Draft paper archived at www.simonbatterbury.net

Batterbury, S.P.J. and M. Baro. 2005. Continuity and change in West African rural livelihoods. In Toulmin, C., B. Wisner & R. Chitiga (eds.) Towards a new map of Africa. London: Earthscan. (in press for Nov 2005 )

Mamadou Baro

Simon Batterbury

Simon Batterbury grew up in London, UK, and now teaches geography and environmental studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has researched the political ecology of natural resource management in West Africa (particularly Burkina Faso and Niger) for a decade. www.simonbatterbury.net

Mamadou Baro is a Mauritanian anthropologist working on livelihood security issues and rural development in several African and Caribbean countries. He is associate professor at the Bureau of Applied Anthropology (BARA) and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, USA.

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Introduction

African farmers and pastoralists have been meeting their everyday needs in diverse ways for many centuries. Wile this process has increasingly been recognized since the late colonial period, a major development since the publication of Lloyd Timberlake’s Africa in Crisis (Timberlake 1985) has been the emergence of support to ‘livelihood security’ and the incorporation of ‘sustainable rural livelihoods’ in the rationales and the thinking of government-led projects and the many international development agencies working in Africa. Researchers too have focused renewed attention on how diverse rural societies enhance their welfare and development options, in many corners of the continent.

In this chapter, we explore the fundamental components that shape everyday livelihoods, focusing on dryland West Africa. We look at the constraints that continue to imperil the achievement of livelihood security, as well as the measured (but very diverse) ways in which rural communities piece together income generation, participation in institutions, and subsistence activities to insure their welfare and survival. We provide brief examples from Mali and Niger to illustrate some of these household responses. We conclude that secure rural livelihoods are attained not only by households and individuals using their skills, knowledge and labor to assemble assets and entitlements, but also by finding ways to negotiate the risks created by poor governance, economic uncertainty, conflict, and vulnerability to natural hazards. Ultimately, rural programs and development schemes in rural Africa have to address the broader political and economic contexts in which livelihoods are nested.

What are rural livelihoods?

Scoones (1998) suggests livelihoods are “the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for making a living”, a definition that echoes the early formulation of rural development stalwarts Chambers and Conway (1992). They are essentially the activities that people do to “get by” - to survive and to meet their everyday needs - as well those more entrepreneurial and profit-focused activities that are best summarized as “getting on” - striving towards better conditions of material wellbeing (Davies et al 1998). African farmers, pastoralists, and households ‘assemble’ a portfolio livelihood strategies based upon a combination of their skills, knowledge, and response to opportunity, but livelihood strategies are ever-changing and involve a constellation of components and networks.

“Getting by” aims to insure a regular supply of food and other important assets, and is achieved through what scholars refer to as “coping strategies” (Mortimore 1989), or processes of “adaptation” to the environmental and social conditions in which they live (Netting 1993, Batterbury & Forsyth 1999). While many empirical studies have documented these strategies in near-subsistence societies, this type of analysis can also be applied to conditions where commercial activity and markets are highly important - where rural people are involved in producing and selling commodities, and responding to the unstable employment and life-chances that this can involve. In times of hardship, “getting by” can easily become the quotidian norm – the search for wild plants and other foodstuffs to supplement the household diet, for example, is now a regular feature of life in the Koro region of Mali, as we explain below.

Since rural poverty is still endemic in Africa, we can surmise that “getting on” over a life course has only been achieved by a minority of rural people. These include skilled entrepreneurs, those who have been able to exploit and develop their asset base, or those who have inherited and consolidated familial claims to ample labour, livestock or land for farming or herding. An elevated position in stratified society, sometimes coupled to a strong position in political networks, provides labour and assets (either by birth, marriage, new political alliances, conquest, or resulting from colonial policy).

Different development philosophies have supported rural livelihoods, which were caught up in colonial projects to develop new territories from the late 19^th century. As we show in the next section, many of these efforts were unsuccessful at promoting a structural shift towards more sustainable and lucrative livelihood systems in West Africa. On the one hand, there have been modest efforts to provide much-needed credit or subsidized technologies to poorer households ‘in situ’. On the other hand, the colonial and post-colonial demand for commodities (particularly cotton, cocoa, coffee, palm oil and groundnuts in West Africa), has favored not only a new class of landed commodity producers, but also led to the emergence of new labour regimes based around contract farming or sharecropping, and encouraged labour migration to those regions (Baker 2000, Bryceson 1999). Also, West Africa’s farming systems must be set within the context of Africa-wide de-agrarianization and the emergence of limited urban and industrial employment in certain regions (Bryceson & Jamal 1997, Bryceson et al 2000, Beall, 2005).

