Bassari, Kédougou region

Agriculture: Cereals and legumes (subsistence). Cotton and irrigated small-scale horticulture (profit).

Mixed income activities: wild plants gathering, art and craft selling, and off-farm employment (dry season).

Livestock: free-range of goats and cows during both seasons.

Credit: Benjamin Klappoth

Change of life, change of farming
Deep socio-economic transformations, such as cash dependency, external agricultural interventions by NGOs, and the loss of traditions, among others, have altered the Bassari way of life and impacted crop diversity and also the management of seeds, water, and soil.

Credit: Anna Porcuna Ferrer

Abandonment of drought-tolerant crops
Bassari traditional staples are harvested by lots of manpower thrive in poor soils and withstand drought. External agricultural interventions are replacing them with fertilized crops with market value and shorter cycles, like cotton, maize, and rice.

Credit: Benjamin Klappoth

Diet changes: from enap to mafe
“Enap”, the Bassari traditional staple dish made with local crops is being substituted by new dishes, like “mafe” – vegetables or meat in peanut sauce served over rice -, which leads to a shift in family nutrition towards market dependency and reduced self-sufficiency.

Multiple factors drive changes in Bassari farming
Bassari farmers in south-eastern Senegal work within an environment of highly variable and interacting climatic, environmental, economic, and political conditions. Drivers of changes in farming practices are multiple, intertwined, rooted in colonial histories, and deeply entangled in the integration of local communities in globalized capitalist economies. Non-climatic drivers are as salient as climatic drivers in guiding farmers’ decisions.

Adaptation actions do not equally benefit all Bassari
Changes in agricultural management practices entail different costs, benefits, and trade-offs for different social groups, with the least vulnerable bearing the benefits and the most vulnerable (i.e., women and poor households) bearing the costs. Gender or access to financial, physical, and natural capitals define who within the community or household can implement and benefit from changes in farming practices.

Trade-offs between responses
Multiple trade-offs exist between changes in farming practices that respond to different stressors. Responses to short-term socio-economic stressors (e.g., adopt cash crops as cotton and small-scale horticulture), could erode access to important assets (e.g., through the abandonment of subsistence drought-resistant crops) and lower future adaptive capacity to climate change.

In the light of climate change, research should reach untapped traditional crops, like fonio and Bambara groundnuts, which can help strengthen locally adapted crop diversity and seed systems, bolstering the resilience of smallholder farming communities.

Agricultural extension projects and NGOs should adopt bottom-up participatory approaches that situate farmers’ knowledge and practices at the center, while including power and gender analyses as a first step for any intervention aiming at fostering local adaptation.

Policies to enhance climate change resilience need to address historical agrarian injustices and embrace the complexity of social and politically contested processes, paying attention to whose knowledge is considered legitimate, and putting local communities at the center.