost everyone riding in Issa’s car is going to the city to sell their wares, so the roof is so overloaded with sacks of millet and rice and peanuts that it tips noticeably to one side or the other. And Issa’s two apprentices are sitting with the sacks of peanuts on the roof so they can load and unload cargo over the course of the ride. Sometimes they carry a 25th and 26th passenger who sits with the apprentices on the roof, and a 27th and 28th stand on the rear bumper holding onto a ladder for support. And the passengers in Issa’s car are also traveling to market breastfeeding their babies, with their chickens pecking at people’s feet, and their goats tied to the roof where they urinate on whoever is sitting by the window. And on trips home from the city Issa often brings a drum of gasoline which he crams in the back – all but guaranteeing that if the car were rear-ended with any amount of force that at least the 22 human passengers with seats would be trapped in a fiery inferno.

Usually Issa’s car simply does not work because the fan belt dates from the early 1970s so every time it tears Issa stops for 40 minutes to melt it back together with a cigarette lighter. Given the fact that fan belts are available for purchase in every city to which he drives, it is somewhat amazing that Issa has never bothered to purchase a new one. But there is no pressing need to spend money on replacing broken parts when the old ones can be stitched into temporary semi-functionality indefinitely. After all, every other Malian transport company also sells tickets to vans and buses with 30-year-old engines that unambiguously do not work, so spending revenues on anything but bare-bone maintenance is considered an uncompetitive business practice. There is not even any incentive for chauffeurs like Issa to improve their services, because Malian customers are perfectly accustomed to waiting on the side of the blacktopped road for 2 hours in the 116 degree sun – they’re not going to complain, because they’ve never known any reality other than one in which buses routinely break down. Besides, a rural transport provider like Issa Sogoba faces no pressure to make his car more efficient or to otherwise reduce his fares, because he enjoys a perfect monopoly over the Sanadougou market.

I recently sat down with Issa to crunch the numbers of his business, and the results demonstrate just how profitable it is to run a transport company with zero competition and zero regulation. Issa bought his fifth-hand car in 1994 for 3 million CFA (~$6,000) – which was by any measure an act of highway robbery, though since no one in Mali could possibly save that much money he financed the purchase by taking out a loan from Kafo Jiginew on the terms that it be paid back in one year at 15 percent interest – which any objective analyst would classify as clear-cut usury. So I actually have some sympathy for the man in that he is a victim of an exploitative banking industry, and the rates that he charges were perfectly justifiable in light of the terms of his original loan.

In order to make 3,450,000 CFA so that he could pay off his loan within a year, Issa set his standard of filling his car with at least 22 passengers and their cargo on any leg of the journey. If one man is traveling to Koutiala with 4 sheep to sell at market, he pays 1,500 francs for his own fare and 250 for each of his sheep. Or if that passenger is bringing 2 sacks of peanuts, he has to pay 1,000 francs for each sack. Issa transports a disproportionate amount of goods in relation to passengers, however, because a lot of people in Sanadougou have prearranged sales with customers in Koutiala and only have to pay to send their goods. In all, Issa makes an average of 45,000 CFA in revenues on a typical trip to Koutiala. He pays for 10,000 francs worth of gasoline, and his two apprentices make 1,000 each day for loading and unloading cargo; this day’s operating costs total 12,000 francs. Thus on an average Wednesday – Koutiala’s market day – Issa makes 33,000 francs (~$66) in profits.

Fares, gas prices and apprentice earnings differ according to the distance traveled each day. On Monday Issa drives to the San market and makes a profit of 40,000 francs (~$80). On Tuesday he drives to Yangasso and makes 35,000 francs (~$70). Thursday he goes to Bla and makes 28,000 francs (~$58). Friday he drives all the way to Bamako and drives back on Saturday to make a whopping 46,000 francs (~$94). The commercial economy of Sanadougou largely depends on Issa’s transport services, so this schedule is carried out more or less indefinitely every week over the course of the year; when Issa himself cannot work because he is sick or has to attend a wedding or a funeral, one of his apprentices assumes driving responsibilities.

