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Chad |
RURAL LIFE
For ten years now,
Chad’s rural areas have been undergoing significant
changes —
changes which don’t always help development
What’s been happening? Where there is arable land, it gets overcrowded with people coming in from other areas. So, local people start to leave. The environment is being destroyed and there’s not much in the way of economic resources available. All this contributes to sparking-off new conflicts over who is to take over the fertile land in the south. How did we ever reach this point? The south is inhabited by cultivators, stock breeders and fishermen. It’s the most densely inhabited region of the country. More than half of Chad’s 6 million people inhabit a third of the total area of the country. This presents a problem concerning the way in which land suitable for cultivation and grazing is allocated; also the way in which water resources are used.
The amount of land suitable for cultivation has been decreasing these past years because of erosion and overpopulation. In the 1970s, villages were still 15 to 20 kms apart and people were able to farm near their homes. Today, villages spring up like mushrooms close to each other. These days nobody consults the traditional chiefs who used to have the final say when it came to founding villages. There’s no difficulty in hearing the cock crow from one village to another, they’re so close! There’s no space between fields and life becomes more and more difficult. Young people no longer find land to cultivate. If parents don’t have any land to hand on to their children, then there’s no way the younger generation can get hold of land for farming. So what happens? Left to their own devices, the young people adopt lazy habits and turn to alcohol, theft and deception.
It’s the same thing with the stock breeders. Anything approaching adequate pasture is woefully lacking. This is because the «wide open spaces» is a thing of the past. People have started to live on what was once pasture, and what’s left is subject to erosion and other assaults on the ecosystem. Also, in recent years, stock breeders from the Sahara and the Sahel, driven out by ever-increasing desertification, are pouring into the wetter regions of the south looking for suitable grazing land for their herds. Because the situation is becoming so drastic, stock breeders risk losing their animals simply because there’s not enough food for them. In their desperation they don’t always follow the traditional emigration from summer to winter pasture and vice versa, and take to grazing their animals in cultivated fields, thus causing «range wars» which tend to become endemic. The farmer’s hoe is raised against the shepherd’s staff!
As for fishermen; they also have a problem with both water and fish. The very few fish-bearing water courses are drying up. So, how can people who have always lived through fishing do anything else? They don’t know how to work the land, and even less raise animals, so they have nothing to leave their children.
Social upheaval
The consequences are dramatic. Among the farmers for instance, the strong young men, having sold their cotton and their peanuts, abandon their old parents in the villages in order to find work in the towns where they become small craftsmen: shoemakers, laundry workers, watch repairers, mechanics, coolies for transporting sacks of millet to the market. This is a complete turn-about in the traditional way of thinking. In the recent past, it was unknown to abandon old people who were always taken care of in the extended family system. In such a society, it was considered a shame to leave one’s old mother or father to wander about the streets. But in view of the current land situation, some old people who still have a few parcels of land, are either forced to sell them, to let them out or put them up as security so they can buy food. Elderly people living in the countryside have overnight become the prey of land speculators.
According to Mr. Djimadoum Kaïnder, director of a farmers’ organisation in the eastern Logone region, the price of renting a hectare of land suitable for cultivation varies between 3,000 CFA francs to 4,000 CFA francs per year. Hence a farmer who has, for example, a total of 10 hectares of workable land, can gain from 30,000 CFA francs to 40,000 CFA francs, depending on the land’s fertility. In this day and age, it’s enough to cultivate one hectare of cotton or groundnuts to earn anything between 100,000 CFA francs and 150,000 CFA francs. If you’ve got ten hectares under cultivation, then you can earn a tidy sum of some 1,500,000 CFA francs per annum.
Right up to the 1980s, in the rural milieu, land was not seen as having anything like the commercial value it has today. It was considered to be a means of providing food for the family, not as a profit-making concern. But what’s happening today? More and more land is put under cultivation resulting in more and more people coming in from other areas to take possession of the land. A real «land grab». Also, the land is worked and worked until it is no longer fit for cultivation. And if that is not enough, village and township chiefs and other traditional authorities see renting out the land in their areas as a means of making a «quick buck». Because many of the local farmers can no longer pay their taxes, the chiefs take the land from them. In the old days, there were flexible rules and regulations governing the way in which land was allocated. These have now fallen by the wayside resulting in violent quarrels among the people.
In April 2000, a meeting was held in N’Djamena to study ways and means of drawing up a national strategy for reducing poverty. During the meeting, a farmers’ association leader from the Mayo-Kebbi region declared that because the availability of pasture land has been reduced in his area, people are beginning to feel the pinch at village level. He said: «Things have reached such a state that we can no longer even follow the traditional custom of confiding the raising of a calf to a relative or a friend in order to create links of mutual confidence». Problems are now arising connected with the amount of land available, the quality of the soil and the possibility of conserving its fertility.
The fishermen want to use the backwaters and other water courses which have not yet dried up. Unfortunately, these, if not already dried up, are shamelessly over-exploited. Formerly, due notice was taken of the «waters above», i.e. the amount of rainfall expected or already fallen, and the «waters below», i.e. the surface water presently available. Today, nobody respects that cosmogony. Now we have fishing with prohibited tackle and without taking into account the advice of the traditional fishermen who know these waters. Such is the case of Lake Iro where fishermen’s hamlets are springing up all around the shores. More than 200 of these fishermen now spend their time in intensive fishing. All they want is to make a profit, even to the extent of taking the young fish.
If nothing is done in the immediate future to counteract this situation, we can only fear the worst. The rural world, which was a haven of peace in the past, now risks falling into total bedlam where everybody does what he wants. The State, civil society and NGOs involved in development issues have to do everything possible to limit this crisis facing the rural world. Concrete action must be taken!
 | Missé Nanando, Chad, June 2000. — © Reproduction authorised, with usual acknowledgment |
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