Seeking livelihood security is not just a question of mobilizing one’s labour and assets to find food or work: it can become a highly political act, for example when it embroils individuals in land tenure battles or wage bargaining, or leads to the establishment of politically active local organizations and federations. Livelihoods are embedded within broader structures and forces, including political networks (Bebbington 1999). This is illustrated in Figure 1, where we place the livelihood systems as central to the achievement of certain outcomes, but heavily influenced by context and by the disposition of ‘capital’ assets of different types. In order to understand a livelihood system one must consider more than how a household obtains and allocates food and other essential resources (Ellis 1998, 2000, Francis 2000). The household juggles ‘capitals’ – natural resources as well as labour, capital, time and tools, in response to a number of external signals and constraints, to manage everyday decision-making. In the chapter, two examples from Niger and Mali illustrate how this is done, before we return to the broader implications of livelihoods analysis in the context of West Africa's changing fortunes.

Figure 1: A framework for sustainable rural livelihoods

Source: Batterbury and Forsyth (1999), adapted from Carney (1998) and Scoones (1998)

Key: Livelihood system

Unfolding livelihoods in West Africa

The networks in which rural households and livelihoods in Africa are embedded have their origins at multiple scales, from the family farm (Bélières et al 2002) up to price-setting mechanisms for the commodities that some farmers produce. Although households (of different forms and levels of complexity) are the best place to begin understanding rural livelihoods, the social arrangements and institutions that make household activities possible are broader and more complex.

The postcolonial era saw expansion of commodity production in agriculture, alongside resource extractive industries and some very limited industrialization. Africa’s new policymakers hoped all three would be of general benefit to national development. There was also a renewed hope that rural people and their labor would fuel modernization and economic takeoff, of the well-ordered type that had existed in the region’s more affluent entrepots like Lomé, Dakar and Freetown in the late colonial period. But in the 1970s, economic growth turned to recession with the drying up of investment and the high oil prices, coupled to an unfortunate lack of effective governance in several countries (Bryceson and Bank, 2001). In the 1980s the severe hardship resulting from climatic perturbations (as in the Sahel) and other emergencies resulted in international donor support for an increasing range of projects including irrigation supply, infrastructure, and famine relief. The largest scheme was the Senegal River Valley Project, which constructed two major dams (Manantali and Diama) encompassing Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali. The extensive areas of irrigation opened up by the project were designed to shift recession agriculture in riparian areas along the Senegal River into these new irrigated areas (Baro 1993).

By the late 1980s there was optimism in the region that the threat of famine has receded, and market led growth of the rural sector would be sustained, fed in part by growing urban populations and foreign exchange earned for some successful commodities like cotton, gold, and uranium. Yet this optimism was short lived. Drought returned, combined with continued population growth, a loss of economic opportunities, and the application of perverse subsidies. Complex emergencies persisted, including those in Liberia, Sierra Leone, northern Niger and Mali, and the Casamance region of Senegal and The Gambia. Conflict reduces agricultural productivity in affected areas and has serious long-term consequences for household stability. Even areas not directly affected by conflict often suffer from its effects. In addition, malaria and the HIV/AIDS pandemic have taken their toll on the productive members of poor households. As the rates of HIV/AIDS infection increases in West Africa, productivity is reduced, negatively affecting food availability.

Economic policies in West Africa have been dominated by the presence of large government loans taken from the IFIs, known as structural adjustment until their re-working as Poverty Reduction Strategy Programmes (PRSPs) in the late 1990s. These have had mixed success, often creating hardship through removing subsidies for agricultural inputs and some state support networks, but promising increased commodity sales or business activity through removal of market price controls. The latter, however, often requires kick-starting through financial credit or skills training, both in short supply in the region. West African livelihoods are also affected by commodity pricing and trade rules. The most famous example in recent years has been the collapse of the Malian and Burkinabé cotton industry, which after a period of growth, has been affected by subsidies given by the USA government to its less efficient producers, who now dominate the market as a result (Watkins and Sul 2002).

In the drylands of West Africa in the 1970s and 1980s the combination of incipient famine and policy failure led many rural dwellers to buffer increased risks by re-focusing their income generation on more diverse activities, often with increased economic migration to urban environments, or to more affluent rural areas like northern Côte D’Ivoire, Togo, and Senegal (Bélières et al 2002). These migrant routes have been used on and off by Sahelian peoples for hundreds of years. Although the data are partial, one can also chart an increase in other buffers against vulnerability – more business activity with greater spatial reach, the sale and purchase of livestock by farmers, and a diversification of cultivars and petty commodities (Mortimore and Adams 2001).

