Land Security As An Issue For Livestock Keepers In The Sudano-Guinean Savannahs Of West Africa
Anne Floquet, Rachad Alimi, Roch Mongbo
Access to grazing land and transhumance is usually analysed as an issue for livestock keepers who have to leave their arid and semi-arid zones to find grazing land, but this paper discusses in which terms it is also an issue for farmers and livestock keepers in the inflow areas of the semi-humid zones. In West Africa, it has been currently assumed that grazing resources are still very abundant in these inflow areas and that, may conflicts happen, they are essentially due to conflicting regulations between countries, competitions around a few resources and to lacks of dialogue and arrangements in petty conflict resolutions among stakeholders at local levels. In this contribution it will be discussed that competition is of a more structural nature and that dialogue should be backed up by vigorous changes in land rights and rules, taking into account the high competition between local farmers, local agro pastoralists and transhumant livestock keepers. Choices also will have to be made. In Benin for example, a law passed in 1987 on transhumance was protecting grazing areas as Commons, especially in the regions supposed to host the largest flows of national and cross border transhumant livestock. The law has been not applied and now securing even smaller commons such as corridors raise many difficulties. New feasible options have therefore to be negotiated and designed that rely on existing practices and can be accommodated by the recently taken Land Act.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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