Gardening on the Edge: The Social Conditions of Unsustainability on an African UrbanPeripheryAuthor(s): Susanne E. FreidbergSource: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 91, No. 2 (Jun., 2001), pp.349-369Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American GeographersStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3651265 .Accessed: 14/07/2011 14:49

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Gardening on the Edge: The Social Conditions of

Unsustainability on an African Urban Periphery Susanne E. Freidberg

Department of Geography, Dartmouth College

Political ecology has done much to disassemble the dominant narratives used to define, explain, and manage envi- ronmental degradation in Africa. However, it has not seriously challenged a core assumption of these narratives: that the "natural" environment (that is, the environment containing natural resources) is the rural. This article ar- gues for a critical analysis of human-environment relations in and around Africa's cities, not simply because envi- ronmental problems in these areas have been for too long neglected. Such an inquiry also offers insights into the dynamic relationship between local ecological and economic change and the geographically and historically con- structed social institutions governing daily production, exchange, and decision making processes. Drawing on re- search conducted in two market gardening villages outside of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, the article examines how a combination of economic austerity and certain kinds of natural resource deterioration have transformed both the meanings and practices of daily work, thereby undermining potentially useful relations of collaboration and trust, both within and beyond the village. More broadly, this article argues that any analysis of how people cope with increasingly difficult material conditions in Africa's peri-urban areas must consider how local social institutions have been shaped by a history of close urban contact. Key Words: Africa, political ecology, structural adjustment, urban food supply, urban periphery, work.

P olitical ecology has done much to disassemble the dominant narratives used to define, explain, and manage environmental degradation in Africa. How-

ever, it has not seriously challenged a core assumption of these narratives, one that underlies much of the dis- course around Third World sustainable development: that the "natural" environment (that is, the environ- ment containing natural resources) is the rural. One might argue that the "rural bias" of Africanist political ecology has not been misrepresentative, given that most African national economies are in fact still predomi- nantly rural and agrarian. However, as Africa's urban populations grow by 5-10 percent annually-rates as fast as those anywhere in the world (UNCHS 1996)-so too grows the need for critical, historically informed analysis of both the emerging narratives and policies concerning the African urban environment and the con- crete ways in which people experience environmental change in urban areas.

With the notable exception of work from South Af- rica (Koch 1991; Lawson 1991; Wisner 1995) political ecology has had little to say on either front. This neglect is especially striking in light of the well-documented role of urban area natural resources in providing food and fuel for African cities and supporting the livelihoods of many urban area residents. In particular, numerous studies have demonstrated that urban demand for high value, perishable foodstuffs has enabled farmers in densely set-

tled peri-urban zones to get by, and even prosper, on rel- atively little land (Schilter 1991; Guyer 1993; Morti- more 1993; Linares 1996). Indeed, these studies provide compelling evidence of African farmers' capacity to re- spond to market forces, through both innovation and in- tensified production (Guyer 1997). These studies also show how farmers in densely populated urban hinterland zones, due in part to their investments in soil care, have been able to maintain the productivity of small plots sea- son after season, year after year.

Such findings cast doubt on "doomsday" scenarios that presume that increasing population density leads in- evitably to environmental degradation (Mortimore 1993, 391). Most of the existing research on urban hin- terlands, however, was conducted during Africa's late co- lonial and early independence periods, when urban economies offered nearby farming communities both rel- atively lucrative outlets for selling produce and ample sources of off-farm employment. Since the implementa- tion of structural adjustment reform programs through- out the continent in the 1980s, the bright lights of many cities have dimmed. Structural adjustment has brought to Africa's cities not only ongoing austerity, but also heightened uncertainty-both conditions that have forced peri-urban farmers to reconsider production, com- mercialization, and investment strategies. At the same time, many peri-urban agricultural zones are threatened by forms of environmental degradation that urban

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91(2), 2001, p. 349-369 ? 2001 by Association of American Geographers Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Maiden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

Freidberg

planners as well as rural development programs have largely overlooked.

This article examines how a combination of eco- nomic austerity and certain kinds of natural resource de- terioration are threatening small-scale commercial food production in an African peri-urban zone. More broadly, it argues that any analysis of how people cope with in- creasingly difficult material conditions in these zones must examine how social relations of production, distri- bution, and consumption have been shaped by a history of close urban contact. I approach this history through an analysis of the changing meanings of work in two vil- lages just outside of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso's sec- ond largest city. For many of the men and women in these villages, work for several months a year centers on the production and commercialization, respectively, of garden vegetables. These activities are important sources of both dry-season income (now crucial to the food secu- rity of many households) and occupational and gender identity. They are also the activities through which men and women have most directly experienced economic and ecological decline. I intend to show how proximity to the city has not only defined the specialized nature of these villagers' livelihoods, and the specific material threats they face, but also fostered the atomization of daily work and thus, in this particular case, the break- down of potentially useful relations of collaboration and trust both within and beyond the village.

