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