Land, investment and migration. By Camilla Toulmin, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. pp. xxv + 241. £67.00 (hbk). ISBN 9780198852766

Abstract

Dark clouds of violence gather over the heads of the villagers in the Sahel. Insurgencies and banditry, motivated by a volatile mixture of well-founded distrust in government, misgivings about urban wealth capture and bitterness about decades of abandonment, terrorize the countryside. Laced with religious sentiments, oratory and decor, armed groups seem to develop ethnic, racial and geopolitical unrest. And when French, and other UN troops, struggle with Russian Wagner mercenaries to court the pleasure of the Malian government and to impose peace, chances are that something completely different is in store. Optimism seems foolhardy.

Yet, if we refuse to see the rural Sahelian population as mere human husks doomed to fade out of history as its predestined losers, we might see resilience, endurance and ingenuity. Against the odds, mind you. Camilla Toulmin's Land, Investment and Migration is about continuity and change in rural Sahel. Forty-some years have passed since Toulmin's first visit to the village of Dlonguébougou in central Mali in 1980, representing more than a generation, more than 2/3 of Mali's post-independence history. We often rely on memory to compare the present with the past. But memories are not of the past, they are assemblages made in the present with the structure of a flea market and the credibility of a compleat angler. In contrast, Toulmin's comparison of the presence with the past does not rely on memory alone. Her book revisits the place and research that formed the basis of her first book, Cattle, Women and Wells: Managing Household Survival in the Sahel, from 1992. With the historical documentation in hand, the new book is on firm ground to describe and explains the modest fortunes and more ample adversities that have been visited upon the villagers over the past four decades. Increasing pressure on land and looming insecurity has changed the conditions for all.

Toulmin's approach is holistic. She engages the system of production in the Sahel and the social and political relations that are spun around classes of people, their interests, visions and actions. The analysis takes its point of departure in the farming system under the difficulties of climate change. Toulmin shows how farming integrates agroforestry and how wild trees are not as wild and unfarmed as an untrained observer would suspect. The landscape was always frugal, and the chapters show how different ‘famine foods’ create a necessary buffer for survival. The farming system itself is also quite intricate. By zooming in on different varieties of crops, the book makes a case for constant micro-adaptation which is only possible for people who know their environment well. The big question is whether the potential of the adaptive strategies will be exhausted in the face of climate change. The jury is still out on this one.

Another relentless pressure comes from land scarcity. Whereas land had seemed endlessly abundant when the author visited the area for the first time in 1980, available land is now in short supply in Dlonguébougou. Aerial photographs and satellite images show that the overall area under cultivation has increased fivefold between 1980 and 2016 while the village population tripled. This demographic challenge is accentuated both by large development projects and the political culture of government administration. As the pressure on land increases, the need for migration becomes even more critical, and the social differentiation seems to reflect the ability to organize labour within the household. The book convincingly shows how these elements interlock. The description of livelihood strategies and opportunities for small, medium and large households is peppered with observations and portraits of individuals which brings the structural story to life.

The movement of families to settle in the areas around Dlonguébougou over the past four decades happened because large irrigation projects in the region forced people to move. Many evicted families moved to the village in search for land, increasing the pressure as they arrived. With increasing farming density, it has, moreover, become difficult for pastoralist to pass unhindered through the area on their long-established annual north–south transhumance. To avoid being hemmed in and forced to trek across cultivated fields with conflicts as the inevitable consequence, herders give the area an increasingly wide berth. While farmers may avoid trampled crops, they also miss out on the manure fertilizing the fields. The sad irony is that the intense congregation of farms around fertile areas has led to a drop in yields. Multiple rationales conspired to create a sum of irrational land use. This is not helped by policies or legislation.