The article proceeds as follows. The following section briefly discusses the historically rural orientation of polit- ical ecology and selectively reviews the scholarly and policy-making literature on African urban environmen- tal problems and urban area food production. Next, I draw on two long-term Nigerian case studies to construct a typology of "close-settled" (Mortimore and Wilson 1965) urban area agricultural zones, and then explain how an analytical focus on the changing meanings of work provides useful insights into the social dynamics of sustainability (or lack thereof) in these zones. The body of the article then presents the results of research carried out in the Bobo-Dioulasso region in 1993-1994.

Rural Bias?

In part, political ecology's neglect of the urban envi- ronment reflects its origins in the fields of rural cultural ecology and agrarian studies; in part, it reflects its targets. In other words, a defining purpose of political ecology re- search over the past several years has been to challenge the "dominant narratives" on Third World environmen- tal problems, as articulated by a wide variety of intera-

tional development, conservationist, and scientific agen- cies (Roe 1991; Jamison 1996). Especially in the case of sub-Saharan Africa, these narratives have focused on the perceived degradation of rural natural resources and its relations to global environmental problems, such as cli- matic warming and biodiversity loss.

Africanist political ecology has challenged these nar- ratives almost exclusively on their own turf. Its initial and ongoing contribution, of course, was to analyze the role of the state, the development industry, and national and international market forces in driving rural soil ero- sion and deforestation (Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brook- field 1987; Little and Horowitz 1987; Moore and Vaughn 1994; Jarosz 1996). Another body of political ecology re- search has shown how cases of environmental "degrada- tion" for which rural people are purportedly responsible (e.g., soil erosion, deforestation) have been misunder- stood and misrepresented (Little 1994; Leach and Mearns 1996). Critical analyses of the "development discourses" themselves have also helped reveal the assumptions about rural people and landscapes informing much of the mainstream environmental science in Africa during and since the colonial era (Williams 1995; Leach and Mearns 1996; Cline-Cole 1998). However, very little scholarly research has taken up the point regularly made by Afri- can and other Third World attendees at major interna- tional environmental conferences: for the increasingly urbanized populations of the Third World, threats to the global biosphere are far less pressing concerns than im- mediate threats to health and habitat, such as unclean water and inadequate sanitation (McCamey 1995). This "rural bias" may be corrected as more political ecology re- search analyzes how African cities consume food and fuel from rural areas (Cline-Cole 1998) as well as how they produce their own (Richardson and Whitney 1995; Linares 1996).

Organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations have also recently begun to pay more attention to urban environmental problems worldwide. For exam- ple, the World Bank made "the human face of the urban environment" the title of its second annual conference on environmentally sustainable development, in 1994 (Serageldin and Cohen 1994). Two years later, the United Nations report An Urbanizing World, written in preparation for the UN Habitat II Conference in Istan- bul in June 1996, agreed that "every one of us has a stake in humanizing the face of the urban environment" (UNCHS 1996, xxii). The World Bank's environmental lending priorities now include a brown agenda focusing on threats to public health and urban "livability" such as air pollution, inadequate waste disposal, and unsafe water supplies. Although only a small proportion of the

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World Bank's urban environmental lending goes to sub- Saharan Africa, several countries-including Ghana, Togo, Burkina Faso, and South Africa-have received multimillion dollar loans from it for urban environmen- tal management or "clean-up" programs (World Bank 1996).

It is too early to assess the effectiveness of these pro- grams, but it is clear that any changes in the quality and availability of urban area natural resources-for better or for worse-will have consequences not only for urban "livability" but also for urban livelihoods and, ultimately, urban food security. In addition to the crops, fruit trees, and livestock raised in urban residential courtyards, roadside gullies, and vacant lots, many African cities have long depended on their intensively cultivated hin- terlands for an important proportion of their food supply, especially for perishable foods. Many studies have docu- mented the history and productivity of these "garden belts" (see, for example, Vennetier 1972, 1977, 1989, 1993; Guyer 1987), while more recent work explores the contributions of urban area agriculture to urban biodi- versity and social life (Linares 1996). However, few studies have explicitly analyzed how urban proximity both poses particular kinds of threats to agrarian liveli- hoods and potentially shapes the ways people cope with those threats.

Existing research does show that innovation and sus- tained high productivity in peri-urban farm areas has been at least partly motivated and made possible by strong urban demand for "European" garden crops and other fresh, relatively costly foodstuffs associated with the urban diet (Resquier-Desjardins 1986). Farmers get- ting high returns from these crops have been willing and able to invest in the ongoing productivity of their land. However, strong demand for the high-value foodstuffs produced in African urban garden belts can no longer be assumed. In many countries, structural adjustment aus- terity measures have eroded urban buying power, raised farmers' production costs, and driven more and more ur- banites into small-scale food production in efforts to gen- erate income and cut their own food costs (Drakakis- Smith 1991; Clark 1994). In other words, when Africa's city-dwellers are told to "tighten their belts," peri-urban commercial farmers also feel the squeeze. When urban markets remain depressed for years (as has often been the case in countries undertaking SAPs; see Walton and Seddon 1994), livelihood strategies that once seemed economically and socially rewarding may have to be re- assessed and modified, if not abandoned altogether. Such reassessments are likely to affect how people work to- gether, as well as how they invest in the maintenance of both local social institutions and the natural resource base.