Weakly developed rural markets characterize the remote and poorly serviced regions of West Africa. Price controls and regulatory systems, monopolies, complex systems of foreign exchange, and a general under-capitalization and lack of assets in the rural sector are all to blame. In sub-regions with sufficient market opportunities, as well as communication and transportation infrastructures, markets can help buffer against localized droughts or food shortages. However, in many regions of the Sahel, market structures are rudimentary enough that these simple transfers cannot occur, or prices are beyond the reach of poorer individuals. In these regions, it is more likely that localized production shortages translate directly into localized food insecurity.

The new millennium began with sanguine and realistic hopes for the agrarian and pastoral sectors. The political and economic conditions that frustrate local-level livelihood security are persistent. ‘Livelihoods thinking’, therefore, has emerged as a viable rural development paradigm at a time when the very conditions it was designed to understand and ameliorate make the achievement of livelihood security very difficult. What Bryceson and Bank call “post modern liberalism” (2001: 11) now recognizes that ambitious development schemes have been unsuccessful (partly in response to adverse world markets and globalization trends), and attention has turned to more modest, less ambitious goals – equitably distributed ‘entitlements’ to food, land etc. (Sen 1981) and ‘livelihood security’. The feeling among donor agencies is that rural policies should be more careful, targeted, and sustainable – few people are now hopeful of large-scale modernization or the rural sector in Africa. Key to this is more effective local governance –exploiting the positive feature of the drive to decentralize fiscal and decision-making powers down to local people, but not in an uncritical fashion that ignores local politics and status (Engberg Pedersen 2002). Decentralization (see other chapters?) has a mixed record since it can also empower local elites at the expense of the poor, and has been used to create a power base for central government and political parties in the countryside

Two Cases

a) Diversification in response to stress Fandou Béri, Niger

Niger, one of the poorest countries on the continent and with “no realistic short-term prospects of accelerated development” (Kelley 2002: 643) experienced a crisis of national political legitimacy, fiscal shortfalls, and a withdrawal of international aid in the 1990s. The effects in rural areas, particularly those distant from major towns and cities, were severe. As already meagre state support, NGO activity and commercial opportunities were scaled back, Zarma farmers in the South west of the country, even those relatively close to the capital city, fell back upon adaptive strategies built around their own rural and urban activities. “Livelihood strategies” therefore became vital, as the “vulnerability context” worsened over several years (Batterbury 2001).

In the 1970s farmers had emerged from a drought and a previous economic downturn. In 1975 a new political regime under President Kountché came to power, fuelled by uranium revenues that supported agricultural extension agents, a reliable primary education system, medical services, and rural cooperatives. But uranium exports collapsed again in the 1980s at a time when the Sahel was once more experiencing drought conditions. This resulted in increased taxation, wage freezes, and price reforms, all under a structural adjustment model introduced with IFI loans. The rural support systems begun under Kountché decayed and there was a balance of payments crisis, and frequent changes of government (with two military coups since 1996 alone). By the late 1990s, even rural areas situated quite close to the major population centres were without the rural support services that they had previously enjoyed. Several international aid donors pulled out of the country or scaled back their activities. Devaluation of the regional currency, the CFA (in 1994) raised the cost of imports, but benefited the international livestock trade and Niger’s few exports[1]. In sum, Niger was seeing ‘development in reverse’.

Fandou Béri is a small Zarma village located about 55km east of Niger’s capital city, Niamey.[2] Rainfed agriculture is dominated by millet, the staple crop, grown in the short wet season from June to October. Livestock ownership by the Zarma is widespread, and a few Peulh (Fulani) pastoralist families also live permanently close by the settlement. In this community, typical of so many in dryland West Africa, monetization of the economy first occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century, creating a household demand for cash to pay for taxes and, increasingly, consumer items. Cotton was once grown, but such commercial crops are very rare today. The last major development initiative in the village, a commercial seed project, finished acrimoniously in 1989.

The ‘vulnerability context’ here has always required inventiveness and adaptability. Fandou Béri exemplifies a trend seen elsewhere in this region – increasing local mobility, and a changing pattern of labour, resources and skills. In the 1950s for example, male migration was rare, land for farming and forage was more abundant than today, and the community was more reliant on its own food sources. Influenced strongly by two droughts in the mid 1960s and the regional one of 1972-4, diversification was also aided by improvements in ‘connectivity’ through transport improvements and road building. Access to markets and to Niamey was improved. This helped women to earn and spend their own income, independent from men.

