| The book begins by describing the ecology and traditional agriculture of the area in question. The Sahelian countries that suffered the famine include: Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso (which was called Upper Volta when the book was published in 1980), and northeast Nigeria.
If you look at the climate and ecology of these West African nations, you will see horizontal belts that decrease in rainfall as they go north toward the Sahara desert. The northernmost parts of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad are desert. As the book puts it:
West Africa is a region well defined geographically. Bordered on the south and west by the Atlantic Ocean and on the north by the harsh barrier of the Sahara Desert, the general area consists of a series of gradual transitions, moving from south to north. Tropical rain forests and swamps give way to thickly wooded "bush," to sparse woodlands, to grasslands [savannas], to steppes, or "sub-desert," aind finally to the almost vegetation-free desert. p. 22-23
Also important are the dynamics of the harmattan (the desert wind that blows off of the Sahara during part of the year, drying the soil and causing erosion while also bringing with it dust that can be rich in nutrients, thus improving the soil), and the tsetse fly, which carries trypanosomiasis, a disease that impacts cattle. The tsetse moves north during the rainy season and south towards the rainforests in the dry season. Nomadic cattle herders move throughout the year to avoid the fly.
The authors also note the role that artificial fertilizer can play in causing drought-like conditions for plants:
For example, many West African crops respond well to heavy doses of fertilizer containing nitrogen. If the rainfall patterns are irregular, however, a heavy dose may cause the plant to grow too fast for the water supply, so if late-season rains are not on time, the plant will create its own drought conditions, having used up too much of the water through rapid growth induced by the application of the fertilizer. p. 27
Pre-Colonial Agriculture
As the ecology changes from south to north, so too did agriculture. Those who lived in tropical rainforests had a large number and variety of foods growing around them. Moving north to the savannas, farmers could grow many vegetables, some fruits (mangoes and melons), as well as millet, sorghum, cotton, sesame, and sweet potatoes. Here, they raise "small-sized cattle that are immune to the tsetse," chickens, and rabbits (p. 35).
Moving north, to the Sahel (the region bordering the Sahara to the south), agriculture is based on millet and sorghum. Millet grown here is much shorter than millet grown in wetter regions to the south, and it is more drought-resistant than sorghum. In some areas, peanuts (a.k.a. groundnuts) were also grown. Peanuts, native to the Amazon, were brought to Africa in the early 1800s with the slave trade, as the slave traders hoped to grow food for the slaves in Africa.
Millet has many uses: (1) it is an excellent food; (2) it can be brewed into a nourishing alcoholic drink; (3) the bran and leaves from mature plants can be fed to animals; (4) the stems can be used to make fences, mats, thatchpoles, brooms, and also fuel; and (5) the stems of a red-seeded variety provide medicine and dye. p. 47
Even further north, in areas unsuitable for growing crops, pastoralists lived with their herds of cattle, camels, sheep, and goats, which gave them meat, milk, and skins. They traded milk for millet with the farmers, and during part of the year, they brought their animals south to agricultural areas, where the animals fed on crop residues and fertilized the farm fields with their manure. The nomadic herders also played a major role in trade, which served as an additional source of income for them in addition to livestock.
The animals were the nomads' most important possessions, the basis of which their societies were built. Pastoral groups maintained several types of animals; their exact number and composition was a combination of ecological considerations, i.e., what food and water was available, the owner's social status, and the necessity to take precautions against possible disasters. In good times the herds would be allowed to grow, taking full advantage of plentiful resources. In a drought or epidemic, a proportion of the animals would die...
A diverse herd was another way to hedge against disaster, and several types of animals were maintained. In the more northerly desert fringe, groups such as the Tuaregs raised camels in addition to cattle, donkeys, goats, and in some instances sheep. Groups such as the Fulani, more to the south in the savanna itself, principally kept cattle and small ruminants. Camels, cattle, sheep, and goats all have different biological needs. Conditions fatal to one species may be quite appropriate for the well-being of another. p. 41
Colonialism
France was not the only European country that colonized West Africa, but it was certainly the most significant one in this story. When France lost the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, it looked to Africa to make up for its losses. Aside from the obvious harm done to Africans (i.e. deaths from fighting the Europeans or conscription into the French military), one of the immediate effects was the movement of trade from caravans across the Sahara (which the nomads led, taxed, and sometimes raided) to trade using the sea. The Sahara caravans were dealt another blow with the building of railroads.