In the next section of this article, two long-term Nige- rian case studies will show just how closely the liveli- hoods of commercial food producers in peri-urban zones are linked, for better or worse, to the dynamism of urban markets. These case studies also suggest that, although such livelihoods are not necessarily headed for a neo- Malthusian demise, their sustainability depends on the existence of certain social as well as economic and eco-

logical conditions.

Dynamism and Intensification on Africa's Urban Peripheries

Labor-Intensive Sustainability

Michael Mortimore's study of Hausa village commu- nities in the densely populated countryside north of Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, spans the pe- riod between 1964 and 1986 (Mortimore and Wilson 1965; Mortimore 1993, 1995). This period encompasses the oil boom years of the 1970s, when Nigeria's cities and overall economy experienced extraordinary growth rates. Still, the agricultural practices and household economic

strategies that Mortimore observed were not unlike those found in peri-urban communities elsewhere in Africa. In addition, they were affected by climatic patterns felt

throughout the Sahel between the late 1960s and mid- 1980s-namely, periodic drought and a gradual decline in annual rainfall (Mortimore 1998, chapter 2).

Mortimore (1965) defined Kano's peri-urban zone as an area extending approximately 30 km from the city, or about as far as it is possible to travel in a day by foot or

donkey. In the early 1960s, population density in this zone was an estimated 250/km2; by the late 1980s, it was estimated to have doubled. This zone occupies part of a broader close-settled zone, extending 65 to 95 kilometers out, where average population density was somewhat less than in the inner ring but considerably more than in rural northern Nigeria.

Arable land in the peri-urban zone was already under constant cultivation in the 1960s. Although dry-land farming was limited to the rainy season, lowland (or fad- ama) agriculture was perennial and oriented towards the

production of commercial horticultural crops. Fadama landholdings were small-a tenth of a hectare or less- but four times more valuable than upland fields. Dry-season production on these small plots was labor-intensive, due in part to the time and effort required for drawing well water. The majority of farming households in the peri- urban communities during this time were not self-sufficient in grain. Money to buy food came from sales of crops

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grown on fadama land, as well as from household mem- bers' off-farm occupations. Not surprisingly, households in the communities closest to Kano (10 km or less) had the smallest and most intensively cultivated landhold- ings and depended the most on off-farm income.

Two decades later, urban residential neighborhoods had spread to parts of the peri-urban zone, creating a "mosaic" of land-use patterns. In the areas still devoted to agriculture, farming methods had changed little, and yields of most crops remained relatively stable except during years of severe drought. Although soil fertility on upland fields was not tested, Mortimore (1993) empha- sized that, by the 1980s, fields in this zone had been ma- nured and annually cultivated for at least a century, with no observable long-term decline in yields. Despite the enormous urban demand for fuelwood, tree density in the peri-urban zone had actually increased, because trees planted there were valued and protected by their owners (Mortimore 1993, 374-75). As before, household in- comes were highly diversified.

Mortimore's study showed that, although small land- holders in the peri-urban zone certainly did not live off farming alone, farming was worth enough to them in terms of the food, income, and social status it provided to justify ongoing investments of labor and capital. These investments helped maintain relatively stable yields, demonstrating that under the right economic conditions, in- tensive agriculture in densely settled urban hinterland regions can be and has been sustained for generations. Such conditions include not only the proximity of strong markets, but also the availability of farm labor and off- farm employment.

Niche Dynamism

Also in Nigeria, Jane Guyer (1997) traced agrarian change in the "hinterland supply area" of Ibadan, Nige- ria's second largest city, between 1968 and 1988. Her re- search focused on Idere, a small Yoruba town 60 km from the city. Although at this distance the town was not di- rectly affected by urban pollution or residential sprawl, it was closely linked to urban markets, and it saw a signifi- cant increase in both commercial production and de- mand for farmland, especially during the oil boom. Both increases were driven not only by in-migration and nat- ural population growth, but also by the new or expanded farming activities of corporate agribusiness, urban retir- ees, and, above all, women. Guyer's use of life histories provides insights into the social and material conditions that informed people's decisions about farming during the study period. For example, these accounts showed that many of the women who took up farming during the

oil boom did so in response to improved transportation and strong urban demand for cassava (Guyer 1997, chap- ter 9). Even after the boom ended, both women and young men continued to take up food farming because, given that urban food prices were still high, it appeared the best route to security, if not necessarily prosperity.

Guyer (1997) also examined village crop specializa- tion in the Ibadan hinterland. All the villages in the study increased production of high-demand crops; they also each became increasingly specialized in the crops for which they were best known, in order to assure regular visits from large-scale buyers. This observation is impor- tant because it demonstrates that, while peri-urban com- mercial agriculture (and market gardening especially) is in many ways more "individualistic" than staple food production, an individual farmer's access to markets often depends at least partly on village-level coordina- tion. The same is true (although Guyer does not mention it explicitly) of village farmers' access to state or nongov- ernmental organization-provided credit and technical assistance: membership in a producers' cooperative or other village group is often necessary, or at least helpful. In short, the willingness of small-scale commercial farmers to coordinate certain activities or decisions with their neighbors can pay off, by bringing their village or region more business and greater recognition. As Guyer (1997, 173) notes, "the historical process of local concentration on a narrow spectrum of crops is not only shaped by eco- logical suitability; it reflects a collective investment in reputation." This article will make clear, however, that village communities' willingness to make such collective investments cannot be taken for granted.

