Roots in the African Dust: Sustaining the Sub-Saharan Drylands [Paperback]

Michael Mortimore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 1998

The traditional image of contemporary Africa is of a continent dogged by poverty, drought, degradation and famine. This study, drawing on the best work of the past decade and based on researched case studies from East and West Africa, rejects the notion of runaway desertification, driven by population growth and inappropriate land use. It suggests a more optimistic model of sustainable land use and an appropriate set of policy priorities to support dryland peoples in their efforts to sustain land and livelihoods.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a concise book, synthesizing a vast range of material...The claims made result from careful comparative work and trustworthy local field investigation; there are no empty assertions here. Mortimore is one of the discipline's most adept and rigourous practitioners of local level cultural ecology." The Professional Geographer

Book Description

The traditional image of contemporary Africa is of a continent dogged by poverty, drought, degradation and famine. This study, drawing on the best work of the past decade and based on researched case studies from East and West Africa, rejects the notion of runaway desertification, driven by population growth and inappropriate land use. It suggests a more optimistic model of sustainable land use and appropriate set of policy priorities to support dryland peoples in their efforts to sustain land and livelihoods.

Product Details

• Paperback: 237 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; First Edition edition (October 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521457858
• ISBN-13: 978-0521457859
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,970,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Roots in the African Dust, June 4, 2000

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burkina (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Roots in the African Dust: Sustaining the Sub-Saharan Drylands (Hardcover)

Roots in the African Dust Michael Mortimore is best known for his extensive studies of farming systems, environmental change and human adaptation to drought in the drylands of northern Nigeria. Mortimore's focus is on local, populist human adaptations to a harsh and complex environment. He developed his research focii when teaching geography at the universities of Ahmadu Bello and Bayero in Nigeria for over twenty-five years, before moving to the UK in the late 1980s where he is now a consultant. He has produced several influential and thought provoking texts; these include Adapting to Drought (1989), Working the Sahel (with W.M. Adams, 1999) and a revisionist account of livelihoods in Machakos, Kenya entitled More People, Less Erosion (with M Tiffen and F Gichuki, 1994). Roots in the African Dust is a synthesis volume, accessible to students, scholars and policymakers, that reviews some of the empirical material contained in these and other works. The book offers a forceful argument that the sub-Saharan drylands (the natural environment, and the people) are still coping under conditions of environmental, monetary and demographic stress. Ten well-presented, liberally illustrated chapters respond to questions posed in the introduction. If we believe expert views, Mortimore says, the Sahelian peoples should have been engulfed by an expanding Sahara many years ago, livestock markets should have collapsed due to overgrazing, farms would have been obliterated by land degradation, fuelwood should have run out, and entire areas depopulated for lack of economic opportunity. Since rural communities farming systems clearly still exist, the author uses several local examples to challenge these erronous crisis discourses. The second chapter addresses the legacy of worries about desertification and its impacts. Mortimore concludes that desertification is usually short-term, and reversible. Chapter three responds to the need to earth the global discourse in the realities of dryland households objectives (p38) since the majority of decisions about farming in Africa (outside the major commercial farms and ranch areas) are taken by smallholders. Defining farmers goals in terms of welfare and the reproductive needs of households, he offers a rich selection of material on labour, crop mixes and land use systems, technical change, trees, water management, and the importance of livestock (walking resources). Three chapters examine risk management. Systems primarily dependent on pastoralism are shown to use opportunistic stocking and herd mobility in an unstable, but resilient environment. Farmers exploit rain and moisture, and manage technological and biological diversity through sequential decision-making. Holding to a broad definition if the African household as a network of implicit contracts (following Robert Netting), Mortimore shows how risk is negotiated through maintenance of household numbers, a focus on flexible food production, and famine avoidance. He recognises that catastrophic policy errors and economic greed contributed to recent famines, but concludes that Sahelian farming is resilient (p111). This is partly due to non-farm activities, and the vigorous marketing of crops and animals (despite price and demand fluctuations and political uncertainty). Wage labour (involving circulatory migration), asset liquidation, agricultural sales, and exploitation of social networks also help to see people through hardship, and diversification away from agriculture and pastoralism is not the act of desperate people. A clear policy recommendation here is the necessity to keep borders permeable to migrants; in the absence of a rich industrial or commercial sector in most African countries, individuals will still keep their links to their rural homes. A further three chapters examine the extent of soil degradation, merits of agricultural intensification, and conservation of biotic resources. Mortimore claims that high population densities fuel intensification of agricultural production, if other constraints are absent. His well-known Machakos studies are used to demonstrate how commercial opportunities and population pressures drive resource conservation. The highlight of the book is the last chapter, where he speculates on the driving forces behind the transformation of rural African land use systems, again trying to demonstrate resilience and diversity in locally managed livelihoods. Africa's environmental and human systems change at different rates, but their trajectories are closely linked. Transitions are underway in land uses, and these are economic, demographic and institutional. Policy must, for Mortimore, follow a populist model by nourishing local creativity and adaptability (a version of Paul Richard's indigenous agricultural revolution). All interventions must be technically and culturally appropriate, and the goal of environmental management might be best served by protecting local innovation and investment against crises, for example through improving access to markets and recognising the need for free circulation of people and capital. Mortimore's project is, therefore, an intriguing and a potentially controversial one. In holding to a notion of strong (Boserupian) human adaptation to environmental and economic stresses, there is an open invitation for the political ecologist/economist (some cited above) to wade in with countervailing evidence of class exploitation, conflict, the systematic prevention of intensification or human development, or economic crisis brought on by commodity markets or corruption. Social and political conflict is downplayed (but not excluded) in the book. Not much is said about struggle and open resistance and why such struggles (often gendered, or to do with access issues) might have been necessary. Although at no point does the author say that rural Nigerians and Kenyans are always capable of solving problems without the state or any external assistance, but his view is that they usually are, and that the state and development agencies may not be suitable agents of positive agricultural transformation. Nonetheless, I have great faith in the author's experience, his findings, and his main recommendations. So much hinges on whether Northern Nigeria and Machakos (in particular) are typical of other regions and situations. Intensified agricultural systems have not always developed elsewhere, because different social and environmental histories apply. What is most gratifying is that Mortimore retains an attachment to rigorous comparative fieldwork that, frankly, few other scholars can demonstrate; a dedication to supporting the African smallholder; and a methodology that places equal weight on the natural environment, and the relationship between environmental change and human response. The book is an example of the real contribution of the committed geographer to African agrarian and development studies, and it is pleasing to have a single volume that offers such a breadth of analysis in a holistic, wide-ranging view of rural livelihoods and landscapes.