Will the 2010 'Code Pastoral' Help Herders in Central Niger? Land Rights and Land Use Strategies in the Grasslands of Abalak and Dakoro Departments

Abstract

Based on a visit to Niger's pastoral zone at the height of the 2010 drought crisis and shortly after the 'Code Pastoral' legislation had been agreed by the interim government, this article compares land use trends in two Tuareg-led administrative communes. The code has been found to be too late and too weak to bring much support to full-time mobile pastoralists, whose livelihoods are increasingly under threat from demographic pressures and the loss of grazing land. Mobility of people and herds persists, not only in relation to herding but also complementary crop farming and the migratory search for paid labour; at the same time sedentarization is also occurring, not only among impoverished herders but even among the administrative elite. Indeed certain herders' leaders are encouraging it as a way of consolidating herders' land rights. This policy, however, entails further loss of grazing land, further squeezing of the only sustainable livelihood in these semi-arid areas, and renders more likely the recurrence of drought-related crisis and the necessity for exceptional mobility and out migration.