Together with a number of other shorter-term studies (Raynaut 1969; Vennetier 1972, 1977, 1989; Freeman 1991; Egziabher 1995; Linares 1996), Mortimore's and Guyer's research in Nigeria shows that African peri-urban agriculture zones share a number of general characteris- tics. First, compared to rural areas, population density in them is high and typically increasing more rapidly than that elsewhere. Second, landholdings are often too small to provide for household self-sufficiency in grain supplies (this is not necessarily the case in more distant urban hinterlands); partly for that reason, household and even individual sources of income tend to be highly diversi- fied. Third, commercial production on very small plots- sometimes 1/10 ha or less-is often an important, even primary source of income for households in peri-urban areas. Fourth, land-use regulations in these areas may be ineffectual or nonexistent, and land tenure rights ambig- uous and contested. Under such conditions, the steward- ship of land in fragile areas, such as riverbanks, is by no means guaranteed. In some cases, local efforts at steward-

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ship may be undermined by pollution, erosive run-off patterns, or other environmental problems generated in nearby urban areas. Finally, while peri-urban farming households may depend less directly on the market econ- omy for survival than do landless city-dwellers, their farming livelihoods are very clearly affected by changes in urban consumer demand and labor markets.

In material terms, then, peri-urban agricultural zones occupy a unique space, in that they are simultaneously sustained and imperiled by the dynamics of the urban economy. However, simply analyzing the economic link- ages between the city and its peripheral zones will not re- veal much about how urban proximity has shaped liveli- hoods in the latter. Nor will such an analysis adequately explain how and why agrarian livelihoods in such zones might or might not be sustained in the face of rising pop- ulation density. To answer these questions, we must also examine how the local social institutions organizing daily production, exchange, and decision-making pro- cesses have themselves been shaped by people's experi- ences living close to a city. In any particular peri-urban community, such institutions include (but are not lim- ited to) the residential household, marriage, the kin group, age or gender-based labor exchange groups, mar- keting cooperatives, rotating credit associations, and the various legal and normative codes regulating trade, em- ployment, and credit relations both within and beyond the community. As illustrated by historian Sara Berry's works on African agrarian change, such institutions have not only "shaped strategies of agricultural production and investment; [they] have been affected, in turn, by farmers' patterns of resource use" (Berry 1989, 41; 1993). This dynamic relationship between economic practices and the meanings and forms of social institutions is em- bedded in, and thus acting upon, the specificities of place and location. Precisely how is an empirical question (Massey 1994).

Material Change and the Meanings of Work

The methodological challenge here is to identify a co- herent means of analyzing and representing the dynamic relationship among practice, place, and culturally in- formed social institutions over time. Although the social science literature on institutions is now quite substantial, place is largely absent from most analyses.1 This article will focus on the changing practices and meanings of work in order to understand how individuals, house- holds, and communities have experienced ecological and economic change on an urban periphery. Moreover, it will demonstrate how these experiences, like work it-

self, are not only place-specific (Batterbury, Forsyth, and Thomson 1997) but also shaped by age, gender, and socioeconomic status (Freidberg 1996a).

The analysis of changing work practices in two peri- urban villages shows how external changes of varying scale and speed-such as gradual shifts in upstream water use and run-off patterns, and relatively sudden market downturns brought on by national-level economic aus- terity measures-have influenced daily uses of time and material resources, as well as the social organization of production and distribution. Some of these changes in

practices are common to peri-urban zones and other areas of rapidly increasing population density. The shift towards smaller plots and more individualized labor pro- cesses, for example, has been widely documented (Turner, Hyden, and Kates 1993; Bilsborrow and Geores 1994; Tiffen, Gichuki, and Mortimore 1994). However, demographic pressures alone cannot explain the specific trajectories and consequences of such trends. Rather, a thorough understanding of how people work with chang- ing material conditions, in ways that may or may not sus- tain their existing livelihoods and resource base, requires a more holistic definition and analysis of work itself. To borrow a popular term, work is about "making a living," and in that sense it takes on many meanings (Wallman 1979; Godelier 1980; Feeley-Hamik 1987; Joyce 1987). The analysis here focuses on three of these.

First, work means duty. Individuals perform labor in order to fulfill their various social roles as, for example, spouses, parents, children, and employees. Each role in- volves not just responsibilities but also rights, both of which define access to resources as well as the social or- ganization of the labor process (Carey and Watts 1990). Equally important, norms about rights and responsibili- ties define how people in a particular social context as- sess and value each other's work. For example, in every society norms about maternal responsibilities condition attitudes towards (and definitions of) "women's work." Through what experiences, in and beyond the work- place, do these norms emerge and change? How do nor- mative shifts in turn lead to broader changes in the prac- tices and social organization of daily work? A key research objective in this study was to identify the rela- tionship between specific changes in the material condi- tions of work and the ongoing (and often contested) re- definition of specific kinds of "customary" duties, such as the duty of senior men to provide grain for their households.

