Bye-bye Baguette?

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The bakers and farmers trying to wean Senegal off imported wheat. Trotting along on a horse and cart, over the bumpy red dirt roads, through the lush green fields of Senegal’s countryside, Oule carries sacks of cargo back to her village. She is the bread lady of Ndor Ndor and she’s selling French baguettes. As a former French colony, the baguette is such a staple of the Senegalese diet, that 8 million loaves are transported out to remote villages, roadside kiosks and high end city bakeries every morning. But wheat doesn’t grow in the West African country, so they are at the mercy of the global markets. Usually they import the majority of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine, but since the war, there have been immense pressures on availability and prices have been soaring. So much so, the government has stepped in to subsidise wheat to keep the cost of a baguette down. But the war has forced bakers to question whether there could be another way of feeding Senegal’s huge appetite for bread. Tim Whewell meets the bakers experimenting with local grains, like sorghum, millet and fonio, that can grow in Senegal’s climate. But can they convince their customers to change their tastes and say bye-bye baguette? Produced by Phoebe Keane Field producer: Ndeye Borso Tall Additional Research: Azil Momar Lo and Nicolas Negoce Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Penny Murphy

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, the driver's just whipped the horse into action. We're juggling on a very basic wooden
0:11.9	cart on very scruffy outskirts of a Senegalese town, Kalalak. There's some goats coming,
0:20.0	quite a lot of livestock crossing, there are two huge hairy pigs. We turned it off already.
0:24.0	Oops, oh my god, I'm not going to fall off then. We're turning right off into the bush
0:28.0	to quite a sandy track now. You know, but we just more civil quit.
0:33.0	And with a woman called Ule, she's got a long pink and green and yellow dress on
0:41.0	and a spotted yellow head wrap.
0:44.0	So Senegalese journalist Vosotal is also juttering along with us. What does Ule say Vosot?
0:53.0	She says I'm very happy that we are together this afternoon, going to my village.
0:59.0	I'm carrying on this cart three big bags of baguettes.
1:04.0	That's right, baguettes. Behind me on this cart two big plastic bags of baguette,
1:15.0	French long French loaves, just like you might see them in any bullongedery in France.
1:22.0	Ule is the bread lady of Hondura and do a tiny village deep in this lush countryside
1:28.0	of giant bay of abatrees and little maze fields.
1:32.0	I'm a brec seller, that's the only job I have.
1:39.0	There's no power at night, it's very dark and I just sell my bread until it gets dark.
1:49.0	So it's a fairly basic village, no electricity, no running water, no sewage system, but they want baguette.
1:55.0	Why? We may not have toilets, we may be a little lacking of money,
2:00.0	but when we have it bread is our food and we just eat.
2:03.0	And not just any bread, but French bread.
2:07.0	French baguette is all we know.
2:10.0	Just go to the city.
	...

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