Matthew D. Turner

Livestock Market Dynamics and Local Vulnerabilities in the Sahel

Abstract As institutions that facilitate the conversion of livestock to grain and adjust livestock populations to local forage availabilities, livestock markets play important economic and ecological roles in dryland Africa. Using a comprehensive database of 1,580 sales of livestock owned by members of 54 households in western Niger over a major drought-and-recovery cycle (1984–94), the effect of real livestock markets on stocking decisions and the economic vulnerability of rural households was investigated. While livestock markets are shown to facilitate destocking of animals from drought areas, price formation is socially-biased (by gender, wealth, residence) reflecting the differential access and powers within local markets.

Methodological Reflections on the Use of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Science in Human Ecological Research

Environmental analysts increasingly utilize remote sensing (RS) and geographic information science (GIS) techniques to study the relationship between human societies and their biophysical environment. This paper considers the influence these techniques have had on environmental research. Using the case of the Sahel, the paper first relates contemporary applications of RS/GIS to the history of the environmental scientific practice in the region. While facilitating an expansion of spatiotemporal scales, applications of these new techniques continue the methodological failings of the past by relying on visual measures of environmental change and problematic indicators of human land-use pressures. The human ecology fields (human, cultural, and political ecologies), by emphasizing the causal connections between local management and environmental change, can address the problems inherent with the spatial analytical turn in environmental science. Using the authors experience with the use of GIS in a political ecology study of grazing management in western Niger, ways of more closely integrating RS/GIS techniques into human ecological research are discussed.

The use of herders’ accounts to map livestock activities across agropastoral landscapes in Semi-Arid Africa

Improved understandings of the agricultural and range ecologies ofsemi-arid Africa require better information on the spatiotemporal distributionof domestic livestock across agropastoral landscapes. An empirical GIS-basedapproach was developed for estimating distributions of herded livestock acrossthree agropastoral territories (around 100 km2 each)over a two-year period. Algorithms developed from regression analyses of herdtracking data (with R2s ≥ 0.67) are used to transform a morecomprehensive but incomplete set of data generated from herders’ accounts oftheir herds’ grazing itineraries (400 herds following 6500 itineraries). Theresulting characterization registers 40 000 days of livestock activitiesacross694 land units (averaging 70 ha) over the study period. This studydemonstrates that rural producers’ knowledge of their daily extractionpracticescan be translated to fine-grained characterizations of extraction densitiesacross mixed landscapes. The spatiotemporal distribution of livestock that isrevealed by this approach diverges strongly from that predicted bycommonly-usedpoint-diffusion estimation procedures. Instead, the distribution reflects localpatterns of land use, topography, vegetation, settlements, and water points.Grazing and nongrazing times spent in land units are not spatially correlatedand the seasonality of grazing pressure is spatially variable. Therefore, theecological impacts of livestock grazing are spatially variable at fine scalesand there is a significant potential for livestock-mediated nutrient transfersacross agropastoral landscapes. The georeferenced data produced by thisapproachnot only will help evaluate the impact and sustainability of differentmanagement practices but also provides a strong empirical base for improvedspatial modeling of herded livestock.

Livestock related nutrient budgets within village territories in western Niger

Poor cropland fertility and a rapidly rising demand for food force Sahelian farmers to cultivate more land and shorten fallow periods. This mostly leads to a gradual decline in crop yields per hectare, which can be counterbalanced by the systematic use of livestock manure on cropland. To assess the potential and limits of manuring practices, annual nutrient budgets were established for different land-use types, based on forage and crop yields and livestock and cropland management in five village territories in western Niger, which were selected along the Sahelian climatic gradient. Stocking rates per km2 of pasturing area range from 8–22 tropical livestock units (TLU, animal of 250 kg live weight). Faecal excretion during grazing directly returns 18–25% of the consumed forage dry matter, 21–29% of the ingested nitrogen and 44–56% of ingested phosphorus to the grazed land. Corralling animals on fields at night leads to a spatial concentration of nutrients, benefiting at most 9% of the arable village land. Where livestock consume only 15–20% of the total amount of forage produced, there is some scope for increasing village livestock numbers in order to increase the area manured, but eventually manuring must be complemented by additional measures such as the application of inorganic fertilizers to sustain overall productivity of the farming systems.

Labor Process and the Environment: The Effects of Labor Availability and Compensation on the Quality of Herding in the Sahel

The relationship between investments of labor to agricultural production and environmental degradation in rural areas of the developing world is complex. This paper reports on qualitative and quantitative research focused on the effects of labor availability and its compensation on the way in which cattle are herded in the Maasina region of Central Mali. Within this particular region, two social relationships determine the level and form of herder compensation: that between herd patriarch and cattle owner, and that between herd patriarch and herder. Both the nature of these relationships and variations in herding practice are described prior to a presentation of statistical analyses of the effects of household labor availability and cattle wealth on travel and grazing management decisions. Reductions in both the availability of herding labor and in the economic security of Fulsse households are shown to lead to reduced herd mobility and more constricted grazing patterns with significant environmental implications.

