Soon after midnight in early January 1994, an Air Afrique cargo
jet
took off from the airport of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. It roared
north over the sleeping city carrying 15 tons of
première-qualité, extra-fine green beans bound for Paris.
Within several hours, the beans would
be unloaded and trucked to the sprawling wholesale docks of Rungis,
on the outskirts of the French capital, and put up for sale to restaurant
and supermarket buyers from throughout Europe. The jet's blast
marked the first time in over a decade that a cargo flight had carried
the region's garden produce overseas. It represented, perhaps, the
opening of an isolated and stagnant economy, the linking of local
producers to the global market. It was exactly the kind of ‘take-off’
the World Bank hoped for from this poor but deadly earnest country when
it began a structural adjustment loan programme in Burkina Faso in 1991.
The months of negotiations and labour preceding this landmark
flight, however, had hardly gone as smoothly as the lift-off from the
darkened savannah runway. Indeed, the whole enterprise was so
fraught with mishap that simply the arrival of that first shipment in
Europe mattered more, especially to those who initiated the ‘green
bean scheme’, than the fact that it made no money.