Conflicting livelihoods and resource scarcity in "The time of global warming" : the political ecology of a farmer-herder conflict in Mopti, Mali

Abstract

Contemporary arguments are stating that increased resource scarcity in the Sahel will cause many and severe conflicts in the region in the coming years. These ideas are increasingly seen in relation to global warming today, and have had huge influences among policy makers, within academic circles and not least among the public. This study has been carried out with the purpose of investigating causes behind a farmer-herder conflict in the Sahel, more specifically in the Mopti region of Mali. The study explores ideas of resource scarcity and environmental stress as possible causes behind conflict, but more importantly it draws on political backdrops and structural links between environmental changes and political factors in a political ecology framework to explain the conflict. There has been a large-scale expansion of rice fields in the case study area the last decades. This has resulted in major losses of pastoral land, and can be seen in light of a pastoral marginalization that has prevailed in large parts of Africa the last decades. In the case of this study, land conversion projects also partly led to a loss of agricultural land, due to insufficient maintenance of irrigation systems, and due to a direct confiscation of rice fields. All in all, national agricultural policies and projects have largely resulted in a worsened access to land for mostly herders, but also farmers, and have led to herders and farmers expanding into each other’s land. Ambiguity and diffuseness in land management systems and political administration have contributed in causing the conflict of this case study. This can be seen in light of a ‘political vacuum’ that prevailed in Mali in the aftermath of the decentralization reforms of the 1990s. This ‘vacuum’ opened up for a practice of ‘belly politics’ and rent seeking in natural resource management, and has acted as an obstacle for finding solutions to resource-related conflicts. In the case of this study, the rehabilitation project of a pond exacerbated tensions and eventually caused the outbreak of the conflict, as agreements on its purposes were not properly clarified in advance. This study demonstrates that structural links between political process and environmental change are crucial to take into account when explaining farmer-herder conflicts. Based on my findings, I argue that political ecology is a far more suitable theoretical approach in explaining resource-related farmer-herder conflicts today, than contemporary arguments of the environmental security thesis. This is especially true in today’s ‘time of global warming,’ as there is a real risk and growing problem that conflicts and problems easily are allocated environmental issues.