Trajectories of agricultural change in southern Mali

Falconnier, Gatien N.

doi:10.18174/375944

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Post-colonial international emigration from Kita was spurred by the "rail crisis" and the closure of the state-owned oil mills between 1986 and 1995 due to a more liberal state economic policy (Lachenmann, 1986). A transfer to the production of cotton, even though supported by the state, created a new pioneering migration front towards Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire (Falconnier, 2016;Mamadou, 2015).…”

Section: The Case Of Kita Reversed Migrations and Deteriorated Develo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

»Failed« Migratory Adventures?

Schultz¹

2022

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success can bring even more advantage and prestige (p. 187). The returnee is supposed to be a hero indeed.Deportations and the supposed ''failure'' of the migratory adventureRestrictive migration policies and multifold borders are what interrupt, stop, redirect, or reverse these migratory journeys (Drotbohm & Hasselberg, 2015) converting them into "new confinements and modes of exploitation" (Glick-Schiller & Salazar, 2013, p. 190). Deportation is generally understood as a legal, political, and socio-economic measure involving the forceful removal of a migrant from a national territory to another country (cf. Drotbohm & Hasselberg, 2015). There is a tendency to consider it as forced removal by air, but research is increasingly considering cross-border removal by land as well (Sylla & Cold-Ravnkilde, 2021; Alpes, 2020;Kleist, 2017a;Mensah, 2016).Deportations and involuntary returns produce the opposite of the heroic homecomings expected. They violently cut the journey to potential economic success and socio-cultural recognition. Particularly in the West African context, deportations are to be seen in relation to the adventurers' deep social embedding and relationality, before, during, and after the journeys (cf. Pian, 2010, p. 97). Here, the extended family plays a significant role in any aspect of life: West Africans experience themselves not as "having" relationships but as "being" relationships (Piot, 1999), an idea that I will develop, particularly in Chapter 5, and consciously construct their families across (inter)national and continental boundaries (cf., e.g., Drotbohm, 2015Drotbohm, , 2009. Deportations thus produce potential "failures" in light of the collective expectation of success and a triumphant homecoming. Against this background, the informants portray themselves as distressed and empty-handed, like Salif: at best with a plastic bag shuffling from the airport to some relative in Bamako. This powerful image emblematically embodies the drama of the unwanted return. As Éliane de Latour puts it: "Failure on the journey is worse than immobility on the spot: from being poor at the start, the warrior becomes poverty-stricken" (Latour, 2003, p. 187; transl. S.U.S.), 13 though in fact such a symbolic and charged depiction does not adequately mirror the realities on the ground."Failure," like the term "adventure," emerged in my research as an emic term first of all. Former deportees and their close contacts speak of "l'échec" or "maloya," the Bambara word for shame. More often, deportees and their circle will say "mon objectif n'était pas atteint" ("My objective was not attained"), or "je n'ai pas réussi" ("I did not succeed"), or, more explicitly, "j'ai échoué" ("I failed"), "c'était un échec" ("It was a failure"). However, the line taken by most of the men is that tounga man ja ("the travel did not work out") and "there are other ways of getting on" (Chapters 5 and 6). 13S.U.S. stands for the initials of the book's author Susanne Ursula Schultz. 17 This differs from the terminology of "state-induced" re...

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Section: The Case Of Kita Reversed Migrations and Deteriorated Develo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

»Failed« Migratory Adventures?