Work in the second sense means occupation, and thus serves as a source of identity. Few historical studies of the meanings of work have examined occupational identities in agrarian societies, the assumption being that peasants' labor processes are neither highly specialized nor sepa-

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rated from other aspects of daily existence. In West Af- rica, however, many predominantly agrarian societies have long been incorporated into regional and long- distance trade networks, and their cultural norms clearly define the skills and social status defining occupations such as vegetable trader, cocoa farmer, or weaver. More- over, Africa's colonial economies very quickly produced additional specialized occupational identities in both urban and rural areas (Atkins 1993; Harries 1994; Cooper 1995).

In the Bobo-Dioulasso region, for example, the occu- pation of maraicher (commercial gardener) became a pro- fessional category recognized on official identity cards. More substantively, it became a profession that drew on customary skills, but also drew villagers more deeply into the expanding urban-based monetary economy as both producers and consumers of commodities associated with moder urban living.2 It also eventually became a dis- tinctly male occupation, but one that often depended on female household members for assistance with commer- cialization (Freidberg 2001). Finally, because dry season commercial gardening was feasible only on riversides and floodplains, it became an occupation associated with par- ticular villages. In these villages, other specialized occu- pations developed around the gardens and the income they generated-for example, many women became veg- etable wholesalers.

Over time, market gardening has become not only a much more common but also a harder and less lucrative occupation than it used to be. One important conse- quence of this change is that, in the villages examined here, gardening is no longer an occupation to which many young men aspire. Instead, most see it as an income- earning activity they would rather practice temporarily or part-time, if at all. This attitude in turn affects indi- vidual, household, and community willingness to invest in sustainability. By contrast, the relative wealth and au- tonomy associated with women's vegetable wholesaling has not only reinforced the commitment and relative solidarity of established wholesalers, it has also made their occupation an attractive goal of many market gar- deners' wives, which in turn has affected their willing- ness to work for their husbands.

Third and last, this analysis examines the meanings of work in relation to consumption (Rutz and Orlove 1989; Fine and Leopold 1993). In other words, if work is about "making a living," what standard of living does it sup- port? How well does it allow people to meet their daily needs and long-term goals and to achieve, by local stan- dards, the "good life?" Questions about consumption practices served three purposes. First, they provided in- sights into both historical change and intravillage (and to a certain extent intrahousehold) differences in mate-

rial living standards and dependence on the urban mar- ket economy. Although inexact, most peoples' accounts of how they spent their past and present earnings were markedly more revealing (and readily revealed) than fig- ures on the earnings themselves. Second, these questions helped illuminate the multilayered relationship between consumption and production practices. In other words, consumption even at its most basic level-eating-sustains not only the labor force but also a range of social rela- tions among those who "share the same bowl" (Robert- son 1984). In turn, these relationships are often crucial to the viability of certain labor processes and, indeed, certain livelihoods (Weismantel 1991; Clark 1994). Third, questions about consumption shed light on local standards of "the good life." Clearly these standards change; in contemporary Africa they have arguably changed most dramatically in and around urban areas, where material wealth is most apparent and public ser- vices typically most accessible. However, daily earnings- the returns to daily work-have also changed. Years of economic stagnation and austerity have left many liveli- hoods less remunerative relative to the cost of living. This is especially true of the numerous occupations (among them commercial vegetable gardening) that de-

pend on urban consumers having a modicum of "dispos- able" income.

Many of the men and women interviewed in this study perceived a direct relationship between the deteri- oration of urban demand and the deterioration of their own material living standards. This material decline had social consequences. For example, many male household heads noted that their declining incomes as gardeners made it more difficult not only to pay for staple foods, school fees and so forth, but also to display generosity- for example, by giving their wives and children the tradi- tional holiday gift of fine cloth, or throwing lavish holi- day festivals. Although not essential to their immediate survival, these forms of consumption and redistribution served to reinforce the intra- and extrahousehold bonds of loyalty and obligation that gardeners relied upon both to accomplish their day-to-day work and to pull through periods of hardship. In other words, the decline of these consumption practices had potentially direct conse- quences for the sustainability of gardening livelihoods.

In sum, deteriorating economic and environmental conditions have made market gardening in the peri-urban zone of Bobo-Dioulasso more difficult and less remunera- tive. By analyzing how these material difficulties also changed the meanings of work (as a duty, a source of identity, and a means of supporting consumption) this study shows how, in two villages, such changes under- mined the social basis of sustainable market gardening.

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Gardening on the Edge

Gardens on the Edge

Research Site and Methods

This article draws on field research conducted in and around Bobo-Dioulasso, the second largest city in Burkina Faso (pop. 400,000) (Figure 1). "Bobo" lies in the Sudanic savanna climatic zone of West Africa, and receives approximately 1100 mm of rainfall annually

(compared to 600 or less in the north of the country). The close-settled zone, defined by a higher population density than neighboring rural areas and the daily urban commute patterns of its residents, extends approximately 20-25 km out from the city. The river Houet originates from a spring several kilometers to the southeast of Bobo- Dioulasso and runs through the center of town. To the north, the Houet and the river Kou provide water for the close-settled zone's "garden belt," where men (and occa-

Figure 1. Burkina Faso.

