Factor Biases and Promoting Sustainable Development: Adaptation to Drought in the Senegal River Basin |
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Authors: | Venema Henry D Schiller Eric J Bass Brad |
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Institution: | 1. Acres International, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada 2. Department of Civil Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 3. Atmospheric Environment Service, Environmental Adaptation Research Group, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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Abstract: | The ongoing drought in the Sahel region of West Africa highlights the vulnerability of food-producing systems to climate change
and variability. Adaptation to climate should therefore increase the sustainability of agriculture under a long-term drought.
Progress towards sustainability and adaptation in the the Senegal River Basin is hampered by an existing set of social and
ecological relationships that define the control over the means of production and how people interact with their environment.
These relationships are sensitive to the technological inputs and the administration of food production, or the factor bias
in the different policy alternatives for rural development. One option is based on state-controlled, irrigated plantations
to provide rice (Oryza) for the capital, Dakar. This policy emphasizes a top-down management approach, mechanized agriculture and a reliance on
external inputs which strengthens the relationships introduced during the colonial period.
A time series decomposition of the annual flow in the Senegal River at Bakel in Senegal suggests that water resources availability
has been substantially curtailed since 1960, and a review of the water resources budget or availability in the basin suggests
that this policy's food production system is not sustainable under the current climate of the basin. Under these conditions,
this program is exacerbating existing problems of landscape degradation and desertification, which increases rural poverty.
A natural resource management policy offers two adaptation strategies that favour decentralized management and a reduction
of external inputs. The first alternative, “Les Perimetres Irrigués”, emphasizes village-scale irrigation, low water consumption
cereal crops and traditional socio-political structures. The second alternative emphasizes farm-level irrigation and agro-forestry
projects to redress the primary effects of desertification. |
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Keywords: | Adaptation agriculture agroforestry climate change drought ecological degradation factor bias Senegal sustainability social relations |
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