Over the course of a year, Issa Sogoba’s transport business takes in 14,820,000 CFA (~$29,640) in revenues, he pays the apprentices 624,000 CFA (~$1,248) for their labor, he pays 4,914,000 CFA (~$9,828) for gas. Issa does not pay for the cost of maintenance because his brother Yahya is the town mechanic and services the family business for free. And he does not pay for replacement parts unless the engine literally cannot turn on; Issa told me that the most he pays for parts in a given year is 2 million CFA (~$4,000). During the first year this business was running he had an additional expense in pay off his loan to Kafo Jiginew plus the usurious interest rate to the tune of 3,450,000 CFA (~$6,900), but he has not had to pay for debt services since 1995.

So in an average year, Issa makes a profit of approximately 7,282,000 CFA (~$14,564) – this is by far the most lucrative enterprise in the entire Commune of Sanadougou. These profits of approximately 7,282,000 francs represent Issa Sogoba’s pre-tax income; after the Commandant, the Mayor and the two doctors, the mobilitigi is the richest man in a population of 16,000. In comparison, Issa makes more than 10 times per capita GDP in this country - which now hovers around 550,000 CFA (~$1,100); since the monetary income is disproportionately weighted in the cities, Issa's immense income is even more immense compared to the subsistence and tangentially-commercial farmers in a rural town like Sanadougou.

Issa Sogoba’s profits, however, can only be honestly evaluated in relation to the costs borne by his customers; i.e. the farmers of Sanadougou. If Amadou the millet farmer were to travel to the Koutiala market to sell his 4 sheep, he pays 1,500 francs for his own fare and 250 for each sheep. If these sheep look meaty and demand for sheep is high – say, as Muslim families prepare for the Eid al-Adha feast – Amadou could sell each of his 4 sheep for 40,000 francs (~$80) and his transport costs of 4,000 francs (~$8) only cut out 2.5 percent of his revenues. But if Amadou only sells 2 of his sheep and he has to pay for their fare back to Sanadougou, or he sells all of his sheep in the months after Eid al-Adha when demand is low, then transport costs up to 6 percent of his total revenues. If Amadou sells none of his sheep, then he just lost 5,000 francs. This might not sound like a lot, but in an economy where that sale of his best sheep might account for the entirety of his monetary income that year, 4,000 to 5,000 francs for a trip to market and back is no insignificant deal of money - with that sum he could buy a pair of mosquito nets, among other things.

And the 4,000 to 5,000 francs that Amadou has to pay for a trip to the Koutiala market only count as the nominal costs of transportation. If Issa’s car breaks down and Amadou has to spend an August afternoon waiting on the side of the road for someone to bike down with new engine parts, Amadou just lost a good chunk of hours when he could have been working out in the millet fields. If Issa is speeding like a madman as usual, slips on a patch of sand and can’t slow down because he has no breaks, the car might crash into a baobab tree, all of Amadou’s sheep might get killed and Amadou himself might sustain debilitating neck injuries which put him out of the labor force for the rest of the year. This is not a society where people sue for pain and suffering. When it comes to safety, Amadou the customer assumes all of the risk and all of the cost of potential injury to himself and loss of goods and Issa the mobilitigi only stands to lose a little bit of profits – even if he were to crash his car into a baobab tree, it would be a safe bet that Issa would be selling seats in his van again within a week.

Furthermore, if Issa gets caught by the gendarme checkpoints driving a car that violates every single regulation on the books, the cost of fines or bribery do not serve as an incentive for him improve the quality of his services because he doesn’t pay for them – that expense falls upon his passengers. When unscrupulous mobilitigis get nabbed for driving a car filled to 250 percent the maximum occupancy with a cracked windshield, without side view mirrors without a license, it is a standard practice in Mali for the apprentice to go down and tell every passenger to cough up “their share” of the bribe so the gendarme will let them pass. Depending on the severity of the offense and their ability to pay, passengers are told to give as much as 2,000 francs each. And without hesitation or complaint, Malian passengers simply do what they’re told and comply like cows marching toward the slaughterhouse – paying bribes is accepted as a routine expense of traveling down le guidron to the big city market. If Amadou the millet farmer would usually pay 4,000 francs in transport costs to sell his sheep at market, then institutionalized bribery raises those transport costs by as much as 50 percent. But in real terms Malian passengers have to pay three times for transport; they pay the mobilitigi once for the nominal fare, they assume all of the risk and cost of injury inherent in traveling in such hazardous deathtraps, and even though it is the mobilitigi who is breaking the law by not paying for new tires or breaks it is their passengers who pay for the fines and bribes. The people willingly pay for the unscrupulous mobilitigis to fuck them twice - and if they get nabbed by a corrupt gendarme, they pay to get fucked three times.

