Colonial Agricultural Development Schemes

The period from the 1920s to the end of colonial rule saw increasing government intervention in agricultural production and the adoption of ambitious agricultural development schemes. These development schemes often aimed to increase and control the production and marketing of cash crops such as cotton and peanuts, essential to European industries. Examples include the Gezira Scheme (Sudan), the Office du Niger (French Soudan), the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme, the Compagnie Générale des Oléagineux Tropicaux (CGOT, Senegal), as well as a host of other schemes. Confident in their agricultural expertise, colonial planners often sought radical transformations in African agricultural systems, away from extensive hoe cultivation toward intensive plow agriculture following a strict crop rotation. Worries about environmental degradation and population growth, as well as the need to manage social dislocation and maintain political stability, framed colonial strategies. Encountering African farmers with priorities and practices that were often at odds with their own, colonial planners failed to transform agriculture in the ways they intended. Nonetheless, development still wrought significant change as farmers considered whether to circumvent, resist, adapt, or adopt new technologies and farming methods. If at first agricultural development schemes were localized and mostly ineffective efforts to make empire profitable, by the 1940s and 1950s, agricultural development interventions became more widespread and intrusive. This helped generate rural support for anticolonial movements. Nonetheless, by the last decades of colonial rule, the idea of planned development as desirable became commonplace, not just within colonial governments, but also in international institutions and among nationalist leaders. Thus, state-led agricultural development would remain a powerful force in independent Africa.

Reconstructing intra-annual cropping dynamics on irrigation schemes in data sparse environments by fusing Landsat and MODIS imagery .

<p>Governments and engineers have promoted the construction of large-scale, formalised, irrigation schemes across Africa for nearly 100 years. These developments are designed to increase food production and reduce the vulnerability of agriculture to climate shocks. Yet over the past decades, many irrigation schemes have deteriorated or completely failed; due to a wide range of problems from faulty infrastructure to unexpectedly severe climate shocks. Understanding the drivers of successes and challenges on irrigation schemes is complicated by limited long-term statistics. Meanwhile, for historic Earth-observation based analysis, the Landsat archive remains poor for large areas of Africa, and MODIS imagery is too coarse for meaningull mapping.</p><p>Here, we demonstrate a multi-sensor fusion methodology to map the expansion and intensification dynamics of irrigation schemes in the 21st century. Our methodology produces monthly Landsat-like images from the fusion of Landsat 5, Landsat 7 SLC-off, and MODIS imagery, which are classified into cropped area estimates. First, we use the StarFM fusion algorithm to generate monthly Landsat-like images from MODIS composites, based on temporally co-located MODIS and cloud free Landsat 5 or Landsat 7 SLC-on images. Next, we adjust these Landsat-like images against Landsat 7 SLC-off pixels by iteratively reweighting within a spatiotemporal Generalised Additive Model. Finally, we classify the derived monthly, Landsat-like, time-series data using a Random Forest classification model, mapping the number of crops harvested per year for the 2000-2020 period.</p><p>We test this methodology against two irrigation schemes in West Africa: the Office du Niger scheme in Mali and the Bagre Irrigation Scheme in Burkina Faso. For both sites, the mapped areas correlate with official statistics on cropped areas. Our data highlight infrastructure improvement and expansion on the Office du Niger, and the resilience of the scheme to rainfall variability. Whilst on the Bagre scheme, we show a vulnerability to large rainfall deficits, and a recent expansion in cropping frequency on newly developed extensions. This methodology is applicable to many areas where the Landsat archive is limited, but intra-annual mapping is required.</p>

From abundance to land scarcity

How could the village of Dlonguébougou (DBG), which boasted abundant land in 1980, find itself land scarce just 25 years later? The answer lies in part with a tripling of the village population, the widespread use of oxen-drawn plough teams, and continued extensive patterns of farming. But, by far, the largest factor has been the arrival of many hundred incoming farmers from farther south, seeking land. Aerial photos and satellite images show the first wave in the late 1980s, from villages badly affected by bird damage to cereal crops, given their proximity to the irrigated lands of the Office du Niger, and the second wave unleashed by the establishment of N-Sukala, a sugar cane plantation 40 km to the southeast of DBG. Hundreds of families have lost their farmland to this irrigation scheme, and have migrated to seek land in neighbouring villages like DBG, putting further pressure on land.

Rice farmer’s poverty and its determinants: evidence from Dogofiri village of Office du Niger zone in Mali

ABSTRACT: The aim of this research was to contribute to a better understanding of rice farmer’s poverty of Office du Niger (ON) in Mali at village-level. Data were collected through survey with 110 head family farms in the village of Dogofiri. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Multiple linear regression models were used to analyze the main determinants of poverty. Results indicated that the factors of physical capital and human capital as well as government policy have a significant influence on the poverty of family farms through production, age, family size, education and health support, agricultural credit and water fees. Policies aimed to improve the family farm’s income and boosting rice production to alleviate poverty ought to be based on these factors.

Ein ewiges Hin und Her

Dieser Beitrag untersucht bäuerlichen Widerstand gegen Vertreibung durch Landgrabbing in dem zu Zeiten der französischen Kolonialherrschaft gegründeten Entwicklungsprojekt Office du Niger in Mali. In dem analysierten Fall handelt es sich um eine fast zehn Jahre andauernde Auseinandersetzung zwischen Kleinbäuerinnen und -bauern und einem malischen Großunternehmer um landwirtschaftlich nutzbare Flächen. Es werden drei Strategien kleinbäuerlichen Widerstands identifiziert (kollektives Vorgehen, Anrufung des Staates, nationale und internationale Allianzen) und deren Möglichkeiten und Beschränkungen diskutiert. Der Artikel argumentiert, dass der Kampf um Rückgabe des entzogenen Landes bzw. für umfassende Kompensation bislang erfolglos war, weil zum einen keine Einigkeit zwischen den Akteur*innen des Widerstands besteht und zum anderen die Verwaltungsbehörde Office du Niger wie ein „listiger“ Staat im Staat agiert. Erfolgreich ist der Widerstand hingegen insofern, als er immer noch andauert, wobei insbesondere transnationale Allianzbildung und die Adressierung von „Gebern“ wie der Afrikanischen Entwicklungsbank und dem BMZ Wirkung zeigt.