Four traditional household and individual livelihood diversification activities, aside from crop production, developed in this period. These were the increased ownership of livestock by Zarma farmers, labouring for other people, engaging in business activity, and seasonal or long-term migration. Strategies are mixed and matched by individuals to maintain a portfolio of income sources, and some people fare better than others at ‘productive bricolage’ – the juggling of livelihood activities (Batterbury 2001), each of which requires different levels of start-up capital, labour. In the larger households, labour of the household members can be deployed more easily to minimise risk, resulting in easier ‘switching’ between these activities; building up some but de-emphasizing others, depending on profits and labour availability. Older men and women (particularly male lineage elders, and the senior wives of polygynous households) have always been able to command more labour and capital. Young Zarma women generally lack these assets and social power, which can set off intra-household conflict over their daily workloads and labour inputs.

Table 1 Comparing farm and non-farm activities for households in Fandou Béri in 1997

Source: Batterbury 2001. In 1997, $1= 625 CFA (approx).

House-hold number	Millet harvest (bottes, a local grain measure)	Household millet requirements (bottes, a local grain measure)	Soil flux on main field (bulked samples) (t ha^-1 yr^-1 )	Annual Household income (CFA)	Annual household expenditure (CFA)	Household financial balance (CFA)	Household animal ownership (Tropical Livestock Units)	Numbers of migrants in family	Total household size	Local petty trading?	Remarks – household status
1	146	300	41.09	179,425	188,650	+9,225	2	0	12	son	Some influence
2	153	400	41.48	542,125	507,450	-34,625	73	1	8	no	Chief. Cash income from taxation.
3	191	360	44.23	250,825	820,100	-569,275	12	4	27	no	Religious leader
4	146	300	40.27	208,300	351,800	-143,500	6	2	8	no	Religious leader
5	129	300	38.85	119,225	169,000	-49,775	3	3	12	Hh head
6	178	250	37.66	375,875	246,700	+129,175	13	1	8	no	Wife is prominent entrepreneur
7	161	200	26.43	137,475	110,900	+26,575	7	0	8	no
8	235	200	35.28	215,925	227,350	-11,425	5	0	7	Hh head
9	174	330	42.73	183,225	264,100	-80,875	9	0	9	no
10	270	250	45.28	262,025	320,575	-58,550	22	3	16	Hh head
11	191	360	46.46	209,800	224,885	-15,085	5	2	10	no
12	74	150	40.06	N/A	N/A	N/A	18	2	8	no	Religious leader
13	187	200	33.12	196,050	200,750	-4,700	10	1	3	no
14	144	300	38.95	224,125	316,600	-92,475	74	2	5	no	Peulh
15	67	300	41.89	206,925	136,600	+70,325	51	0	6	no	Peulh
16	210	450	N/A	414,825	366,000	+48,825	141	1	4	no	Peulh

Some examples drawn from Table 1 illustrate the diversity of livelihood responses in 1997. Household 2 is large and complex, comprising the village chief and his relatives. His ability to command land assets for farming is good, but he experienced a harvest shortfall and financial difficulties that year. So his large livestock herd acted as a tradable asset. Household 6, managed efficiently by a prominent woman entrepreneur, invested in fuel wood collection and sales to maintain an above-average income. Two Fulani (Peulh) families (hh 14-16) are denied secure land access by their ethnicity and status in the community. But they balance good crop yields obtained with large inputs of manures and careful crop management small, loaned plots by maintaining large animal herds – rather than through economic migration or trading.

An outcome of livelihood diversification is increased livestock ownership and sales, a trend seen right across the Sahel among farming peoples in the late 20^th century (Batterbury and Warren 2001). Livestock ownership ranges from a single sheep or goat to large herds of cattle or even camels. All are ‘bankable’ investments, and three quarters of household heads bought and sold livestock (primarily sheep and goats, but with some cattle). Livestock provide financial security and are easily liquidated when cash is required urgently. The Zarma, like other predominantly agricultural peoples, see the logic in increasing livestock ownership because of its relative stability, but they resist adopting a true agro-pastoral livelihood system since, culturally, it is farming and attachment to land that distinguishes them from the Peulh. Conversely, the Peulh cannot become full-time farmers because they are denied long-term land tenure by the Zarma. They do practice agriculture on small, loaned plots that have such high inputs of animal manure that their yields far outpace the Zarma (Table 1). Peulh are also are entrusted with the feeding and watering of Zarma animals, and manure ‘contracts’ are struck with the farmers (crop stubble for manure inputs). Thus, both ethnic groups systems converge around agro-pastoralism as much as practicalities and entrenched power relationships allow.

