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Drought,
nomads and the price of peanuts
Issues:
Land use and trade
Description:
Using industrial methods of production in fragile ecosystems
can have dreadful consequences. Droughts in the Sahel
may have been made worse by cash cropping and a dependence
on exports, whereas improvements to traditional methods
and systems may have been a sign of more sustainable development.
What is true is that at the height of the 1980s famine
in Ethiopia, considerable exports of food took place.
These activities are fairly straightforward in scope,
comparing traditional systems with cash cropping groundnuts
(peanuts). It offers one example of the difficulties brought
about by a modern agricultural model in circumstances
which are ecologically fragile.
Key
questions:
•
Are droughts and famines natural disasters?
•
What is the link between changing land use, trade and
poverty?
•
What forms of land use potentially support most people
in their basic needs?
Tasks
1 and 2:
Students
study the satellite images to identify key features with
the help of an atlas. They then compare these images,
noting what has changed and what they would need to know
before they could account for these changes. Click
here to go to tasks 1 and 2.
Task
3:
Next
students read two short text items, which describe different
approaches to agriculture. They describe the likely advantages
and disadvantages of each approach for farmers, commercial
peanut buyers, the government, nomadic herdsman and the
European customer. They also consider which approach is
more likely to resist a period of drier weather.
Click here
to go to task 3.
Key
questions – expanded
•
Are droughts and famines natural disasters?
This
activity asks students to ponder the possible reasons
for the denudation of vegetation around Timbuktu between
1976 and 1986. Possible reasons include: drought; overgrazing;
increasing population pressures; the breakdown of social
mechanisms of water management; civil war, etc. Task 3
amplifies this line of thought through a comparison of
farming approaches. The main learning point is that drought
is not just a periodic event in the Sahel whose people
we might feel ‘sorry’ for; indeed, it can be
made worse or ameliorated according to the nature of the
‘development’ taking place.
•
What is the link between changing land use, trade and
poverty?
•
What forms of land use potentially support most people
in their basic needs?
The
short summaries in the tables in Task
3 suggest that, without extreme
care, cash cropping will be more intensive in its use
of water, fertilizer and debt (borrowing for seeds, etc);
and whilst it may reveal a short term gain, it may also
encourage drier soils, loss of surrounding vegetation
and falling soil fertility.
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