I avoid motor vehicular transport in this country when I can, but whenever I have no choice but to suffer with my adopted countrymen sitting in sub-human conditions and the car gets stopped and the inevitable shakedown falls, I ask my fellow travelers why they put up with such bullshit. The responses I get are quite Stoic; “C’est comme ça” or “Nous n’avons pas un choix”. Perhaps this is a cultural thing and patriarchal Malians are more accustomed to obeying their social superiors, perhaps 80 years of colonialism and 30 years of homegrown dictatorship have robbed people of any semblance of dignity and self-esteem. Two millennia ago such attitudes might have been considered virtuous, but in this day of free will, free markets and democratic self-government it breaks my heart to watch as grown adults just grin and bear it while they’re being cheated and exploited.

And when it happens to me, the storm clouds in my head erupt into pitch black fury. Maybe it’s because my hippie parents taught me to think of myself as a unique snowflake. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a society where people are encouraged to criticize the way things are so that we can remedy existing problems and pave the way for a better future. Maybe it’s because I come from a nation whose values were forged in the fires of dissent, protest and a Revolutionary War, a nation whose modern regulatory regime was conceived by a Populist movement that demanded protection from the price-gouging railroad trusts, a nation that honored the body of Rosa Parks with the same pomp as only the greatest of presidents in the Capitol Rotunda because she refused to give up her seat and move to the back of a bus.

But my style of rebellion has less in common with the moral majesty of Rosa Parks than the brazen vernacular of New York. When I'm on a bus, we get stopped for safety infractions and the apprentice tells me to cough up 2,000 francs to bribe the gendarmes, I raise my middle finger and tell him to perform the unspeakable on various farm animals. If he asks again, I dig my feet in further and tell him to perform even more creative and more obscene actions on those livestock. Eventually the apprentice realizes that the more he asks me to pay for bribes the more I am going to instill an image of him sodomizing a donkey into the minds of my fellow passengers, so he backs down and moves on.

Every time I put on such a show the rest of the passengers watch in bewildered astonishment. They’re used to paying these bribes week after week. They’ve never heard someone stand up to the mobilitigi before. It’s never occurred to them that they have the power to say “No” - and that refusing to acquiesce with the status quo is the first step to changing it.

Transport costs might lessen and more commerce might flow if the Malian government were to build more paved roads. But bringing goods to market would become even more affordable if the Malian government were to regulate their own law enforcement agents who are tasked with regulating the transportation industry in order to facilitate more commerce and economic growth. The underdevelopment of this economy is a scandal, and the blame lays no small part in the hands of those gendarmes who allow these modern day robber barons to flout the law with impunity in exchange for illicit enrichment.

In the meantime, Malian farmers have to learn to stand up for themselves. They have to organize so that every single passenger refuses to pay for bribes and chauffeurs themselves have to pay the penalty when they break the law. And the farmers have to learn to speak up to their transport providers and demand that they improve the quality of their services. If rural mobilitigis do not change their ways and begin to adequately maintain their cars, enteprising farmers should pool their money, take out loans and start their own competing businesses that break the local monopolies so that there is an incentive to improve services and reduce the price of transportation. And villagers of all stripes need to get into the habit of bringing their valid grievances to the traditional gerontocracy, the offices of la Mairie et le Commandant. Only when the compelling force of the State is exercised to protect the interests of the farmer over the exploitation of the middleman will the rural masses be able to break out of mere subsistence and participate in the modern commercial economy.

