DROUGHT, AGRICULTURE ANDENVIRONMENT: A CASE STUDY FROM THEGAMBIA, WEST AFRICA

Abstract

THE TROUBLES OF the agricultural sector in Africa are widely acknowledged in the literature, but as to the nature and causes of the problems there is little consensus. The wealth of evidence and the breadth of opinion on constraints on African farmers is testimony to this. Mortimore demonstrates how factors such as drought have wrought havoc for the Nigerian farmer, while Timberlake and Blaikie drawing examples from different parts of Africa have argued that ecological problems now affecting farmers are the product of bad political and managerial decisions.l Bates too has shown the adverse impact of ill-conceived political decision-making on the agricultural sector.2 The importance of indigenous expertise in coping with difficult environments has been demonstrated by Richards, Mortimore and Adams,3 and after the historic neglect of the African smallholder in agricultural policy, the World Bank has accepted that development schemes should increasingly involve indigenous expertise as one means of stimulating growth in the agricultural sector.4 Causal explanations for the crssis in aculture must inevitably vary owing to differences in ie location of research, in levels of generalizationfrom ie continental scale to ie case study and in the approach of researchers from different disciplines and with different objectives. This makes generalization about changes in agriculture both difficult and dangerous and so it became the aim of two field visits to The Gambia, in 1990 and 1991, to investigate more closely the nature and causes of change in farming and to establish if indeed there had been any change. Information on changes in agriculture are, in theory, available from