When in drought, plant fonio

Climate change has exacerbated drought and extreme weather in northern Ghana, leaving many in the agricultural region struggling to grow enough food. Chef Fatmata Binta sees a solution in fonio, a grain similar to couscous, indigenous to West Africa, and most importantly, one that is able to thrive in dry conditions.

The Big Fix
Updated:
HCHannah Chanatry
7:33

Chef Fatmata Binta works to educate women about cultivating fonio, a climate-resilient grain that can grow amid drought.

Courtesy of Fulani Kitchen Foundation

In northern Ghana, climate change is a hot and dry reality.

Rising temperatures have caused severe drought in a region heavily dependent on agriculture. Food production has plummeted, forcing thousands of people to move south.

But one particular crop could help change that picture: fonio. Similar to couscous, the fluffy, nutty-tasting grain can thrive in dry conditions.

“It’s Indigenous to West Africa, it’s gluten free and it has a very short lifespan,” said Fatmata Binta, a chef based in Accra, Ghana, who has re-popularized growing and cooking with fonio.

“It’s a grain that is [also] very easy to cook. [So] we’ve been able to create other recipes from fonio, we’ve been able to do breads, cakes, different things. It’s very versatile.”

For The Big Fix, our series on climate solutions and the people working to make them happen, Chef Binta spoke with The World’s Host Marco Werman about fonio and its importance in helping people in West Africa adapt to climate change.

Chef Fatmata Binta and The World’s Host Marco Werman discuss recipes that can be made with fonio. Still images taken from a Zoom video call.Hannah Chanatry/The World
Marco Werman: Help us understand how these ancient grains, like fonio, are actually playing a role in the fight against climate change.
Chef Fatmata Binta: Fonio is easy to grow, and you don’t need much water. And drought is a big problem now across Africa, not just [the] West.

Fonio is a drought-resistant grain. Whenever it’s planted, you don’t need water — as long as it has rained, it can sustain itself. And you don’t need to plow the land too much. So, if you think about a very sustainable grain that reduces the footprint of too much water, too much plowing, destroying the land. It regenerates itself. It’s a very sustainable grain to grow more right now and less of what is destroying our land.
How widely is it grown currently, like in northern Ghana?
Not much. It’s also considered an underutilized crop, abandoned. Even though it’s ancient, it’s been around for so long, but most people are still catching up [to] it.

It’s picking up now because, for the last two years, my organization, which is a nonprofit called Fulani Kitchen Foundation, we trained women in the north of Ghana to bring it back to their menu, to their farms. It can be something that we can also export to support them.
The United Nations has termed fonio one of the 100 forgotten foods of Africa. What does that mean, the forgotten food?
The way I see it, it means people need to diversify more.

Before we started this project, we did this case study where we went to all the local markets. And it was shocking that we couldn’t find fonio in the local market. But then you can find rice from Thailand easily. So that it also ties to the mindset. But that is changing now … and I think it’s important for it to change because these ingredients that are, they seem new, but they are not new, they are old.
The thing about fonio is that it’s a pretty labor-intensive crop. It takes a lot of work to process once it’s been harvested. And even then, I understand it’s got fairly low yields.

So, to put it bluntly, can investing in fonio cultivation actually meet the needs of people in the region amid this intense climate change trend?
Absolutely. [But] mechanization needs to happen. And that’s something we’ve been working on. It’s easy to grow all of these things. But when it comes to processing, it’s very hard. It’s very hectic. But if there is enough mechanization to de-husk, to thrush, and I think if that burden is eased, more farmers would grow foods. Not just fonio, [but] they’ll grow all types of food. And that can also translate to more access to these ingredients in local markets, and also them going from small-scale farmers to larger scale. But mechanization needs to happen for it to take off completely.
Talk a bit more about your work with women. I mean, do you see women in northern Ghana as kind of like the vector by which fonio will catch on?
Absolutely, they are the gatekeepers. Because it’s also considered a female crop. Traditionally, the men will take the land that is considered fertile to grow other crops. And then they will hand the arid areas to the women. So, that’s how the women started growing fonio and it became a female crop.

Also, as an organization, we are launching a new initiative called the Fonio Heritage Village, because we want to build a center that can process fonio, and package, and sell, and distribute to local stores. … Most of these women, as much as we train them with the best practices and placing value for better production, better nutrition, better environment and better lives, they hold the Indigenous knowledge. They hold the agricultural best practices that modern science cannot understand. So, we are trying to create a space that can bring all this knowledge together and the space to collaborate so that innovation can happen.
How did you become so interested in fonio in the first place, Chef Binta?
I come from a very large family in Sierra Leone, and I experienced [the civil war in Sierra Leone] when I was almost a teenager … and we had to move to a small village in Guinea.

[The village] could probably accommodate about 200 people. [But] we were over 1,000 people in that small village. The food that was already available couldn’t sustain us, things like rice, potato, fruits and all this, it couldn’t. So, [my] family had to fall back on fonio. And that’s how we sustained ourselves within [those] two years, eating fonio in different ways.

So, once I became a chef, and knowing how much fonio helped me survive those hard years, for me, I feel like it’s a responsibility not to let something that saved me and my family be lost. I can’t sit back when I have a platform. I also have a restaurant that can champion [these] grains because I see the restaurant as a vehicle to educate people. For me, it’s very important to not sit back and watch fonio get lost.
Chef Binta, what do you hope to see moving forward? Can you just paint the picture of a thriving agricultural sector for us where fonio is playing a vital role?
I hope to see fonio in a lot of restaurants. I hope [to see] it in markets, most importantly. I don’t want to see it just on shelves, I want it in local markets, widely accessible. And I want everyone to know about fonio. Because sometimes I still find it shocking that, as much as it’s an ancient grain, I still have to explain what fonio is to people who are local. So, I want to see that happen. And want to see the world eat more fonio the way we are eating rice. That’s how I want to see it.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.