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One Leg or Two? Food Security and Pastoralism in the Northern Sahel

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Abstract

Should pastoralists in dryland Africa diversify or specialize in their productive activities? To investigate this question, we analyze data from a consumption survey and two surveys of the nutritional status of children in addition to qualitative interviews comparing nomadic and sedentary population groups in the Gourma area in northern Mali. We show how the children of pastoralists seem to be better nourished than children of sedentary farmers and that the children of the sedentarized nomads seem to be the worst off. Based on these findings, we first argue that sedentary farming appears to be a poorer adaptation than nomadic pastoralism in arid environments such as the northern Sahel. Secondly, we argue that the diversification argument (better to stand on two legs than one) is flawed for mobile pastoralists in the northern Sahel because the logistical and organizational costs of combining different modes of livelihood are large and easily become insurmountable for a single household.

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Notes

  1. Nomads are here defined as mobile pastoralists who support their livelihoods mainly through livestock management. We use the terms “nomads,” “pastoralists” and “herders” interchangeably in this paper.

  2. Deborah F. Bryceson’s work on diversified African rural livelihood patterns as a result of deagrarianisation caused by structural adjustment and market liberalization is another major contribution in this field, but her work is less prescriptive (see e.g. Bryceson 2002a, b).

  3. The Tuareg call themselves Kel Tamasheq, meaning “the people who speak tamasheq.” While the imushar, ineslemen and imghad are mainly of a Berber origin, the inhaden and Bella descend from black Africans. Sometimes, the term Tuareg is used only for the three former groups, while the term Kel Tamasheq would be used to include all five social layers (by e.g. Randall 2005). However, “Tuareg” is also commonly used, as we do, to denominate the whole Kel Tamasheq society.

  4. While the other groups (imushar, ineslemen etc) are labeled as such by the population in the Gourma, there is no corresponding term for the “low status free.” The groups are only identified by the name of the group, such as Iborgheliten.

  5. After the period discussed here, there have been even more changes, because of the rebellion in northern Mali during 1990–1996. The effects of the rebellion on the stratification and the division of labor are beyond the scope of this paper.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to useful comments received from Ced Hesse and André Marty as well as from two anonymous referees. The research was part of the Mali Programme at the University of Oslo (1987–1996) where we were both based at the time of the main fieldwork for this study. The Programme was funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs through its Sahel-Sudan-Ethiopia Programme.

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  1. Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science, Oslo, Norway

    Jon Pedersen

  2. Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway

    Tor A. Benjaminsen

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Correspondence to Jon Pedersen.

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Pedersen, J., Benjaminsen, T.A. One Leg or Two? Food Security and Pastoralism in the Northern Sahel. Hum Ecol 36, 43–57 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-007-9136-3

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