By Aly Ouattara
KORHOGO, Northern Côte d'Ivoire, Aug 3 2007 (IPS)

No more grass for livestock to graze on. No more water, either. More than 50 stock animals dead. For farmer Samba Diallo, staying in Burkina Faso was no longer an option.

“If I had not left my village, Dori, in northern Burkina Faso, I would have lost my entire herd,” he told IPS. And so, like other farmers from his country – also Mali and Niger – Diallo migrated south to Côte d’Ivoire, setting up a new home in the northern village of Dikodougou four years ago with more than 1,000 head of cattle and 500 head of sheep. “Nature is much more forgiving” in Côte d’Ivoire, he says.

Not so his new neighbours.

Like many migrating stock breeders, Diallo has found himself at odds with settled crop farmers whose harvests are often destroyed by travelling herds. At worst, these disagreements can escalate into deadly conflicts.

Diallo blames his difficulties on the herdsmen he employs to oversee his livestock, saying they don’t always guide the animals to pasture areas designated by land owners – this through laziness or a taste for mischief.

Yaya Sekongo, once a farmer in Bada Farakoro in northern Côte d’Ivoire, has also experienced problems with herdsmen.

“One afternoon, in the middle of the cotton harvest…we were invaded by a herd of cattle. The animals started to graze on the cotton without any herdsman trying to make them leave,” he told IPS.

“I called out to one of them, and he forbade me, in a threatening tone, from touching his animals…I started to chase the cattle. Then, the herdsmen took out their machetes and a fight started between them and us.”

Three of Sekongo’s children and workers were seriously injured in the clash, which took place five years ago.

“The incident was referred to the local administrator…who sent us to the courts,” he recounted. But with the owner of the cattle said to have returned to his country, the matter never went to trial, added Sekongo – who found himself obliged to earn a living through business after this incident.

Nawa Traoré and Lobèko Ouattara, two farmers’ wives, tell of a similar experience in which they found cattle feeding on their crops in the middle of the night. The women fired on the animals, and tied up the herdsmen.

“We decided to get involved…because the actions of stock farmers have harmful consequences for the lives of our families,” said Traoré.

Having a herd of livestock strip a field can be financially ruinous, noted Ouattara: “Families have abandoned farming. Some have had to take their children out of school because of a lack of money to pay for school fees. Divorces have even taken place because of the lack of food.”

The courts did not agree with the two women meting out justice: both have just completed a six-month prison term for their actions.

But, with stock farmers accused of corrupting officials to escape paying for destruction to harvests, crop farmers do sometimes take the law into their own hands; they illegally detain or kill animals, said Korono Silué, a crop farmer at Kaouara in the far north of Côte d’Ivoire.

He does not believe that herdsmen are the only people at fault when crops become grazing grounds.

“We accuse herdsmen of being at the root of the conflicts between stock breeders and crop farmers, but in reality they act with the blessing of their boss – the owner of the livestock, who asks them to lead animals towards…areas where there are plants, so that the animals eat properly,” he said.

Silué also has another bone to pick with stock farmers, whom he accuses of failing to pay all the money owed for use of village water reserves.

The farmers are often asked to pay about 20 cents per head of cattle, with the money going for maintenance of dams.

While the farmers do make payments initially, they stop doing so after a few days; village committees responsible for the water sources then track them down, said Silué.

Parliamentarian Abou Coulibaly Nibi, from Korhogo, says crop farmers must be vigilant concerning the herds, and alert authorities to any unauthorised movement of stock farmers.

He further advocates accelerating the compensation process, to ensure that stock farmers are less able to slip away without paying for the damage wrought by their herds.

But, Nibi also strikes a note of pragmatism, saying the migration of farmers is an age-old occurrence that would be difficult to end completely.

“The cattle will continue to flood into Côte d’Ivoire each year. We should simply…limit the intensity of armed conflicts between stock farmers and crop farmers, as the crop farmer will always have need of the cattle of the stock breeder – and the stock farmer will himself also have need of the products of the crop farmer.”

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