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Freidberg

sionally women) from dozens of villages cultivate dry season riverside and floodplain vegetables plots, prima- rily for the Bobo-Dioulasso market (Sanou 1989).

The two gardening villages featured in this study, Sak- aby and Dogona, lie just five kilometers from the center of Bobo-Dioulasso, on adjacent sides of the Houet (Fig- ures 2, 3). Although they differ in some ways-most of Dogona's market gardeners are Muslim, whereas Sakaby's are mostly Catholic-the two villages' differences matter less for the purposes of this article than do their similari- ties. In particular, as close neighbors they share a long and relatively well documented history in commercial gardening,3 as well as a common set of ecological prob- lems. Both Sakaby and Dogona are also now officially a part of the municipality of Bobo-Dioulasso, meaning that census data on them is unavailable. However, even as rezoning and urban residential growth have blurred the boundaries between the city and the villages, the lat- ter still have architecturally distinct "old quarters" where the descendants of the villages' founders live. These long- time residents invariably identify themselves as villagers rather than city-dwellers. Gardening in Sakaby and Dog- ona is primarily an occupation of men from these founding families, as they have customary rights to the riverside land. By contrast, in more remote commercial gardening sites in the Bobo-Dioulasso hinterlands, most if not all the growers are first- or second-generation migrants.

Fieldwork in Sakaby and Dogona relied primarily on semistructured interviews of women, men, and adolescent children in fifty households4 that a preliminary survey had identified as having at least one member actively en- gaged in market gardening.5 Discussion centered for the most part on work: what people did, how long they had been doing it, with what kinds of labor and material re- sources, and towards what ends. I was particularly inter- ested in different accounts of how and why intra- and extra- household relations of production and distribution had changed over time. In addition to the interviews with ac- tive participants in market gardening, in-depth, open- ended interviews with twenty-two village elders pro- vided historical information on the villages themselves as well on their participation in commercial gardening. The relevant findings from this village-based fieldwork are presented in a summary, narrative form.

A later phase of fieldwork, based in Bobo-Dioulasso it- self, focused on the local, regional, and export trade in garden vegetables. Interviews with women retailers and wholesalers at two urban marketplaces provided insights into the local history and contemporary "gender politics" of food, cooking, and mealtimes. I also conducted inter- views with a small number of local, relatively large-scale exporters of fresh fruits and vegetables, who had recently

undertaken contract relations with growers in several villages further out in the Bobo-Dioulasso close-settled zone. These export operations were fraught with difficul- ties, but they did offer what many growers say they des- perately need: access to bigger and higher-priced markets (Freidberg 1996b, 1997). The exporters' explanations of why they chose to work with particular villages and growers indicated that gardeners in Sakaby and Dogona were not well positioned, either geographically or so- cially, to participate in contracted export production.

"The Cultivating People"

Although the population of the Bobo-Dioulasso re- gion is ethnically diverse, nearly all the gardening house- holds in Sakaby and Dogona identify themselves as Bobo or, if they are Muslim, as Bobo-Dioula.6 Except for the small blacksmith and griot castes, most Bobo have his- torically defined themselves as the san-san, the "cultivat- ing people" (Sanou 1990). At the turn of the century, grain production on common patrilineage land provided the primary means of sustenance for lineage members and the material basis of authority for male elders. Al- though reliable information about precolonial gender roles in agriculture is scarce, it is clear that men and women both cultivated-sometimes alongside kin mem- bers, sometimes with members of their age sets during periodic work parties. Unlike those in parts of Africa sometimes referred to as the "female farm belt" (Boserup 1970), however, Bobo women have not historically been expected to assume major or even equal responsibility for the production of staple foods (as opposed to comple- mentary foods) as long as male labor is available. Partly due to the influence of Islam on Bobo gender ideologies, especially in villages near Bobo-Dioulasso, male house- hold heads often seek to minimize-in fact or at least in appearance-the participation of their wives and kins- women in household agricultural production (Freidberg 2001). However, women were and are expected to par- ticipate in seeding, due to their symbolic association with fertility, and to prepare and carry meals to the fields (Saul 1991).

During the rainy season, most able-bodied lineage members are expected to devote five days a week to cul- tivation of a common plot. In principle, both women and junior men also have usufruct rights to private plots, though women have generally not had access to land along the river. In the past, private plots were planted with crops suitable for either trade or home consumption, such as groundpeas, beans, peppers, tobacco, and sorghum (for beer brewing). Today, the types and uses of the crops planted on dryland plots still vary, but riverside land is

356

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Gardening on the Edge

nearly always devoted to "European" garden vegeta- bles. According to Bobo custom, the person with current use rights to a plot also has rights to any income from the sale of its produce. By contrast, the millet produced on common fields is controlled and distributed by male lin- eage heads. Earlier in the twentieth century, many lineages in this region were more than self-sufficient in grain pro- duction, and lineage elders stored the surpluses in their granaries for emergencies, gifts, and ceremonial feasts. To have several full granaries demonstrated an elder's ca- pacity to recruit labor and display generosity; it showed he enjoyed wealth and power (Le Moal 1980).

