Changing the World

Dreams and idealism came together back in 1969, when Carmel enlisted with the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture's CINADCO. Since then, Carmel has spent years overseas as a CINADCO emissary directing projects in the tropical regions of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Now back on base in Israel, Carmel works as course director in the Francophone Department at CINADCO and MASHAV's campus in Kibbutz Shefayim north of Tel Aviv. He sees his teaching as an extension of his work overseas and recalls that a fundamental task of establishing new projects was to ensure that local people would be capable of maintaining them after he left. Tall, rugged and larger than life, Carmel recalls his last foray overseas, which was to supervise an irrigation project in Cameroon.

Carmel recounts that back in 1989 the American fruit corporation Delmonte, in collaboration with the Cameroonian government, wanted to turn a rubber plantation into a banana plantation. "The area (Tiko Province) has 3,000 mm of rain per year," he says. "So you wouldn't think that they'd need irrigation. But the rain falls in the summer months. So we had to ensure that there was a supply throughout the year".

Because of their world-wide reputation as irrigation specialists, Delmonte wanted Israeli's to handle that aspect of the project. Delmonte was referred to CINADCO, and Carmel was despatched with two Israeli assistants to the Cameroonian province of Tiko near the Nigerian border.

"This was a huge project", recollects Carmel. "We were talking about a 3,000 acre plantation. And Delmonte wanted to do it the hard way. Time is money, they reasoned, and they started planting during the wet summer months, so that when the dry season came irrigation would be in place."

"Delmonte was taking a risk," he stresses, "because if we had not finished on time, all the bananas planted in the wet season would have perished. But we succeeded despite having to wade through mud to lay the pipes and Delmonte gained a season."

In fact, Carmel relates that Delmonte reaped back all their investment with the income from the first season's harvest of bananas, which were larger and of a more standardized size than they had anticipated.

The logistics of the project involved conveying the water from two streams that were 20 kilometres apart into the banana plantation. A system of pipes and sprinklers spread the water during the dry season.

"At the height of the project", says Carmel, "we had nearly 400 people orking for us, most of them laying pipes. We employed all the local plumbers and re-trained all the local carpenters. The region suffers from underemployment, so finding labour was no problem".

Carmel recalls striking a blow for feminism in Cameroon when he hired a woman accountant to be his warehouse manager. "Suddenly a lot of my warehouse staff quit on me," he says, "because they refused to take orders from a woman. But I stuck by her, not only out of principle, but because she was intelligent, hard working and honest and I don't think I could have found anybody else nearly as good."

Carmel emphasizes that enormous amounts of irrigation equipment had arrived from Israel and the success of the venture was dependent on efficient storage and distribution of the items. All told, the project involved 155,000 sprinklers alone. And then there were kilometres of pipes, fittings, taps and equipment for pumping stations. "The warehouse manager proved herself," comments Carmel, "and I've heard that she was retained by Delmonte as a senior executive. One of the major successes of the operation was that we were able to find good local people to run the system after we left at the end of 1990."

Cameroon was Carmel's last mission overseas in a career that included setting up a model ranch in Chad in 1970, introducing water preservation for addition of an extra rice crop in Cambodia and Laos in the mid-1970s, and digging wells in the late 1970s to irrigate sorghum, beans, tomatoes and peppers in Haiti. Carmel also spent five years in Nigeria improving chicken coop methods and introducing irrigation techniques.

In between times, he even managed to study for his B.Sc. at the Hebrew University's Faculty of Agriculture in Rehovot. But after suffering badly from malaria when in Africa, and now aged 57, Carmel has decided that his travelling days are over. Not that he leads a sedentary life at CINADCO. He still mixes theory and practice. He has his own farm at Binyamina, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, where he grows avocadoes and grapes for wine and takes great pride in the quality of his produce.

But he also enjoys teaching and meeting the students who come to CINADCO from all over the world. At present he is teaching a course to veterinarians, which stresses the breeds of cattle and sheep that Israel has developed for farm rearing in hot climates. The last course he taught was on irrigation techniques.

"The developing world offers an enormous challenge," he insists, "and the problems of Africa, Asia and Latin America and now the emerging nations of the communist bloc in Europe can be overcome. But sometimes the task is overwhelmingly frustrating," he adds. "Sometimes I feel like an officer who has conquered a hill, and then I look around and realize that no support is coming and we will have to retreat."

"The difficulties of the developing world can be solved," he insists, "but massive help must be forthcoming. Much more than money, Israel has proven that by sending in experts with the appropriate technology and by training local people to master that technology, the problems can be overcome."