A small market for wage labour is available, mostly in the cultivation season and (unlike in Mali, below) confined to men. Agricultural labour was first hired during drought periods in the 1950s, but then at a very modest level since the Zarma were accustomed to deploying family labour (in some cases, former slaves) on their farms. A quarter of adult men worked as paid labourers on the fields of others by 1997, mainly doing essential weeding work and harvesting. pays about 750-1,000 CFA a day ($1.20-$1.60); one son earned 22,500 CFA ($36.00) this way in a single season, enough to purchase two male sheep or one and a half sacks of millet in July 1997.

The Zarma have always engaged in market trading. Business activity frequently requires travelling to Niamey (two hours by bus) and other market centres, to exploit price differentials. Local market trading and livestock sales are also important, and clearly most activities are seasonal. Some 25 % of household heads trade locally, often through marking-up and reselling products like paraffin, matches, kola nuts, or foodstuffs (their younger sons engage more infrequently in this activity, preferring the migration option). Womens’ net profits from business frequently exceed those of their men. Girls begin their income earning activities at an early age, selling jewellery made from beads bought in the local market, or selling foodstuffs. Foyutto (Ceratotheca sesamoides) and crickets, a seasonal snack, are also collected and sold at the regional market. In adulthood, crops such as groundnut, sesame and pois de terre are grown by both men and women separately but in small quantities, and are either consumed or sold depending on how much is produced. Incomes vary of between 5,000-10,000 CFA on average per month per woman engaging in petty commerce and other income-generating activities. Old women specialize in making mats and baskets from local grasses. Fuel wood sales - the first stage of the filière supplying the Niamey market - are dominated by one woman in the village, and are lucrative (Batterbury 2001).

Out-migration is, in the eyes of many, the most problematic strategy for policymakers to comprehend and manage, and yet it is a deep-seated and widespread response to the vagaries of Sahelian life (Batterbury and Warren 2001, Rain 1999). Many men are absent from the village in the dry season, and sometimes for years at a time. Seasonal migration relieves reliance on the locality and its sporadic rainfall and undercapitalized markets, and it is one of the main strategies used to earn cash. The Zarma have always migrated widely, notably to Nigeria and Ghana, but by the late 1990s it was most common for them to travel to northern Côte D’Ivoire to work as mobile traders. Some 34% of all men in the village in 1997 had migrated seasonally out of the area, primarily to Côte D’Ivoire but one or two to northern Nigeria. According to those interviewed, this migration stream has increased since the 1950s. Remittances go to pay for food, rituals and social obligations, especially for cloth for wives and for bride wealth payments. Two household heads earned 250,000 CFA ($400) and 50,000 CFA ($80) respectively for a single year, but some men cannot even marshal the necessary resources to depart at the beginning of the dry season. In Côte d’Ivoire the migrants stay with other Zarma and live communally, borrowing start-up funds, if necessary, and begin to trade locally in textiles or other head-loaded goods. Although most men do return with cash and goods, some stay away for a long time, or send for their families to join them, and a few do not return at all. Incomes, and the desire to return, are dependent on the economic and political situation in the destination countries. Widespread xenophobic reactions to migrant labourers in Côte D’Ivoire from 2000 have now slowed, perhaps temporarily, the migrant stream to that country (Batterbury 2001).

These diverse livelihood activities have effects upon agricultural systems, and upon the local landscape (Osbahr and Allan 2002). In households with high migration rates, soil erosion was found to be higher on their agricultural plots (Warren et al 2001). This is because in deploying human capital (labour) in distant locations, weeding and tending to these household fields can suffer. Thus there is some correlation between the long term decline in soil fertility on agricultural land and the emergence of a more diverse economy where the need for cash draws labour to other activities. This is one down-side of livelihood diversification, although local people do not perceive it in that way. Diversification and non-farm income sources are dialectically related to changes in the local landscape – both influence each other.

b) The Cercle de Koro, Mali

The cercle do Koro is situated in Mali’s 5th region, comprising the area south of the Dogon Plateau and north of the Burkina Faso frontier. With a similar population density to SW Niger (median 18.4 people Km²), there is a localized shortage of agricultural land. The livelihood systems of twelve widely dispersed villages in the region were studied in 1996 as part of a project on food security in this sub-region (Baro 1996). [3]

