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| Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity |
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07/04/2009 |
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Mauritania: milk, bottarga and biodiversity
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The Imraguen Women’s Mullet Bottarga Presidium will have their own stand at Slow Fish, the sustainable fishing fair to be held in Genoa over April 17-20. In addition, the Mauritanian producers will participate in two special events on Sunday April 19 in Room B: at 1pm the women will be special guests at a Taste Workshop dedicated to the Orbetello Fishing Cooperative, a Tuscan fishing community who they have developed a collaborative relationship with; and at 4pm a representative of the Presidium will speak at the conference The Future of Fishing in Africa.
Chiara Frascari, coordinator of Slow Food Presidia in Mauritania, recently visited the bottarga Presdium, to check progress being made by the producers. Here is her report:
 A glass of fresh, delicate white camel’s milk is poured from a plastic Coca-Cola bottle almost with a flourish of pride.
With this gesture of hospitality we are welcomed to the office of the NGO Mauritanie 2000 in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, by President Nedwa Moctar Nech, who for some time has been working on the project “Femmes et Pêche” (Women and Fishing).
Fish processing is carried out nearby under poor hygienic conditions: the fish are gutted and cut up on the sand among plastic sheeting, and then dried on metal sheets. It’s far removed from the tiled rooms and proper equipment we are used to. However Mauritanie 2000 is moving in this direction by improving the women’s work. It is training the women to produce a quality product and motivating them to maintain standards.
Nedwa is incisive when she describes the situation along the Mauritanian coasts: the continuous plundering of resources by Western fishing vessels which have purchased local licenses is steadily depleting waters which are normally teeming with fish. More than 340 vessels operate in the waters off the Mauritanian coast every year, continually exploiting resources which are obviously not unlimited.
Then, traveling north for 530 km on the endless straight road connecting Nouakchott to Nouadhibou, we cross the desert—or rather deserts, because we would never have imagined that something with just one name could have so many forms and colors. That’s biodiversity.
Nouadhibou is where the thirty women involved in the Imraguen Women’s Mullet Bottarga Presidium work.
We meet them in the small premises which have been rented to dry the bottarga. They are wearing the latex gloves they were taught to use during training courses with the fishermen of the Orbetello Bottarga Presidium in 2006.
 We are proudly shown the bottarga drying on frames of wood and netting which were specially built during the training period. Everything is now done hygienically and using significantly better techniques than at the start of the program. The difference in taste is also noticeable.
New training courses will be organized in the coming months, this time run by women from the cooperatives currently involved, extending the project to around thirty new producers. Each of them will receive a training manual illustrating the correct techniques for handling the fish, extracting and processing the bottarga. The manual will convey its message through photographs of the producers accompanied by captions in their language, Hassaniya.
Furthermore all the women involved now and in the future will be part of the Slow Food network, as project members.
Faced with the massive plundering of the seas, this is a small initiative. But the result is a quality product transformed locally, not yet another anonymous frozen bottarga sold on the European market under who knows what label.
It is a proudly Mauritanian product—like the camel’s milk served from a Coca-Cola bottle.
The Imraguen Women\'s Mullet Bottarga Slow Food Presidium is supported by Piedmont Regional Authority
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