The Niari valley is a fertile region in the

Niari Department Niari (can also be written as ''Niadi'') is a department of the Republic of the Congo in the western part of the country. It borders the departments of Bouenza, Kouilou, and Lékoumou, and internationally, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of th ...

in the south west of the

Republic of the Congo The Republic of the Congo (french: République du Congo, ln, Republíki ya Kongó), also known as Congo-Brazzaville, the Congo Republic or simply either Congo or the Congo, is a country located in the western coast of Central Africa to the w ...

. The soil in the area is good and this state is an important agricultural and industrial region.

Geography

The Mayombé Escarpment in the Republic of the Congo rises to and runs parallel with the coast. It is a forested area with high rainfall. Inland from this and at a lower elevation is the Niari Valley. It is an area of

savanna A savanna or savannah is a mixed woodland-grassland (i.e. grassy woodland) ecosystem characterised by the trees being sufficiently widely spaced so that the canopy does not close. The open canopy allows sufficient light to reach the ground to ...

h and woodland and the rainfall here is lower. The valley has most of the country's

agribusiness Agribusiness is the industry, enterprises, and the field of study of value chains in agriculture and in the bio-economy, in which case it is also called bio-business or bio-enterprise. The primary goal of agribusiness is to maximize profit w ...

es and the main crops are

coffee Coffee is a drink prepared from roasted coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulant, stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content. It is the most popular hot drink in the world. S ...

cocoa Cocoa may refer to: Chocolate * Chocolate * ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree * Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao'' * Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...

sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double ...

maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. Th ...

tobacco Tobacco is the common name of several plants in the genus '' Nicotiana'' of the family Solanaceae, and the general term for any product prepared from the cured leaves of these plants. More than 70 species of tobacco are known, but the ...

and

palm oil Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil derived from the mesocarp (reddish pulp) of the fruit of the oil palms. The oil is used in food manufacturing, in beauty products, and as biofuel. Palm oil accounted for about 33% of global oils produced from ...

. Livestock is also reared in this area. The River Niari is not used for transport because the navigable stretches are separated by frequent rapids, and where it flows through the Mayombé Escarpment there are gorges. Big game such as

elephant Elephants are the largest existing land animals. Three living species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. They are the only surviving members of the family Elephantidae an ...

leopard The leopard (''Panthera pardus'') is one of the five extant species in the genus '' Panthera'', a member of the cat family, Felidae. It occurs in a wide range in sub-Saharan Africa, in some parts of Western and Central Asia, Southern Russia, a ...

and African buffalo, buffalo still roam in this area, especially in the Mount Fouari Reserve.

History of agriculture

The Niari Valley has an area of about 400,000 hectares. Three quarters of this is fertile land with a deep layer of humus. After World War II, the families of a group of people that had been in the French Resistance in Aubeville, France, moved to the valley to set up a communal farming project. At the time some pioneering French farmers were already located in the valley but there were few native inhabitants in the area. The valley had the advantage of having the only railway line in the country running through it. The new settlers were granted a concession of 5,500 hectares but encountered difficulties in their early years, including plant pests and diseases, droughts and occasionally hailstorms. They did small-scale crop raising, poultry rearing and livestock husbandry, and tried out new crops such as rice, Peanut, groundnuts and

. Not long afterwards, research stations were set up by the French state which planted oil-palm plantations, built mills to extract the oil, mechanized the production of peanuts, experimented with growing ''Urena lobata'', planted sugarcane and built a sugar refinery, mechanized rice production, and grew citrus, bananas and pineapples. Other enterprises included prospecting for minerals, a tree nursery for Terminalia superba, limba was established and a herd of about 2,000 N'Dama cattle was built up. In 1970 the agricultural assets and the sugar plantations were nationalised and became a state run organisation, ''Société Industrielle et Agricole du Niari''. By 1978 there had been an 80% decline in sugar production and the company went bankrupt, owing large sums to the treasury. The same year, it was broken into three parts, one being ''Sucrerie du Congo''. By 1988, sugar plantations covered 22,000 hectares, but, after a few good years, the labour force had grown too large and productivity had fallen, so in 1991 the company was privatised once again under the name ''SARIS-Congo''.

References

{{reflist Geography of the Republic of the Congo Niari Department Agriculture in the Republic of the Congo