The study showed similar trends in coping strategies to the Zarma case, and broadly similar climatic conditions and income levels prevail, despite evident differences in political context and ethnicity. Since the 1960s there were two decades of single party rule in Mali (under Modibo Keita and then Moussa Traoré), during which the widespread Sahelian famines occurred, and the national balance of payments was in deficit. Mali also saw an increase in international assistance and more agricultural support to small farmers over the period. In 1991 a democratically elected government under Alpha Oumar Konaré took power, and a political and administrative process of decentralization began, with elections held to form newly decentralized rural communities in 1999 (Brock and Coulibaly 1999). There was also a system of government purchases of grain quotas from rural villages until 1982, and then the gradual liberalization of markets and trade into the 1990s. Farmers may avail themselves of agricultural credit more easily than in Niger (Davies 1996).

As in Fandou Béri, agrarian systems in Koro region illustrate a strong adaptation to spatial and temporary variability in drought and rainfall. The sample in the survey included farmers of the distinctive Dogon ethnic group (72%), as well as Peulh herders and agro-pastoralists (10%), and Mossi farmers (18%). Each group has culturally distinctive strategies for farming, herding, and settlement. In Koro, livelihood strategies differ by geographical location (there are four major geographical units, and diversity within those units), but also according to the ‘capability’ (Sen 1981) of individuals and their skills and household networks. At the time of survey, the sale of livestock, and engagement in other business activities, were the most common practices used by households to gain access to needed cash, but the range of options used was broad (Fig 2).

Table 2 Livelihood strategies of households in different agroecological zones

Livelihood strategies	% of households
	Total	High Plateau	Gondo Plain	Sourou Plain	Seno
INCOME
Livestock sales	24.6	35.3	11.8	14.3	33.3
Loans	10.1	5.9	17.6	7.1	9.5
Paid work	10.1	0	23.5	0	14.3
Gifts from parents	5.8	11.8	0	14.3	0
Selling beer	2.9	5.9	0	7.1	0
Artisanal work	5.8	11.8	0	14.3	0
Other business activity	18.8	5.9	23.5	7.1	33.3
OTHER COPING MECHANISMS
Purchase of millet	8.7	5.9	11.8	21.4	0
Cueillette	2.9	0	0	7.1	4.8
Reduction in meals	1.4	5.9	0	0	0
Migration	2.9	0	5.9	0	4.8
Use of food reserves	4.3	11.8	0	7.1	0

Source: Baro 1996. N=134

This coexistence of multiple livelihood options offers a degree of autonomy to individual households. Three different classes of adaptive strategies (Figure 1) were noted in the survey. Firstly, there were measures that could be used at any moment and which are local, employed as a reflexive response to changing conditions. A reduction in food intake and the rationalization of low food stocks is practiced almost annually as food stocks decline prior to the new fall harvest, but especially during times of hardship. The consumption of wild foodstuffs also is prevalent (table 3). Some 34 % of households depend on these activities for subsistence, particularly in the High plateau region.

Table 3 Wild foods consumption by agro-ecological zone

Zones	% household eating wild foods in survey period, 1996
High Plateau	13.0%
Gondo Plain	41.9%
Sourou Plain	41.9%
Seno	31.4%
Total	34.1

N=134

Wild foods were collected by all households in our survey, despite their scarcity during times of drought, during which less palatable species are consumed. Some 30% of households mentioned the Baobab tree as a food source (t4). There are other trees, shrubs and wild plants of which the leaves and fruits are eaten, some of them much less palatable.

Table 4 Wild foods consumption by agro-ecological zone: most important food sources

Plants	% of households eating commonly available or wild foods
	Total	Haut Plateau	Plaines du Gondo	Plaines du Sourou	Seno
Baobab Adansonia digitata	31,8	33,3	50,0	23,1	10,0
Tamarind Tamarindus indica	9,1	0	0	15,4	20,0
Karite (Shea nut) fruit Vitellania paradosea	6,8	0	11,1	7,7	0
Doum palm	6,8	0	16,7	0	0
Louo Leptadenia hastata	9,1	66.7	11,1	0	0
Bere ( ?)	25,0	0	0	53.8	40,0
Jujubes Ziziphus mauritania	2,3	5.6	0.0	0.0	0.0
Others	9,1	5.6	0.0	0.0	30.0

The securing of short term loans figured in all the case study villages suggests a certain solidarity among households. In each zone, between 30-45% of respondents admitted taking loans in times of hardship. A little less than a third of households borrowed small quantities of cereals from neighbours, parents, or local traders during the long dry season, in the hope of returning the same quantity of grain at harvest time. In the case of borrowing from traders, however, 50% more grain was generally demanded on returning the loan. In effect, traders exploited price differentials.

