Africa: Economics, PeaceKeeping, Diplomacy: Mauritania's new international product is camel's milk, DR Congo rebukes UN, US Sen Obama

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The impoverished, mostly-desert country of Mauritania (historically a Black Musliim country) has found an international market for a new product that has long been part of the national cuisine. Claire Soares reports for Christian Science Monitor, "A new use for camel's milk: Sell it abroad."

Slightly saltier than cow's milk and three times as rich in Vitamin C, camel's milk has been a favorite drink for centuries in Mauritania, served to guests under the billowing folds of a traditional khaima tent or donated to the poor.

"But we never thought of selling it. It was a very shameful thing to do," Mr. Tati explains, raising his bushy eyebrows in remembered horror.

But now, nomads across the desert nation supply fresh milk to the Tiviski dairy in the capital, Nouakchott, where it is pasteurized, packaged, and sold. "Slowly the mentality has changed," Tati grins. "Before, milk was for drinking; now it's liquid gold."

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization said recently that the world market for camel-milk products could be as much as $10 billion, giving nomadic herders a key source of income while helping to provide more food to people in the world's most arid areas.

Mauritania's population is 3,177,388 people (July 2006 estimate); and its camel count is 1,087,000, with 1.048 camel/s per square mile in Mauritania's wide open spaces.

Altho oil has been discovered in Mauritania, the income from it does not directly help the population of nomads, the younger generation of which is flocking to the capital to make it a city of 1,000,000. The benefit of oil revenues to the govt are largely spent in Nouakchott. It's to the Nouakchot former-nomad market that the homgenized camel's milk product is sold, where it is preferred to local cow and goat milks. A camel's milk cheese is now also manufactured; but the EU so far has prohibited its importation into the Common Market.

Africa > Mauritania, DR Congo

In other news from Africa, the UN peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of Congo has come under sharp critique by Human R+ts Watch (new report not yet posted), the ultimate concern of which are the warlords who operate militias and in some cases recruit child soliders into their warfare (at the moment, a truce is being relatively well-observed after having been initated for the elections). You may want to check out reporter Tristan McConnell's "Measures to keep peace in Congo draw fire - Critics say the deals run contrary to the UN's mandate by letting war criminals go free and undermining long-term peace" (Sep6,2k6) CSM, but you may want also to read the earlier HRW Aug1,2k6 document by Anneke van Woudenberg, "Democratic Republic of Congo: On the Brink." The UN outfit is officially UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC, according to its French acronym).

A third item fits our category of Diplomacy and in this case refers to an African-American who is now a member of the US Senate, the only Black member, Barack Obama. Les Neuhaus of Associated Press via Black America Web, "Barack Obama Visits Ethiopians Displaced by Flooding (Aug31,2k6) reports:

DIRE DAWA, Ethiopia (AP) - Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) visited a sprawling tent camp in eastern Ethiopia on Thursday for people displaced by devastating floods earlier this month, saying the U.S. military will continue to help the region.

U.S. Navy personnel began relief operations two weeks ago in the eastern town of Dire Dawa, where the first flash floods ripped through the town on Aug. 6. In eastern, southern and northeastern Ethiopia, flooding caused by the heavy rains has killed more than 600 people and displaced tens of thousands of people, according to U.N. officials.

. Earlier, I read reports of Obama in Kenya where he was treated as a native son (his economist father was Kenyan, his mother an American and Obama has a granny whom he visited in a Kenyan village). Howard LaFranchi tells us "Senator Obama puts spotlight back on Africa -- His visit to the continent attracts attention, but overall, momentum on Africa issues has been waning" () CSM.

WASHINGTON – The throngs that Barack Obama has attracted on his two-week trip through Africa suggest a star status for the son of a Kenya-born economist, stretching from Lagos to Lesotho.

It hasn't hurt that the only African-American member of the US Senate has a warmly smiling granny in a photogenic west Kenya village. Or that the first-term senator from Illinois is regularly identified by African media as a likely future US presidential candidate.

Yet the high-profile hoopla around Mr. Obama is hardly the first time a US lawmaker has paid heed to the continent. Indeed, African-American members of Congress have kept close ties to Africa - and Africa issues - for years. Those links were forged when black lawmakers took up the anti-apartheid movement and worked with Africans who were to become officials in new governments.

Obama has raised the attention paid to Africa by a notch, at least temporarily. In addition, some observers say Darfur and its emergence as a global human rights lightning rod has refocused a congressional spotlight on Africa. And they say that such Africa-related issues as development, AIDS prevention and treatment, and global poverty have renewed interest in Africa - especially as some influential religious conservatives in Congress have adopted those issues as their own.

But some veterans of the anti-apartheid years say the absence of an overarching galvanizing issue as strong as that has weakened the intensity of connection to Africa and Africa-related issues.

Obama, a Liberal Christian who seeks good relations wth more conservative Christians and, indeed, has some allies on Africa concerns among Christians known as both religious and political conservatives. "One difference is that religious conservatives like Sen. Sam Brownback (R) of Kansas have taken on Africa-related issues like Darfur, AIDS, and poverty as moral imperatives for US foreign policy." Let's see whether the new Senate after the November elections comes out with a strong bipartisan Africa Friendship Caucus.

-- Politicarp

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