Indigenous land management in West Africa : an environmental balancing act
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Bibliographic Information
Indigenous land management in West Africa : an environmental balancing act
（Oxford geographical and environmental studies）
Oxford University Press, 2000
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Includes bibliographical references
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The success of rural development schemes in Africa, particularly those involving land, is heavily dependent on understanding the local ecology. Any farmer knows this, yet rarely has development project design catered adequately for the vicissitudes of the African environment. Although environmental unpredictability was recognized in the temperate zone by the mid-nineteenth century, the ecological theory which was subsequently developed and most widely accepted, was
based on concepts of norms and equilibria. History has shown that the application of such ecological assumptions to African environments is wholly inappropriate.
This book argues that many methods used by West African smallholder farmers and pastoralists are properly adapted to the region's unpredictable physical environment. Field examples from the semi-arid and humid zones demonstrate the nature of environmental variability, and the skill of indigenous farmers and pastoralists in exploiting this. It is thus argued that development planners should, where possible, model development schemes on the more successful, ecologically sound methods of
indigenous land management.
Table of Contents
- 1. Environmental equilibrium and non-equilibrium
- 2. Problems and prognosis: perspectives on agriculture at a regional scale
- 3. Small holder adaptation: the humid domain
- 4. Non-equilibrium and the cocoa sector in West Africa
- 5. Unpredictable savannah environments
- 6. Farming in the semi-arid domain: adaptation to an uncertain environment
- 7. Rangeland and livestock management
- 8. Conclusions
by "Nielsen BookData"