More drastic actions result in a reduction in asset stocks – through livestock sales or semi-permanent migration from the region. As in Fandou Béri, animal sales are increasingly part of normal life and over half of households surveyed had either cattle or sheep. When cattle in particular are sold because of hardship, this has negative long term consequences on household security. The region is also know for its weaving: cloth destined for family use may be sold in times of food stress in exchange for cereals, and local market trading of foods and other goods occurs. Other objects sold off for cash include clothing, guns, bicycles. The loss of sociocultural and use values means sales of some of these items are reserved for extreme hardship, since they almost impossible to replace in the short term. Peulh herders react to hardship by centralizing around similar livelihood mixes as seen among their sedentary neighbors – combining less livestock mobility with exchanges of millet for cereals (as in Fandou Béri).

Livelihood systems involve, as Beall (2005) notes, social networks of trust, that in this region allow for occasional loans and borrowing for neighbors. It appears that this practice is most common in villages with established community organizations. Revolving credit funds permit the use of the communal fund for cereals purchase during bad years.

Migration is established and widespread in the culture of several of the ethnic groups present in the region, and unlike in Fandou Béri, it also involves young women who migrate as agricultural workers or who depart to Bamako and other urban areas for brief periods. In harder times, men may migrate to work as labourers elsewhere in the region, exchanging their work for a small quantity of cereals on a daily basis. Migration patterns in the region have been influenced by the devaluation of the CFA in 1994, which raised local prices. Also vital has been the situation in Côte D’Ivoire where at least 700,000 Malians were resident in the 1990s before rising xenophobia made them increasingly unwelcome. About 15 % of households in the survey reported that migration was highly important to livelihoods. Some 44% of migrant headed to Côte D’Ivoire, the majority to work on plantations, and 27% went to the Malian capital city, Bamako. Less affluent households, particularly on the Sourou Plain where 60% of households experienced a migrant leave in 1996, saw it as an exit from difficult food security or disadvantageous tenure conditions.

All of these strategies have limitations. As in Niger, daily living continues to be harsh, there are scant opportunities for income generating opportunities in local towns like Koro, and the benefits of political reforms are slow in coming to the region. The livelihood strategies employed in the survey clearly show the same process of productive bricolage, mixing and matching strategies and exploiting near and distant opportunities. It appears that over 50% of income came from agriculture in 1996, but many other activities were pursued. As in Niger, and as other studies have suggested, it is a greater than average household size that provides the flexibility of labour and skills to weather difficult periods (Toulmin 1992, Brock & Coulibaly 1999, Davies 1996). The study also found that the difference in food security between households in the same village was greater than the difference in average security between villages, and this is partially accounted for by the different constitution and size of households.

Although we have presented the many ways in which people respond to resource constraints, the reality is that the majority are extremely vulnerable to climatic and other stresses and basic needs are far from being met. A basic multivariate index placed 40% of those surveyed in the category of “extremely vulnerable” to food insecurity in 1996 (Baro 1996: 64). At this time, there was an alarmingly high level of chronic malnutrition - 43% of the children in the households surveyed. Livelihood insecurity, therefore, is endemic in Koro.

Conclusion

Common threads emerge. Firstly, it is safe to say that the majority of rural people, in West Africa, “getting by” involve a more complex range of activities and strategic decision-making than twenty years ago, although comparative evidence is hard to find (Timberlake 1985). At that time, the Sahel was suffering extreme drought – coping strategies were seen as short term responses to a natural crisis. But viewed over the longer term, we can see that coping and responding to vulnerability form part of everyday practice and are deeply etched into labor patterns and the evolving relationship between towns and countryside, between rich and poor. Accusations that the West African drylands had been pitched into dependency on foreign and domestic aid by the droughts of the 1970s proved to be too dramatic – agricultural systems have proven resilient, livestock herds have been rebuilt, and business and migrant activity have helped to recapitalize areas once devastated by food shortages and hardship (Mortimore and Adams 2001). In addition to some of the trends described above, rural people are maintaining and extending kin and social networks that extend far beyond their localities. The colonial period began some of these movements, which had their roots in tax avoidance and new employment opportunities, but it is rural Africans that have sustained and deepened them.