During this time, France has the clever idea of forcing West Africans to grow peanuts to sell to France at a low price. They did the math and figured that peanuts would never be profitable, so instead of forming large French-owned peanut plantations with the Africans as slaves, they would have smallholder Africans grow the peanuts themselves and they would simply buy them.
Prior to this brilliant French policy, West Africans grew peanuts rotated with millet, and that rotation worked. But growing peanuts year after year did not work well.
What was beneficial to French colonial interests was contradictory to the preservation of the environment. The small peasant with a very low per capita income could not afford to keep animals whose manure could be used or buy chemical fertilizers when these became available. Nor could the peasant allow the land to lie fallow, and without fertilizers and a fallow period the peanut has a very deleterious effect on the soil...
... The only recourse for the peasant whose land was exhausted was to acquire new land and repeat the process. Thus colonial profit-making in peanuts and African poverty at the producer level combined to set in motion a spreading wave of environmental degradation. p. 70
So how did the French convince the West Africans to grow peanuts and destroy their land? Taxes. A subsistence farmer growing only food to eat has no major use for a cash crop. But tell that same farmer he or she must pay high taxes in the form of cash, and tell them that the way to get cash is by growing peanuts, and that farmer will grow peanuts. This is what happened. The French used brutal means such as whipping, burning huts, and holding women and children hostage in order to collect taxes, and West Africans grew more and more peanuts, and put more and more land into peanuts to come up with the tax money. Cotton, which was discussed less in the book, was the other major cash crop, and it likely caused similar problems to those caused by peanuts. Meanwhile, the French also brought in cheap, manufactured goods to sell, and ruined the market for local artisans and traders.
To grow more and more peanuts, rainforests were cleared, peanuts were grown in fallow lands that were typically reserved for use during bad times (p. 93), and the territory of the peanut growers expanded beyond the usual area, pushing the nomadic pastoralists into even more marginal (and less suitable) lands.
As peanut production increased in the 1950's and 1960's, the first land that was lost to the nomads were the areas where they kept their herds while waiting to move their herds to the farm fields where the animals would eat crop residue and fertilize the land with their manure.
Then in the 1960's, with the development of newer peanuts seeds, zones to the north were opened by farmers hungry for cash to pay their taxes... The result was a sharp decline in the amount of pasturage available to the Fulani herders, who were not able to readjust their pasture movements as fast as the peanut "pioneers" came in...
As a result, the pastoralists did not receive the pasture they needed, and the farmers no longer received the fertilizing services of the animals. - p. 98-99
Additionally, during the 1950's, the French decided they would also like to buy cheap West African beef. They put vaccination and animal health programs in place in West Africa, and between that and rising demand, the amount of livestock in the region surged. And this was happening at the same time the pastoralists were losing access to good grazing land and being pushed north toward the desert. To make matters worse, the French began digging wells, resulting in pastoralists all converging along the same grazing land near the wells. Overgrazing is an understatement.
[In Mali] Cattle-watering sites are so soaked with urine and droppings that the soil has reached an acidity that defies replanting of nearly any kind of grass. In other, more extensive areas top soils have hardened into a crust. Thus rainwater cannot be absorbed, and the top gradually washes away, while grass seeds embedded only a few mm. underneath do not receive the moisture that would cause them to sprout. p. 104
Another dynamic brought about was the high demand for labor on plantations and "export-oriented production facilities." There were massive migrations of people leaving their home to work to raise money for taxes (and other "monetary needs"). This left the villages the workers came from with labor shortages during certain times of the year, reducing their ability to provide for themselves via farming. The book includes a very telling 1970 IMF quote about this phenomenon:
"This large flow of migrants has been advantageous to Upper Volta [Burkina Faso]. Not only has it reduced considerably the unemployment problem, but it has also contributed to the favorable balance of payments in recent years because of the remittances by the migrants to relatives in Upper Volta." - p. 118 (from Survey of African Economics p. 711)
The book continues, telling about the world's (lousy, inadequate) response to the famine, and then the efforts to prevent future famine. They write about the 1977 OECD publication Strategy and Programme for Drought Control and Development in the Sahel. As you might expect, major international institutions, nations, and charities came together to try to prevent a future drought and to bring development to the Sahel. The authors of the book judge the effort to be an enormous failure.
All in all, this book was excellent. I only wish it was not 30 years old, because now I need to find newer sources to learn what has happened to the region in the past three decades since Seeds of Famine was written. |