One Man's Trash

The foundation of the Malian economy is composed of subsistence agriculture in which peasant farmers feed their families with the fruits of their own labor. Indeed, the manual work involved in millet cultivation could be made faster and easier with better shovels and ploughs – but it is difficult to expand the annual harvest yield very much with a limited allotment of land and water. Here in the epoch of pre-capitalist means of production, there are only so many ways of stimulating the economy. The cost of farming with a tractor, combine or commercial pesticides could not be justified by a crop that is consumed by the people who grow it and hardly sold at market for currency. Hence microcredit or cash grants are of little use to expand millet production, and any new international trade agreements or adjustment of currency exchange rates would be all but irrelevant to the subsistence agricultural economy. What rural millet farmers need to increase their yields is something more organic than capital, something tangible and solid…


To find an apt method to stimulate economic growth, Peace Corps Volunteers are not asked to further the Obama administration’s international trade policy or the interests of American business. Instead, we must return to the first principles of the American Republic and the sustainable agricultural practices of the Founding Fathers.


Though most remember George Washington as the commanding General of the Continental Army and as the first President of the United States, Washington has been overlooked by history for his innovations as an organic farmer and poop management engineer. Paul L. Haworth’s biography George Washington, Farmer states that at his Mount Vernon Vernon estate he “saved manure as if it were already so much gold, and hoped with its use and with judicious rotation of crops” to reap plentiful harvests of tobacco, corn and wheat. Washington also experimented with fertilizers, finding that the fertilizer with the most stimulating effect was a mixture of sheep poop and black mould.

Thomas Jefferson – the author of the Declaration of Independence, the first Secretary of State, second Vice President and third President of the United States – was also deeply interested in organic fertilization. In Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, Edwin Morris Betts explains:

Jefferson used dung in three different stages of decomposition – fresh or long dung, half purified or short dung, and well-rotted dung. He does not state which condition of the dung he found most beneficial for his crops. Jefferson probably used very little manure of any kind on his lands in the early days of farming at Monticello and at his other plantations. The newly cleared land was plentiful and rich and brought fourth abundant crops. He expressed this idea in a letter to George Washington on June 28, 1793. He wrote, “…Manure does not enter into this, a good farm because we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old acre…” But later, after the soil had been robbed of his fertility by successive crops of corn and tobacco, fertilizing his soil became a necessity.

James Madison – co-author of The Federalist Papers, father of the Bill of Rights, Secretary of State and our fourth President – also stood out among the Founding Fathers as the most eloquent student of waste management. On May 12, 1818 he gave an address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, Virginia:

Nothing is more certain than that continual cropping without manure deprives the soil of its fertility. It is equally certain that fertility may be preserved or restored by giving to the earth animal or vegetable manure equivalent to the matter taken from it. That restoration to the earth of all that naturally grows on it prevents its impoverishment is sufficiently seen in our forests, where the annual exuviae of the trees and plants replace the fertility of which they deprived the earth... That individual farms do lose their fertility in proportion as crops are taken from them and return of manure neglected is a fact not likely to be questioned. The most logical mode of preserving the richness and of enriching a farm is certainly that of applying a sufficiency of manure and vegetable matter in a decomposed state; in order to procure which too much care cannot be observed in saving every material furnished by the farm. This resource was among the earliest discoveries of man living by agriculture; and a proper use of it has been made a test of good husband in all countries, ancient and modern, where its principle and profits have been studied.

Though Washington, Jefferson and Madison probably only owned slaves descended from the inhabitants of what is now Mali, the Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe independently developed similar practices of organic agriculture. One might even contend that the Minianka are more absolutist in their waste management methods – so much, in fact, that they make efficient use of the contents of their own solid waste. Even in fairly densely-populated cities, a common sight in Malian streets is the evacuated contents of emptied pit latrines. When the poop has left the latrine, the Minianka no longer refer to it as bo - "poop" - but as nogo – which has a double meaning; nogo can mean “filth”, for they will refer to something extremely dirty as “nogolen don”, but it can also be translated as a more benign “compost”.


Part of the reason why most Malians just throw their shit into the street is that they simply do not understand the health hazards that this poses to their neighbors. But they also use their collection of months of their phosphorus-rich fecal matter as the foundation of a prime compost pile. As they harvest their various crops, Malians cover their crap with nitrogenous and carbon-rich millet stalks, peanut shells, corn husks, mango pits, and all of the other waste that is produced while farming, cooking and eating their food. And livestock also enjoy rummaging through these compost piles to find all sorts of goodies, so poop eventually gets more distributed among the layers of vegetable matter. Over the course of the eight months or so between the addition of one season's agricultural waste to the compost pile and its recycling into the next season's fertilizer, all of that poop and organic waste should decompose into a rich humus.

