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

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.