Besides the obvious value of abundant production, skill and industriousness in the field traditionally earned men of any age high esteem. The Bobo respected the farmer who increased yields through labor-intensive techniques such as careful weeding, mounding, and ridg- ing (Saul 1993). The use of such methods often reflected a farmer's wealth of family labor, but agricultural skill- prowess, of sorts-was valued even in young unmarried men. It proved their strength, their ability to provide for a future family, even their occult power.7 One admittedly nostalgic account of the precolonial period notes that a man did not need to be handsome to find a wife; "work was the only consideration" (Gnankambary 1970, 58). Today, Bobo elders recall men who succeeded during the early years of market gardening simply by working inces- santly "day and night." Among the younger generation, men's demonstrated strength and skill in farming (in- cluding gardening) still commands respect, but few believe that these qualities alone are enough to assure individual commercial success. Indeed, the fact that hard work and skill now seem to count for relatively little contributes to many gardeners' bitterness about their own economic circumstances.

One central meaning of market gardening, therefore, has been the status attached to the achievements of indi- vidual gardeners. In addition, the monetary value of mar- ket gardening, both actual and anticipated, has figured importantly in the ongoing renegotiation of intragenera- tional authority relations. In the Bobo system of dual de- scent, male and female elders historically controlled most of the wealth, as well as the inheritance and mar- riage arrangements of both their patrilineal and matrilin- eal kin.8 Until the midcolonial period, this oligarchic concentration of wealth and power both reinforced and was reinforced by the elders' ability to secure labor for ag- ricultural production and, in the case of women, group gathering activities (Saul 1992). However, the introduction of new sources of cash income-first military service and later trade and employment in the civil service or the Catholic Mission-broadened the "off-farm" avenues for

accumulation and achievement, especially for young men (Saul 1986). In other words, colonialism brought not only new activities but also new meanings to work, in- cluding the possibility of economic autonomy earlier in life.

The elders did not necessarily lose authority over their offspring, but retaining their labor did become more challenging. In late colonial Sakaby and Dogona, the male elders' control over riverside land-which com- mercial gardening had made newly valuable-helped keep sons in the village during the dry season when they might otherwise have sought work in town or the C6te d'Ivoire. Adolescent and young adult men knew that if they worked in their fathers' gardens they would not only have their immediate needs provided for, they would also eventually receive a plot of their own. Nonetheless, as will become clear below, the declining economic and ecological conditions of market gardening in the 1980s not only undermined the ability of fathers to provide for the immediate needs of their sons (or other dependents), it also threw into question the future of market gardening as a viable livelihood for their sons. For both generations, retaining sons' labor in the fathers' gardens appeared a less sure route to either present or future economic secu- rity. As young men looked elsewhere for such security, the fathers' gardens-as sites of daily work and forms of patrilineal property-no longer served to reproduce intragenerational authority relations.

Less Water, More Work

Contrary to what recent United Nations reports on worldwide trends in peri-urban agriculture might suggest (Smit 1996; FAO 1999) neither urban development planning nor land- market pressures pose a direct threat to commercial gardening in Sakaby and Dogona. Al- though the current government of Burkina Faso now en- courages official land titling (Gray forthcoming), it still recognizes customary claims. Such claims are disputed throughout the country and often end up in the court system, but lineage rights to the riverine lands of Sakaby and Dogona-like those in other areas that have been continually inhabited or cultivated by members of the same lineages since they were first cleared-are rarely challenged.9

Moreover, the municipal government of Bobo-Dioulasso has designated the riverside land and surrounding villages north of the city as a protected zone maraichere (market gardening zone). The protected status of the gardens reflects the Bobo-Dioulasso Department of Urbanism's relatively recent efforts to incorporate environmental considerations into its urban growth planning (Ministere de l'equipement 1992). It also reflects the long-standing political and social

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Freidberg

prominence of the lineages that founded Bobo-Dioulasso and surrounding villages. In Sakaby and Dogona, more and more residents are seeking formal title to-and sometimes selling-their dryland holdings, which are a few kilometers away from the villages themselves. As of the mid-1990s, however, few villagers had sought title for their gardens, and in fact one man who had was viewed with suspicion.10 Elders of Sakaby and Dogona made clear that they would disapprove even more strongly of any sales of garden land, which holds considerable sym- bolic value, regardless of the revenue it generates."1

In other words, the threats to market gardening liveli- hoods in these villages are more creeping and diffuse than the threat of land loss through seizure or forced sale. The deteriorating ecological conditions, in particular, have been gradual, and they affect different members of the vil- lage communities in different ways. Some, but not all of these ecological changes are direct effects of urbanization.

For the men tending gardens in Sakaby and Dogona, the poor water supply poses the most consistent hard- ship day to day. The water table, which once filled the village wells and kept the garden soils damp, has dropped, and the river Houet has dug itself into a deep steep--sided gully. The gardeners have two explanations for both phenomena: first, it rains less than in years past, and second, more people upstream are sucking the river dry. Annual rainfall since the mid-1960s has de- clined somewhat (Laclavere 1993), and certainly the number of households, farms and industries drawing water from the Houet has increased (Bobo-Dioulasso's annual growth rate is 7.2 percent). However, these trends alone do not explain the gullied river, which is primarily a consequence of the changing run-off pat- terns that have come with urbanization. In particular, run-off from intense rainy season storms flows quickly down Bobo-Dioulasso's streets, lightly vegetated open spaces, and drainage ditches into the Houet, helping to create an erosive torrent.