Down the street from me, Soongalo Sogoba maintains one of the most impressive compost piles in all of Sanadougou.


Malians harvest millet from October to November, and if they farm cotton they pick it in December. The start planting again when the rainy season begins in June – so depending upon the crop designated to it those fields have been lying fallow for seven to nine months. Cotton robs the nutrients from the soil so thoroughly that the cotton fields are pointedly more austere. Crop rotation with nitrogen-fixing plants like beans and peanuts is seldom practiced, so if these fields are to be useful the next planting season the soils must be rejuvenated with fertilizer. So during April and May they send boys to load their compost onto donkey carts and bring it out to the fields.


Over the next few weeks the farmers will rake their compost through the rows, and once the rains come they will aid the fertilizer’s decomposition and carry its nutrients into the soil.


However, the composting practices prevalent in Mali are not as organic as those at Monticello. Only a few generations ago, very close to 100 percent of all solid waste produced by Minianka farmers was composed of agricultural waste and it all made great fertilizer. But in recent decades as foreign-made industrial goods have begun to penetrate this remote market and household garbage now includes decidedly inorganic plastics and metals, the quality of Malian compost has significantly degraded. To be more precise, Malian compost can now be toxic – roughly correlating to the degree that a particular family participates in the market economy. Here is a close-up of Soongalo’s massive fertilizer collection.


A lot of Malians are concerned about all the plastic bags lying around – only because goats and sheep often think that they are food, try to swallow them and choke to death. So it is common for people to burn their trash in the streets – something that wouldn’t be so bad if trash still consisted entirely of millet stalks and corn husks. But burning plastic releases noxious fumes into the air, exposing the population to toxic heavy metals, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and carcinogenic dioxins. Even with the complete and utter lack of industrialization, air quality is surprisingly bad in market towns like Sanadougou because everyone sells their wares in cheap Chinese-manufactured plastic bags which are inevitably incinerated; the concentrated burning of plastics makes breathing in Malian cities absolutely intolerable. Air quality is at its worst when night falls, because many people think that breathing plastic fumes is only bad when you can see them.


What is even more hazardous is that people can buy cheap Chinese-made batteries for use in flashlights and radios, and these batteries also make their way into their compost piles. Every battery carries a warning “MAY EXPLODE OR LEAK IF CHARGED OR DISPOSED OF IN FIRE” – but of course, no one can read here and even if they could read they can’t read English. Batteries also carry a pictogram of a garbage can with a cross through it and “Pb” – the abbreviation for plumbum; anyone in the developed world should be able to recognize this to mean that they should not throw their batteries in the garbage because they contain lead. But in a society without trash collection where hardly anyone could identify the image of a garbage can, these safety warnings are meaningless hieroglyphics. So Malians burn their batteries with the rest of their trash, they explode, and battery acid containing extremely toxic concentrations of lead, nickel and cadmium seeps into the compost and the soil.

Taken from another angle, one can see how Soongalo’s otherwise awesome compost pile is actually really dangerous because he collects it only a few meters from the well where his family draws all of their drinking water.


Even if this were a purely organic compost pile, a significant amount of that cow, sheep and donkey shit would inevitably make it into Soongalo’s uncovered drinking water supply. And it does. But since he also tries to compost plastic and batteries, Soongalo is also polluting his family's drinking water with toxic concentrations of lead, nickel and cadmium. Thus it should come as a surprise to no one that most of Soongalo’s children have severe neurological disabilities. I’ve tried to politely tried to explain to him why he should move his compost pile somewhere further from his well, but the modern consensus on lead poisoning can be much-too-easily rejected by a man who is convinced that his children are mentally retarded because they have been cursed by an evil sorcerer.

