Breaking Groundnuts: Senegal’s Fight for Agricultural Sovereignty in a Changing Global Order

Marianna Ka, 70, works under a blazing sun, bending over the dry earth to pick peanuts while keeping a watchful eye on her grandchild. She says her life is hard, but unavoidable: “If you do not have livestock, other crops, or money to buy new seeds, you have nothing… you really have nothing.” Many families in Senegal, a country where peanuts are the main grown and exported product, are still unable to purchase the very seeds of the crop that drives their economy.

The colonial system that France built is the source of Senegal’s absurd reality. In the 19^th century,  France made Senegal the center of its peanut production. Colonial administrators coerced farmers into monoculture through taxes, market restrictions, and land reallocations. Thus, Senegal became “the peanut plantation of the French Empire,” and by the late 20^th century, this colonial legacy had made peanuts 60% of the Senegalese agricultural GDP and 80% of its export earnings. France would import Senegalese peanuts for processing into oil and soap. Sales globally were lucrative, as customers like the British railway would consume up to 13,000 tons of grease annually from French-processed Senegalese peanuts. Thus, despite the high commercial value of those Senegalese peanuts, Senegal itself was deprived of the main profits and sovereignty over its seeds, production, and value-added processing. 

The independence that Senegal gained in 1960 did little to actually shed this colonial structure. In the following decades, Senegal found scant international support, with the IMF cutting subsidies for the nation and dissolving marketing boards, and a French private company swooping in to privatize the state’s peanut-processing company, National Society for the Marketing of Oleaginous Seeds of Senegal (SONACOS). As a direct result of this colonial legacy, French and French-affiliated multinational corporations continued to monopolize the peanut trade, concentrating profits among the international elite. Senegal’s colonial legacy remained intact in all but name. 

Today, less than 10% of peanuts are processed locally, despite the staggering fact that 70% of Senegalese households rely on them. Moreover, in an ironic twist, dependence on foreign hybrid seeds from companies such as Euralis Semences and Corteva has reduced yield to 800-1,000 kg/ha compared to the global 1,600-1,800. Hybrids, which are promoted by USAID, actually require additional chemical fertilizers and pesticides, making them a poor alternative to the hardier local varieties. Thus, farmers incur annual seed debts while multinationals maintain control over the means of production.

         Discontent with the exploitative colonial system, Senegal has taken steps to reclaim control with a revolution that began at the genetic level. The Institute Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles (ISRA) has led the wave of revival using local peanut breeding programs that restore the biodiversity eroded by decades of imposed foreign hybrid dominance. They have also engineered open-pollinated, climate-smart varieties of peanuts that better adapt to shortened rainy seasons and the degraded soil of Northern and Central Senegal. These varieties boast improved yield and seed size with increased high oil content and deep seed dormancy to boost. With the genetic backcrossing of peanuts through the Peanut Innovation Lab’s international scientific collaborations, Senegalese researchers have produced numerous seed lines that achieve higher yield stability. 

Senegal is fighting back against its colonial past on other fronts besides research. Grassroots efforts have been essential to Senegal’s reclamation, including community seedbanks that have preserved, stored, and distributed traditional and improved peanut varieties. These seedbanks have proved to be of critical importance in areas of the nation like Ndiongone, where many women-led farmer cooperatives use smaller-scale farming infrastructure to ensure cultural seed heritage and seasonal availability. 

  However, the struggle for sovereignty does not only encompass the growth of raw peanut exports because it is processing that contains the largest value addition. For centuries, Senegal exported raw peanuts while importing processed oil, which was a colonially-imposed economic system that drained value from local agricultural labor. Shifting that imbalance, the government re-nationalized SONACOS. Previously known as SUNEOR and collapsing under French Advens Group ownership, the company had exported up to 150,000 tons of crude peanut oil annually, controlled 70% of Senegal’s domestic market, and dominated global peanut oil transactions.  Now back under renewed state control, SONACOS has resumed production with eight operating sites and local brands like Niani and AradOr to attain value-adding processing outputs of 300,000 tons, mostly in oil processing, vitamin A enrichment, and the production of animal feed cakes. Such a bid for sovereignty has resulted in robust sector revenues, with exports from 2021 totaling over 329 million euros, contributing roughly to 16% of the national GDP.

Parallel to state-level processing, women-led cooperatives are also reshaping Senegal’s peanut economic landscape from the ground up. One of the many cases in the region, Fatou Sall Ndiaye Mbacké has launched the Modernisation de la Production de Pâte d’Arachide project, a modern artisanal peanut butter production facility, in Touba. A workforce of forty women who produce 220 pounds of peanut butter daily, the workshop exports to Mali and Gambia. Seeing a proliferation of local women-led cooperatives, Ndem and Rufisque Nord, supported by non-governmental organizations like ENDA Pronat and Réseau des Femmes Transformatrices, have provided women with equipment, hygiene training, and market linkages.

 The Senegalese government has long encouraged rural entrepreneurship in order to increase the nation’s productive capabilities also. Beginning in 2009, the government gave 500 peanut-processing machines to village organizations after the Institute of Food and technology created a regionally-feasible method for making aflatoxin-free oil. These early investments planted the seeds for today’s micro-enterprise ecosystem, which in turn fueled larger national frameworks like the Programme d’Accélération de la Cadence de l’Agriculture Sénégalaise, which optimizes the groundnut sector from value-chain performance to storage and packaging in an effort to balance agribusiness and family farming.

Due to both top-down and grassroots measures, the percentage of peanuts processed domestically has risen from less than 5% in the 2000s to 10% today. In the 2022 fiscal year, Senegalese processors crushed around 200,000 MT of groundnuts, double their output from the previous year. Recently, Senegal began establishing investment ties with powers like Turkey, China, and the United States, mitigating the limitations of its small economy. Foreign investment in the nation reached an all-time high of $2.64 billion in 2023, suggesting that Senegal is quickly becoming a hotspot of agri-industry and one of Africa’s most promising commercial frontiers. 

Senegal has leveraged this momentum to expand export markets and lessen its reliance on long-standing trading partners like France. It has turned peanuts into a trade diplomacy tool. More than 323,000 MT of peanuts have been sold to China from the nation since gaining tariff-free access in 2015, making it the largest importer of peanuts to China. Senegal’s pricing power has strengthened considerably, and more equitable conditions for producers in the nation have been made further possible by the increase in export output to nations like Kenya, Morocco, Ghana, the United States, and more.

 Senegal is taking back control of its roots. Reclaiming its peanut seeds, increasing domestic processing, and changing trade ties on its own terms, the African nation is breaking out of its traditionally limited colonial supply role. Most importantly, its increasing agility in new markets signal the emergence of a West African agricultural power in a shifting global order.