Political ecology I: An alliance with resilience?

Resilience is an ecological term that has proven to be exceedingly malleable as it has grown in usage across a range of scholarly and policy communities. Despite its malleability, resilience does introduce particular ideas of society-nature relations into scholarly and policy discourse. In this political ecology progress report, I explore the relationship between political ecology and resilience thinking. I first explore common features of the intellectual histories of resilience thinking and political ecology. Despite parallel and common influences and reactions, the two fields diverge significantly along two dimensions: in their normative commitments and adherence to systems thinking. Given these divergences, I argue that intellectual engagement between these fields will prove to be most productive if circumscribed around land-use ecology – an area of inquiry important to both fields.

The effect of clipping on growth and nutrient uptake of Sahelian annual rangelands

Growth and nutrient-uptake responses of annual rangeland to defoliation were studied at 13 sandy range sites located across the Sahelian zone of Mali between 1977 and 1989. 34 clipping experiments (site-years) were conducted using identical treatment designs with respect to the timing and frequency of clipping. The effect of highly variable growing conditions (rainfall and nutrient availability) on the response to clipping was analysed through a series of regression analyses. The growth response of vegetation to clipping is more related to variables associated with rainfall and growing condition than to clipping frequency. Total yields were lowered most during periods of rapid growth. Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) yields were not affected by growing condition while clipping consistently increased N and P yields. Greater sink strength in clipped plants better explains the observed stimulation of N and P yields than does the increased nutrient availability that could result from modified soil water status after clipping. The significance of these results for the ecological management of Sahelian rangelands is discussed.

The New Pastoral Development Paradigm: Engaging the Realities of Property Institutions and Livestock Mobility in Dryland Africa

The confluence of new understandings of dryland ecology and common property resource management has arguably led to a “new pastoral development paradigm”—a paradigm that incorporates a widespread acceptance of the importance of livestock mobility within the context of devolving greater rangeland management authority to local groups. Despite over a decade of interest and attention generated by this new paradigm, little progress has been achieved on the ground. A major premise of this article is that this impasse results from persistent conceptual difficulties surrounding the relationship between livestock mobility, nonequilibrium ecology, and common property institutions. These difficulties are best resolved through work grounded in the social and ecological realities of particular regions. The promise of such engagements is illustrated through case material from the annual grasslands of Sahelian region of West Africa. The policy implications resulting from a reconceptualization of the relationship between property and dryland ecology are presented.

Clarifying competition: the case of wildlife and pastoral livestock in East Africa

Contentious debates surrounding the relationship between peoples’ livelihoods and protected areas in East Africa have largely revolved around claims and counter-claims about the level of competition between pastoral livestock and wildlife. Habitat and dietary overlap are often cited as the primary mechanism by which competition occurs with both overlap and lack of overlap (displacement) used as evidence of competition. Despite the importance of this issue for the economic and environmental futures of the region, there has been little scientific progress for understanding the nature of livestock–wildlife competition in pastoral landscapes. This article seeks to add conceptual clarity to this debate by focusing attention on exploitation competition in ways that are relevant to dryland East Africa. The article begins by briefly reviewing the changing understandings of the concept of competition in ecology. Requirements of competition, as defined in the literature, are then related to the ecological characteristics of East African drylands. By demonstrating that competition necessarily occurs through vegetative responses, we argue that there is the need to clarify competition by differentiating between ‘proximate competition’ and competition that is mediated by vegetation change across seasons. The article concludes by outlining the implications of these clarifications for the management and study of livestock–wildlife interactions.

Drought, Domestic Budgeting and Wealth Distribution in Sahelian Households

Over the past twenty‐five years, Sahelian households have experienced recurrent harvest failure and greater reliance on remittances from migratory wage labour. Household subsistence has become less dependent on household grain stores and more on the liquidation of individual wealth stores. This study investigates how these broader changes have affected struggles between household members over obligations to support the household in the Zarmaganda region of western Niger. As the land‐derived leverage of male patriarchs has declined and household dependence on individual wealth stores has increased, domestic budgeting has become more contested. Household heads make case‐by‐case moral claims on other household members during times of grain shortage. Women and subordinate males invoke Islamic law, which accords primary provisioning responsibility to the household head, to protect their individual wealth in times of grain deficit. This article investigates the nature of these budgetary struggles, showing how individuals’ decisions to contribute individual wealth to support the household are best understood as highly situated, affected not only by the specific material conditions of the household but also the interplay of the moral, structural, and individualistic imperatives that derive from one’s position within the household. Using reconstructed livestock wealth histories for the members of fifty‐four households in western Niger, this study investigates the material consequences of these struggles. Male heads of corporate households, the historic managers of the household’s land and agricultural labour, have lost wealth relative to their wives and married male subordinates since the drought of 1984.