Land legislation from the colonial period still forms the practical norms in citizens' encounters with government officials. Colonial law, adopted and continued by the independent government of Mali, made the state the owner of all land in the country. Large-scale irrigation projects for sugarcane were thus greatly facilitated by the perfunctory legality of non-compensated expropriation of smallholders. More recent legislation from 2017, giving customary rights a formal legal status, has yet to become effective. Meanwhile, mayors and other civil servants abuse the presumption of government's legality when they arbitrarily intervene in land matters. Dexterous politicians are known to finagle reclassification of farmland into building plots and thereby dispossess farming families. By insisting that private families' customary land is by law public and thereby state or municipal property, property is easily seized by government and recoded into urban plots in the name of law and development. Decentralization introduced local government in 1999, and mayors did not waste any time to have an active hand in land allocation. Some mayors even operate outside of their own municipalities. These presumptions of land as public, and of civil servants as acting with legality by default, have offered tremendous opportunities for creating private wealth out of other people's land. Indeed, land seems to be at an institutional turning point. Transactions between rural people have not yet taken a monetary form, but the cunning land appropriation by the political elite suggests that land is increasingly valuable, and plotting suggests that is on the cusp of becoming a commodity. Decentralization of government with paper thin answerability may prove as ominous to smallholders as changing weather patterns. The wider question is whether global demand for climate policies has fuelled an authoritarian politics of exception in many countries and has muffled ‘normal’ politics of distribution and accountability.

Facing the combined adversities of climate change, demographic pressure and government capriciousness, the population have reacted by managing their households, by investing and by migration. The chapter on household dynamics is positively fascinating and the kind of work which seems to get rarer in academic literature, possibly because of the demanding data collection. Bambara households were always to the larger side, and Toulmin shows that many households have even grown over the past decades. The largest households have grown from between 30 and 40 members to more than a hundred; indeed, the largest household tallies 185 souls. If rainfall is more erratic, and peak season is shorter, the ability to command labour and call home the youth from Bamako, Côte d'Ivoire, or France to participate in fieldwork will separate the robust households from smaller, over-stretched, ones which will be winnowed out. All households declare to be better off now than 35 years ago, but this testimony comes from the survivors and not the households that became too small to survive.

Generally, all households have invested in equipment since the 1980s. Animal traction for ploughing and transport has eased the burden of many even if work on a farm remains among the most arduous occupations imaginable. The investments depend on cash flow and make migration an integral part of rural livelihoods. The book establishes a distinct pattern of male and female and rural-to-rural versus rural-to-urban migration patterns. While the heads of households kvetch about the young handing over less and less of their earnings to them, the point remains: Migration critically subsidizes agriculture. Regular, seasonal migration allows most of the population to sustain a rural livelihood. If such work migration was blocked, we would soon have a tidal wave of desperate footloose populations on the move.

Toulmin brushes up against two literatures in her book without confronting them directly. On the one hand, the policy debate pours all the world's misfortunes into the same cauldron of a witches' brew of Shakespearian proportions: climate, terror, demography, migration, poverty, corruption and violence. Eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog. Without dismissing any of this, Toulmin takes a longer view, a citizen's view, and pulls together a narrative of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The book also speaks to political ecology. Toulmin combines quantitative data to give a sense of proportion, with descriptive profiles of men and women to understand their different rationalities, their choices and their perception of opportunity and danger. This fastidious structure and agency perspective is a wholesome contribution to political ecology research and a welcome kick in the shins to those who obsess with fast turnover in academic publishing.

Land, Investment and Migration enters the shelves of Tania Li′s The End of the Land and Jacobo Grajales' Agrarian Capitalism, War and Peace in Colombia. It seems to me that books like this have become few and far between. But without a close inspection of the bio-physical resources, and the organization of production and reproduction, it becomes all too easy to create stereotypical avatars of political ecology heroes or faceless inevitable losers. Camilla Toulmin's voice is vibrant and engaged. While scientific, the timbre betrays a deep solidarity with the inhabitants of Dlonguébougou and the wider Sahel. Still, while the subject matter is filtered through her sincere commitment to the plight of the village population, the text stops short of being sentimental, or carelessly optimistic.