Schultz¹

2022

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“…Trial results, i.e. average yields and gross margins, were presented using the visualization schemes as they were introduced at the beginning of the colearning cycle in 2012 (Falconnier, 2016). In a region with a high level of illiteracy (section 6.2.1), we anticipated that farmers would have limited experience with interpreting graphs.…”

Section: Reflections On Participatory and Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not wrapped up in cotton wool : how risk influences farming in southern Mali

Huet

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West African farmers are exposed to a variety of risks, including climate variability. Moreover, trends of population growth, declining natural resources and climate change increase the probability of hazards and extreme events. In this environments, farmers are often struggling to be food selfsufficient or escape poverty. We focused on the area of Koutiala, southern Mali, as an illustrative region for the challenging farming conditions in West Africa.The aim of this thesis was to understand farmers' strategies to cope within a variable and hazardous environment. A parallel objective was to analyse which sustainable intensification options could increase productivity and/or reduce risks within the socio-economic and biophysical context. Risk was defined as the combination of the probability of a hazard taking place and the impact this induces. To analyse risk perception and suitability of on-farm options several data sources were combined: responses from individual surveys and focus group discussions, outputs from crop model simulations, long-term weather data and evaluations of trials and try-out fields embedded within a long-term participatory process.Risks related to health of family members were perceived as the highest, followed by risks related to health of livestock. Farmers managed those risks by maintaining flexibility and diversity in the farm management which allowed them to limit the impact and react quickly when hazards happened.Farmers overcame losses by relying on social interactions and using productive assets, e.g. selling cattle. Hence, they lost capital. Within households, differences in risk perception were related to decision-power, not to gender. Between farms, risk perception was related to resource endowment to a limited extent. The frequency and impact on yield of some hazards were quantified using crop simulation data. Weather hazards occurred at least every five years and reduced cereal yields. The impact of hazards on cereal yields (maize, sorghum, millet) interacted with the cereal management (early sowing, increasing N fertilisation and/or introducing a short duration variety). Increasing maize yields through management did not affect relative yield losses in case of hazards. Adapted millet management caused a trade-off between yield and hazard impact. Adapted sorghum management increased yield and mitigated hazard impacts simultaneously. Further, I demonstrated that on-farm diversification of crop land allocation had the potential to increase stability. The combination of cotton and a cereal had a relatively strong stabilisation benefit, as cotton and the cereals responded differently to weather. While the majority of diversification strategies enabled farmers to meet the food sufficiency requirements, farmers had to target combinations with a high mean return and large variability in order to surpass the poverty line. Within this environment, an iterative and participatory co-learning cycle facilitated a learning environment for researchers and farmers. This process yielded a diver...

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Key research challenges to supporting farm transitions to agroecology in advanced economies. A review

Prost

Martin

Ballot

et al. 2023

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

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In response to the sustainability issues that agriculture faces in advanced economies, agroecology has gained increasing relevance in scientific, political, and social debates. This has promoted discussion about transitions to agroecology, which represents a significant advancement. Accordingly, it has become a growing field of research. We reviewed the literature on and in support of farm transitions to agroecology in advanced economies in order to identify key research challenges and suggest innovative research paths. Our findings can be summarized as follows: (1) Research that supports exploration and definition of desired futures, whether based on future-oriented modeling or expert-based foresight approaches, should more explicitly include the farm level. It should stimulate the creativity and design ability of farmers and other stakeholders, and also address issues of representation and power among them. (2) Research that creates awareness and assesses farms before, during or after transition requires more holistic and dynamic assessment frameworks. These frameworks need to be more flexible to adapt to the diversity of global and local challenges. Their assessment should explicitly include uncertainty due to the feedback loops and emergent properties of transitions. (3) Research that analyzes and supports farms during transition should focus more on the dynamics of change processes by valuing what happens on the farms. Research should especially give more credence to on-farm experiments conducted by farmers and develop new tools and methods (e.g., for strategic monitoring) to support these transitions. This is the first review of scientific studies of farm transitions to agroecology. Overall, the review indicates that these transitions challenge the system boundaries, temporal horizons, and sustainability dimensions that agricultural researchers usually consider. In this context, farm transitions to agroecology require changes in the current organization and funding of research in order to encourage longer term and more adaptive configurations.

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Trajectories of agricultural change in southern Mali

Cited by 3 publications

References 154 publications

»Failed« Migratory Adventures?

»Failed« Migratory Adventures?

Not wrapped up in cotton wool : how risk influences farming in southern Mali

Key research challenges to supporting farm transitions to agroecology in advanced economies. A review

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