Assessments of the sustainability of smallholder agriculture in Africa have focused on soil fertility decline. The forms in which these scientific assessments take are shaped by disciplinary traditions, development prerogatives, and assumptions about the social “drivers” of environmental change. The dominant approach in Africa today creates nutrient budgets for land areas spanning a wide range of scales: from farmers’ fields, village territories, districts, nations and continents. After critically assessing these approaches, I present empirical work that provides an alternative understanding of the causes of soil fertility variation across village territories in western Niger. The management history, yields, and soil fertility parameters of 181 fields in two village territories were analyzed along with the characteristics of the households managing and owning them (livestock and land wealth, labor, tenure security, cropped area). I show that the heterogeneity of soil fertility is socially produced with the distribution of certain macronutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus in particular) affected differently by settlement history and contemporary differences in wealth and power. This runs counter to standard ideas of homogeneous landscapes shaped by ubiquitous population-induced scarcity and land tenure insecurity. In this case, soils provide a potent vehicle for social differentiation – the rich, through their cattle, are literally harvesting nutrients from common pastures and the fields of the poor and accumulating them on their fields. The implications of these findings for rural development and resource management are discussed.
Hosted by Mara Goldman
Co-sponsored by IBS Population Program and IBS Environment and Society Program.
Matthew Turner is a professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research concerns, in broad terms, nature-society relations in dryland West Africa. Using political ecology frameworks, he has conducted research on questions of environmental governance, resource-related conflict, pastoral livelihoods, property institutions, dryland degradation, vegetative dynamics, food security, and climate change vulnerability. His work often involves mixed methods combining qualitative and quantitative data and analysis in novel ways. As someone with strong commitments to the rural people with whom he works, he often finds it necessary to critically engage with environmental science and development practices that directly or indirectly shape their lives.