The health hazards of improperly disposing extremely-toxic substances are particularly acute when they are thrown away directly adjacent to the wells from which people draw their drinking water. But even if plastic bags are thrown away in trash heaps far from the water supply, if that refuse is eventually used to fertilize the fields then the toxic materials are going to seep into the soils, they will be absorbed by the millet plants and people are still going to consume that lead, nickel and cadmium with their food – albeit maybe in smaller concentrations. You are what you eat – and if you fertilize your food crop with batteries, then your body is going to contain lead, nickel and cadmium and you are probably going to develop anemia, cancer, renal failure and irreversible brain damage.

If there is anything that can be done to improve the quality of the water, air and soil in this country, it is to teach people about the health hazards of pollution and safe waste management practices. When you consider how controversial environmentalism is in the United States, you can only imagine how much more difficult it is to get these concepts across is in a conservative culture like the Miniankas who are generally ignorant of modern science and believe that illness comes from frogs, the wind, whistling at night and voodoo spells. In a society where people are more scared of soap than they are of consuming the fecal matter of those who don’t wash their hands before eating from the communal food bowl, it will long remain an uphill battle to get people concerned about the carcinogens they put into the air and the battery acid they put into their food and water.

Of course, the absolutely most environmentally-sound course of action would be to encourage Malians to reduce or eliminate the inorganic trash they produce by going to market with canvas tote bags and replacing their disposable batteries with rechargeable Energizers –insh’allah this strategy might be feasible over the course of the next few centuries. Though in the meantime, Sanadougou needs to adopt different ways of disposing their organic and inorganic waste.

In some cities and larger towns, Peace Corps Volunteers or NGOs have helped communities to establish trash collection agencies. Such a project often entails creating demand for services where none might exist. But once there exists a critical mass of families who are interested in separating their organic from their inorganic waste, one would have to get them separate containers to contain the latter; in the past PCVs have bought empty steel gasoline barrels and hired blacksmiths to split them in half to serve as trash cans. And then they have to get the village to designate a fallow field isolated from the water supply and dig a massive hole to serve as a landfill. And they would have to dig a separate hole and line it with concrete so that it can contain the toxic chemicals in batteries. And then they have to organize any number of donkey cart owners to serve as trash collectors, come to these people’s homes once a week, take their inorganic waste and dump it in the appropriate pits in the landfill. And this is the kicker: the trash can-owners would have to pay for these services and the donkey cart owners or le Bureau de la Mairie would have to collect payments and manage their funds without any fraud or embezzlement so that this trash collection agency can stay afloat as a profitable business. Even in those few municipalities in Mali where there is a trash collection agency, services are often so irregular that subscribers stop paying their bills and collection stops altogether. But nevertheless, even if the agency functions relatively well, without laws mandating participation there will always be cheap, lazy, ignorant people who won’t spend money on trash collection when they can burn their trash for free.

Most importantly, any effort to improve the sanitation of Malian waste management practices cannot lose sight of the fact that the application of garbage as fertilizer constitutes a crucial part of this country’s agricultural economy – no grassroots campaign to improve the safety of local composting practices can succeed unless it can also promise farmers that these new practices will improve the total yield and quality of their harvest. Even if the health hazards of consuming plastic and battery acid is beyond the comprehension of the intended audience, extension agents like myself have to emphasize that the toxins at hands are harmful to their millet, corn and cotton crops.

So I have been collecting my own compost pile to demonstrate how to make even better quality humus.



The quality and potency of compost increases accordingly with the ratio and concentration of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. I collect nitrogen-rich millet stalks and corn husks like everyone else in town, though the only livestock I have to my name are a dog and a cat so for phosphorus I pay children with milk candies to collect buckets of cow, donkey, sheep and goat manure. I add my rotten vegetables, mango pits, banana peels and orange skins, but I prevent my compost pile from emanating the sour reek of organic fermentation because the ample vegetable matter contains enough carbon for the micro-organisms to finish their job and break down dead matter into usable molecules. And my compost is even richer than that of my neighbors because I add my own urine – which contains 90 percent of excess human potassium. So not only is my compost essentially free of the toxic chemicals which ruin Malian compost, but it contains much more potassium so that my garden crops can utilize the nitrogen and phosphorus to build complex chemicals needed for plant growth and reproduction - and I get to consume the fruits of my labor.