Secondly, in many senses the range and diversity of livelihood strategies is increasing, both in response to adversity, and to the widening range of choice offered by the progressive, albeit very slow, arrival of global linkages in the rural Sahel. Local migration offers limited opportunities for agricultural work, trading, and forms part of normal kinship and marriage relations. There are other options, but these can be short lived or (as in the case of artisanal gold mining), risky. Rural to urban migration – particularly to seek work, or to start secondary and higher education – tends to extend out of the Sahel and into neighboring countries, given the paucity of opportunity, high levels of urban poverty, and already saturated labour markets in Sahelian cities like Niamey and Bamako. Violence and conflict in both Niger and Mali has been of a small scale and generally contained, but the established high-volume migration destinations have suffered changing fortunes – in Côte D’Ivoire , the largest economy and a major destination for Sahelians seeming urban and rural jobs, xenophobia (Ivoirité) and political instability has seen hundreds of thousands of Sahelians expelled to or returning voluntarily to their countries. At times Nigeria, Togo, Benin and Ghana have also experience instability or declining labor markets. In response the rural response is increasingly daring, particularly in regard to immigration controls in western countries. There are many cases of individuals traveling on foot across the Sahara to North Africa where they await opportunities to enter Europe. Sahelians can be found working temporarily in the mines of South Africa, the oil fields of Gabon, or in the kitchens of Tokyo restaurants. There are sufficient numbers of migrant established semi-permanently overseas to provide some communities in Senegal and Mali with a health flow of remittances, with complex arrangements (now including internet transactions) to make capital transfers back to host villages. The remittance economy generates mixed feelings in West Africa. Migrants in Fandou Béri, who had established links in Côte D’Ivoire, regret their absences, but have long viewed the migrant trail as a proving ground for young men, with its rewards limited in wealth but abundant in life experience. The Sahel is truly experiencing its own version of globalization.

Thirdly, it is important not to idealize rural livelihoods. The livelihoods perspective warns us away from this. Rural life in Africa is hard, given the trends in health, mortality, income levels and other hardships, some noted in the chapter. Livelihood diversity has only developed in this way in Africa because the risks and uncertainty that characterize rural life. It is in part a function of the Sahel’s diverse and unpredictable ecology, that makes pure agriculture or pastoralism an unreliable enterprise, and the modern-day uncertainties that surround land access and tenure arrangements in countries now experimenting with land titling, decentralization initiatives, and western legal systems.

Livelihood diversification is bitter-sweet. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Sahelian peoples are seeking business opportunities and traveling widely to do so, accords with a neo-liberal model for west Africa – one in which the towns and cities develop stronger labor markets and continue to grow, and where economic modeling suggests freer markets will lead to growing prosperity for all (Cour 2001). This process, if it were true, would absolve governments from doing too much about rural poverty – particularly those that still dream of the modernization and transformation of rural areas, or who resist calls that the state should intervene more directly to assure basic needs are being met in the countryside. What need is there to do this, if people are getting by on their own, more or less successfully?

This model is unrealistic, and most importantly it absolves the state from its responsibilities. Livelihood diversification will never be taken to its logical conclusion because of labour and immigration controls to western nations, because of the import duties placed on African commercial produce, and the endurance of ‘tied’ development aid that does little to increase the volume or quality of solid urban and rural employment opportunities (Bryceson 1999). Whatever one’s view of livelihood diversification, it is clear that in the new millennium, rural Africans are already negotiating their way out of the African ‘crisis’. They take advantage of opportunity, even as they suffer the costs of Africa’s global position and its history.

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[1] One US $ = 760 CFA, Sept 2000.

[2] Livelihoods in Fandou Béri were assessed in a project funded by the UK ESRC from 1996-1999 and in linked investigations into erosion patterns, agricultural practices and indigenous knowledge systems in this same community. See Batterbury (2001), Osbahr and Allen (2002), and Warren et al (2001) for greater detail. These and many related papers can be obtained from the first author.

[3] The study was conducted in 1996 for the agency CARE (see Baro 1996). The villages studied were Bénébourou and Gakou Timiri on the Sourou Plain, Léré, Pel, Gansagou and Madougou on the Gondo Plain, Douna Bana and Anakila on the Seno, and Tourgo and Déguéré on the Dogon Plateau. Communities ranged in size from 150 to 2800 people. 134 households were surveyed in total, of which 24 were female-headed.