Thanks to a network of Diaspora West Africans, the grain many call the “Next Quinoa” is being grown in Guinea, Milled in Senegal, and marketed worldwide as the social impact carb of the future. Pierre Thiam, who rose from New York City restaurant dishwasher to restaurant proprietor to James Beard-awarded culinary writer, is adding a new title to his storied resumé. The Senegal native is also the owner of the Brooklyn food processing conglomerate Yolélé Food Inc., where he’s been hailed as the Father of Fonio. That’s for Yolélé’s efforts to cultivate, propagate, and promote a protein-rich African millet that many food enthusiasts are touting as “the next Quinoa.”
Fonio? That’s the hardy, nearly microscopic grain that has sustained life for centuries in one of the planet’s harshest environments. Like quinoa, from Peru, and Ethiopia’s teff (the highlands grain that has turned so many Ethiopian runners into marathon champions), fonio is part legend and part miracle. Foodies love it, and so do environmentalists.Gluten-free and drought resistant, Mr. Thiam says fonio “checks all the boxes” when it comes to nourishing body and soul.
“It’s easy to grow, easy to cook, good for the environment and—most important—under-utilized by small farmers” in several of Africa’s poorest nations, the 60-year-old entrepreneur explains during a phone interview from his home in Northern California. Celebrated by philanthropists like Bill Gates, it has garnered praise as “the drought-resistant super grain” or “one of the world’s neglected crops.”
Fonio, available in specialty shops in the U.S. and Europe for around $6 per kilo, appeals not only to the health-conscious but also to altruistic diners who target their food expenditures towards sustainable agriculture or “impact” investments.
Thiam is himself bringing together philanthropists, nutritionists, agro-innovators, and peasant farmers by the thousands to promote this most versatile carbohydrate that can feed millions. Mr. Thiam has persuaded chefs in Tokyo to swap fonio for beds of white rice when preparing sushi, and brewers from Brooklyn to Copenhagen to craft specialty beers brewed with fonio instead of barley.
His biggest transformation is with fonio’s farmers, who today stretch across the arid West African Sahel, where fonio has been harvested for at least 5,000 years. Guinea’s Fouta highlands are the original fonio heartland, raised by nomadic Fulani villagers who mainly herd cattle and camels.
Fonio grows quickly with little rainfall and provides a rich source of iron for both the villagers and their livestock. It’s still harvested by hand in most places, which not only is backbreaking, but also risks losing much of the crop’s nutritional value as fonio’s tiny sand-like grains blow away like dust using primitive “artisanal” threshing and milling techniques. Organized into modern cooperatives, farmers harvest and bag fonio unhulled, sending the durable pods across the border into Senegal, where the edible grain is separated from its shell.
As much as 40% of the earth’s arable land is in Africa, and yet nearly 90% of Africa’s agricultural wealth is either untilled or underutilized. The continent has an estimated 600 million hectares of uncultivated farmland, roughly 65% of the global total.
On a hungry planet that loses more farmland than it adds each year, Africa’s potential as an agro-gold mine serves as a powerful lure to young farming entrepreneurs returning to the continent. You can see the process in the pastoral scene I witnessed last November at a tiny rural crossroads called Mamou-Gongoré, in Central Guinea.
As an autumn sun set, men and women in traditional flowing gowns cross a field of low grass, backs bent to the task of harvesting handfuls of fonio pods from tufts rising only to men’s ankles. As they reach downward to swing their hand sickles, the women trail behind, clapping out a beat and murmuring to the singsong rhythm of an overseer’s chants.
“This is the work of fonio now. Fonio is Good. Bring in the Fonio!” a tall man calls out in a local Fulani dialect. He urges: “Bring It, Camara! Bring it, Diallo!” spurring a good-natured competition between two of the region’s leading clans.
About 60% of the world’s fonio is produced in Guinea and, until recently, was little known to consumers outside West Africa. Today, it promises prosperity to farmers like Mamadou Balde, an elder in another village I visited, called Kouraba, near Guinea’s border with Sénégal. Although miles from any electricity grid, Fulani villagers here enjoy watching international soccer games on giant-screen TVs, thanks to the new solar panels stretching across the roofs of their mud-hewn cottages.
“Young people here prefer rice nowadays, but we old timers like fonio,” Mr. Balde says, adding almost all Kouraba’s 70 farming families now are exporting their grain, thanks to Europe’s strong demand. Mr. Balde proudly displays his village’s new fonio warehouse, where freshly harvested grain awaits shipment to Sénégal for processing.
From its origins in Guinea, fonio has spread to Ghana, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Sénégal, creating an agro-renaissance, aided to a degree by growing demand from the demand side: Diaspora migrant consumers in Europe, North America, and the Middle East.
It’s also supported on the supply end by Diaspora brain power, arriving in the form of skill transfers, access to finance capital, and the unique knowledge expatriates share with each other when building bridges between ancient farming practices and modern markets.
That’s where Diaspora activists like Pierre Thiam play crucial roles. The fonio harvested in Gongoré belongs to a cooperative, Groupement des Producteurs de Fonio au Foutah (GPFF), whose 85 members are being nurtured by a constellation of corporate allies in Europe and the U.S., mainly led by African expats who have banded together to help subsistence farmers bring fonio to the world’s tables.
