The baobabs are sounding the alarm.
Mali's baobab population has declined by over one-third since 2010, signaling ecological collapse in a region already experiencing extreme drought and food insecurity. Overexploitation from excessive irrigation and continuous pastoralism, combined with short-term economic policies, has systematized soil degradation across the Sahel region.
- 58% of Mali's land surface is already desertified; 42% more threatened by deforestation
- More than one-third of Mali's baobab forests have vanished or face extinction since 2010
- Kayes region experiences extreme climate swings between heavy rainfall and severe drought
- Vulnerable populations—women, children, displaced persons—face acute food, water, and healthcare shortages
Mali faces severe desertification with 58% of land degraded and deforestation accelerating, threatening food security and displacing vulnerable populations as baobab trees disappear at alarming rates.
Mali is running out of time. More than half the country—58 percent of its land surface—has already turned to desert. Another 42 percent teeters on the edge, threatened by deforestation that moves faster than any policy can stop it. The numbers are stark, but they obscure something more immediate: the trees are dying, and the people who depend on them are beginning to move.
Four decades ago, the world watched the Sahel starve. Between 1984 and 1985, a brutal drought swept across the vast band of Africa stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, a region spanning more than four million square kilometers. The international community called it the "hunger belt," and the images of that crisis reshaped how the world thought about climate change. Now, as the United Nations climate conference convenes in Egypt, the Sahel faces the prospect of another food emergency. This time the causes are layered: the war in Ukraine has spiked grain prices, but the deeper wound is homegrown. Governments and rural communities have spent decades squeezing more from the land than it can give—pushing irrigation beyond what the soil can sustain, running livestock herds across pastures until nothing grows back. The short-term thinking was simple: maximize profit now. The long-term cost has been systematic degradation across an entire region already fragile from heat and aridity.
In the Kayes region, which borders Senegal, the climate swings between extremes—years of heavy rain followed by stretches of severe drought. Right now, the drought has the upper hand. And it is the baobabs that are sounding the alarm. These trees, immortalized in Saint-Exupéry's *The Little Prince* and known locally as the monkey bread tree or the pharmacy tree, can live eight to ten centuries under the right conditions. For centuries, they have served as gathering places where communities make decisions about shared problems. They are not merely symbolic. Baobabs feed families—their seeds yield oil, their fruit provides nutrition, and their presence anchors the agricultural systems that sustain the region.
But the baobabs are vanishing. In 2010, Mali had roughly 15,000 hectares of baobab forest. Today, more than a third of that has disappeared or stands on the edge of extinction. The loss is not incidental to the broader ecological collapse; it is a visible marker of it. As the trees die and the ecosystem fragments, people move. Farmers and herders migrate toward the greener south, but they bring the same practices that degraded the land they left behind. The result is a cascade of damage: landscape transformation, soil loss, and the spread of agricultural practices that worsen the very conditions driving migration.
The human toll falls heaviest on those with the least ability to adapt. Women, children, and displaced persons face acute shortages of food, clean water, and healthcare. A drought that might have been a seasonal hardship forty years ago has become a multidimensional crisis—one that strips away the basic rights of survival for the most vulnerable. The conflict and geopolitical tensions that now grip the region only deepen the wound.
The COP27 conference in Sharm El-Sheikh is being held on the continent most ravaged by climate change, yet the same urgent questions that dominated climate discussions in the 1980s remain unresolved. Developed nations have made promises before. What Mali and the Sahel need now is not another roadmap but binding commitment—real resources, real accountability, real action to halt the desertification that is erasing a way of life and displacing millions. Without it, the hunger belt will only grow wider.
Citas Notables
Baobabs contribute significantly to food security for families, both through the oil extracted from their seeds and the fruit pulp, and through their role in sustaining agricultural systems.— Source material on baobab ecological importance
Excessive irrigation and continuous pastoralism have caused systematic overexploitation of lands far beyond their real capacity to provide water and pasture.— Analysis of agricultural practices in the Sahel
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why focus on the baobabs specifically? They're trees, not people.
Because they're the canary in the coal mine. A baobab can live a thousand years under normal conditions. When they start dying en masse, it means the entire system is collapsing. Malians have gathered under these trees for centuries to make decisions. Their disappearance is both ecological and cultural.
You mention that a third of Mali's baobab forests have vanished since 2010. That's twelve years. How fast is that actually happening?
Fast enough that it's accelerating. The drought intensifies, people need more pasture and water, so they push harder on the land. The land degrades faster. More people migrate. It becomes a feedback loop.
The piece mentions both drought and bad policy. Which is the real culprit?
Both, but policy is the one we can control. The drought is real, but governments and communities chose to maximize short-term profit by overgrazing and over-irrigating. They knew the land couldn't sustain it. They did it anyway.
You say women and children are hit hardest. Why them specifically?
They're usually the ones responsible for gathering water and food for the household. When water becomes scarce and crops fail, they face the immediate crisis first. And they have fewer resources to migrate or adapt.
What does COP27 actually need to do that it hasn't done before?
Stop making promises and start making transfers—money, technology, accountability. Developed nations created this crisis through emissions. Mali didn't. The conference is in Africa for a reason. It's time to act like it.