Mark Breusers

Suzanne Nederlof

Teunis Van Rheenen

Conflicts between farmers and herdsmen are certainly not new 
phenomena: they already occurred at the time of the biblical 
patriarchs. In West Africa, conflicts over the use of scarce natural 
resources between farmers and herdsmen are said to be on the 
increase. The occurrence of such conflicts is generally attributed to 
growing pressure on natural resources, caused by population increase, 
the growth of herds and the extension of cultivated areas outpacing 
population growth. That such conflicts appear to oppose two ethnic 
groups – generally Fulbe herdsmen versus a population group
 of 
farmers – is explained by the fact that not only has overall competition
 
over natural resources increased due to a saturation of space, but that
 
at the same time a balance between the two groups has been broken. 
The convergence of production systems, as a result of farmers engaging
 
in cattle breeding and herdsmen in agriculture, entailed the disappearance
 
of both ecological and economic complementarity between 
the two groups – a process that is said to have been accelerated
 by the 
droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. The interpretation of these conflicts
 
depends on the – sometimes implicit – assumption that formerly,
 in an 
often unspecified epoch in the past, relations between farmers and 
herdsmen could be conceived of in terms of symbiosis – a relationship
 
based on mutual dependence and mutual advantage with implied 
complementarity in the ecological and economic spheres.</jats:p

Conflict or symbiosis? Disentangling farmer-herdsman relations: the Mossi and Fulbe of the Central Plateau, Burkina Faso

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