From Food Security to Development in the Sahel Region

The Sahel has been always considered a homogeneous region in an environmental and climatic perspective as well as from the agricultural-productive and the economic point of view. Today this statement, that portrayed the Sahelian rural system during the '80s, hides the deep contradictions and un-homogeneities resulting from the policy differences arisen among countries in the last 20 years and driving to a divergence of territorial configuration. In the past, the lack of major natural resources and the difficulty of access to maritime commercial circuits (except from Senegal) caused a development mainly based on the land and the manpower ensured by demographic growth. Actually, studies, methodologies and evidences show that new and interesting dynamics have been started appearing in the Sahel. According to these analyses, the Sahel productive system is more complex than it has been traditionally considered as new crops and emerging sources of income are demonstrating. Moreover, they show that new phenomena are deeply changing the socio-economic context. Considering the region is no more homogeneous in terms of potentials, population distribution and productive systems, the interpretation of new emerging driving forces for food insecurity and vulnerability needs a more holistic approach. In fact, the Sahel has been interested by new phenomena such as the exponential demographic growth, which increasing the anthropic pressure over natural resources fosters rural population to migrate toward urban poles or more developed regions. Moreover, the rural system is experiencing deep changes at administrative (landed estate), institutional (rural codes), biophysical (land degradation) levels. At macro scale, such changes have not been deeply considered by development models, which often remain anchored to the traditional vision of the Sahel based on subsistence economy. At micro scale, research is still working mostly on traditional systems, which seem to best represent the village economy. However, at meso and macro scales, these changes are deeply influencing food security, development and crisis. Nowadays, the Sahel region plays a very important role for the implementation of medium term stability policies in West African Region (WAR). In fact, considering a stable economic recover in Guinea gulf countries will not arise rapidly, the Sahel has started been involving in search of those sustainable development pathways able to conjugate economic development and increasing human pressure.