One player, Terra Ingredients, is based in Minneapolis, MN. Another, Telli Ventures AS, is based in Tromsø, Norway. A third, Compagnie Africaine Agroalimentaire (CAA) operates in Mali, Guinea, Sénégal and Paris.
Each of these allies relies on highly trained African expats. It’s the Brain Chain answer to the continent’s Brain Drain, a scourge which has undermined African development since the end of its colonial era.
Osman Diallo of Telli Ventures is French, born to Guinean/Sénégalese parents, who today lives in Norway. Malick Diehdhou of Terra Ingredients is a Sénégalese-German who works out of Amsterdam, and Laura Layousse is of mixed Sénégalese/Lebanese descent. All hold advanced degrees from European or American universities (often both). All speak at least three languages.
All have turned to fonio to advance farmers back home
Besides its nutritional qualities, the grain has other attractions for impact investors. For one, it’s grown almost exclusively in just a handful of impoverished states, which means aiding fonio cultivation puts cash directly in poor African households. Another reason: almost 80% of fonio production occurs on family plots, so investors do not find themselves automatically in league with big commodities monopolists. Another benefit: few grains on earth are cultivated with such small amounts of water, which means fonio doesn’t require big investments in irrigation infrastructure. Nor does it create chemical contamination from irrigation runoff.
“It’s usually not mechanized at all,” says Osman Diallo of Telli Ventures. “Something ‘advanced,’ like having a tractor when planting seed or harvesting, can boost production enormously.”
Malick Diedhiou of Terra Ingredients explains that the average yield from cooperative members is 500 kilos per hectare, with most farmers cultivating more than two hectares per harvest season. At today’s prices, EU .55/kilo, that comes to just EU 275 per hectare per harvest, or about 10% of Guinea’s average annual salary.
Mechanization, paradoxically, can be a money saver for the farmer. That’s because migration—either to nearby Sénégal, or else to another continent—has begun to drain Guinea’s rural workforce.
As farmers’ sons and daughters leave for easier work in the city or abroad, the rising cost of hiring outsiders as day labor cuts into farming’s profits. Thus, having corporate partners who can finance the purchase of modern machinery removes the obstacle of seeking cash for a down payment. It also frees more children from laboring in the fields. To educated expats, efforts like fonio seem safe. Because the scale of production today is so small, risks shrink to a very manageable size.
Consider the fonio processor that Laura Layousse’s CAA group installed at a cost of under EURO 1.5 million. It is considered the first attempt to mill this ancient grain industrially, handling 700 metric tons of fonio annually from some1500 farmers CAA has recruited into its supply chain. That’s up from only 30 farmers two years ago. In effect, the cost of amortization on that initial investment was EU 1000 per farmer, an input cost that drops exponentially the longer the mill is operational.
“Before we had the plant, it was all manual and we had almost zero sales,” says Malick Diedhiou of Terra Ingredients. “Of course, we didn’t go from 30 to 1500 immediately, but it exploded this year because fonio starts to become more sought after in the US.”
Before CAA’s machinery, fonio was as labor-intensive to de-husk as it was to plant and harvest. Women used wooden mortars and pestles to pound edible grain from a hard casing, and often lost much of its volume in dusty clouds of fonio. Exporting grain for processing doesn’t simply mean saving lost product. Outsourcing also cuts the time spent turning raw grain into food. So, larger spring plantings and larger harvest yields follow.
CAA’s success with its suppliers has encouraged at least one other Diaspora enterprise, La Petite Damba, to match CAA’s investment with a fonio processor of its own in Mamou, Guinea. Fodé Youla, the son of Guinean diplomats, attended Northwestern University outside Chicago. Since 2016, he has been operating La Petite Damba as an exporter of several Guinean farm products.
Pierre Thiam is also following a similar path in his native Senegal and neighboring Mali. He calls fellow fonio promoters like Terra, CAA, and Telli Ventures “friendly competitors.” Each shares a desire for the same outcome: bringing fonio cultivation to scale to reduce costs and spread profits more widely. Like CAA, Mr. Thiam’s Yolélé West Africa unit is also working to bring industrial processing machinery to his operation. Like Telli, he’s planning aggregation centers in Senegal and Mali that will rely on thousands of small growers feeding fonio into Yolélé’s pipeline.
“We are projecting to invest $120,000 per aggregation center with an estimated 5000 farmers in each,” he explains. That amounts to an outlay of $24 per farmer, a manageable cost to spread fonio’s footprint across two countries. Until those two centers are operational, Yolélé will also rely on a network of 3,000 fonio growers in Togo, already organized to fulfill orders if necessary.
If there is a cloud lingering over fonio’s future, it may come in the form of a steep drop in U.S. support. In recent years, fonio has attracted the support of the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S./AID). The agency has lavished grants to fonio cooperatives across nearly half a dozen West African nations under the WATIH program, which stands for the West Africa Trade& Investment Hub.
Pierre Thiam is already searching for alternatives. “At Yolélé West Africa, we had benefited from a WATIH grant,” he said. “But with the new administration, we can expect that such programs will be discontinued.”
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