Whereas some villages in the close-settled zone have abandoned dry season gardening altogether due to the drop in the water table, the problem for gardeners in Sak- aby and Dogona is not absolute scarcity, but rather the enormous amount of time and effort they now must de- vote to watering their vegetables. Their views of this work are very much shaped by reference to the past. El- ders in these villages recall that when they first began dry season gardening, the soil stayed damp longer and the Houet ran higher, so watering amounted to nothing more difficult than tossing gourds of water directly from the river onto the crops every two or three days. Their memories may be colored by nostalgia, but they do de- scribe dramatically different conditions of work than

those today. Now, gardeners water in the early morning and again in the late afternoon, and during the hottest

parts of March and April they may even have to water three times daily. Although some gardeners use motorized

pumps to pull water out of the river into small holding pools, most cannot afford to buy these petrol-powered machines, much less run and maintain them, and so in- stead use large watering cans. All agree that hauling water by hand out of the gully for hours each day is much more strenuous than the day-to-day work of rainy season grain cultivation, and too hard for many older men to do at all. In short, this is an environmental problem they ex-

perience daily and very physically. It is also a problem unlikely to be addressed anytime

soon, given the priorities of the state and its foreign financiers (Marcussen and Speirs 1998). Although a num- ber of urban infrastructure projects in Burkina have re- ceived funding from the World Bank and other donors over the past several years, most have taken place in the

capital city, Ouagadougou (Jaglin 1994). At the local level, the Bobo-Dioulasso Ministry of Urbanism has pub- lished documents acknowledging erosion along the banks of the Houet (Ministere de l'equipement 1992). However, this is clearly not its most pressing environ- mental concern; derelict water lines, abysmal roads, hap- hazard waste disposal, and industrial pollution all pose more immediate threats to public health and safety, as well as to the city's efforts to encourage investment and tourism. At the regional and national level, soil and water conservation programs-many of them funded by the World Bank and the Caisse Francaise-are focused on projects in rural areas, many of them planned and im- plemented at the village level (Batterbury 1994; Gray forthcoming).

A second kind of environmental change in Sakaby and Dogona, especially noticeable to the older gardeners, is the land's declining capacity to produce certain vege- tables. For example, yields of tomatoes, once considered an easy and often lucrative crop, are now so poor that few gardeners even plant them. A local plant epidemiologist who paid a brief visit to the Sakaby gardens in 1994 said this was "probably" a case of long-neglected soil diseases, but neither he nor any of his colleagues at a nearby agri- cultural research station had actually inspected the soil conditions in the peri-urban gardens in recent memory. This neglect is itself significant: both the research station and the provincial agricultural ministry have horticultural specialists on staff, and the Bobo-Dioulasso region has long been considered the national center for vegetable-crop research and extension services (D'Arondel de Hayes and Huyez 1972). However, local expertise is focused on the market gardening sites farther from the city, where

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Gardening on the Edge

plots tend to be larger and the potential for expansion and intensification deemed greater.

A third form of environmental change, one especially important to women, is the loss of trees and shrubs throughout the urban hinterland. Compared to the close-settled zone around Ouagadougou, Bobo's is still a verdant patchwork of small state-protected forests and private orchards. However, certain useful species have become noticeably scarcer, according to the women who have long depended on them for fuelwood, wild food, and medicinal plants, both to use and to sell.12 As in the gardens, this scarcity translates into more work-in this case, longer forays into the bush. Some women have sim- ply given up gathering activities altogether and now buy all their provisions in the city's marketplaces.

So the most pressing environmental problems of peri- urban villagers-the ones that force them to work longer and harder even to maintain the same yields-are in part attributable to climatic trends and in part to inadequate soil care, but they are also very much related to urbanization. Clearly environmental conditions are always changing one way or another, oftentimes for reasons well beyond lo- cal control. Therefore the key empirical question is what people do about these changes, and how their actions are shaped by (and in some sense shaping) historically and culturally constituted relations of power and production.

In Sakaby and Dogona, people's actions, as much as the environmental problems themselves, have been shaped by their relationship to the city. Whereas studies of other peri-urban areas have found proximity to urban markets and access to urban employment advantageous for smallholder communities-crucial, sometimes, to their staying on the land-in this case the opposite has proven true. In Sakaby and Dogona, individual and household coping strategies over the past two decades have undermined the social institutions through which villagers in this region have historically mobilized a wide variety of resources, and through which market gardeners in particular have affirmed their commitment to their work. These institutions vary widely in scale and formality, from the customs of intrahousehold gift-giving as a form of labor compensation to long-term credit relationships between farmers and traders to state-sanctioned marketing cooperatives. The weakening of these institutions-and the concomitant atomization of daily work-both re- flects and, I believe, contributes to the deteriorating eco- nomic and ecological viability of market gardening. In other words, it undermines the local social conditions of sustainability: the conditions that motivate and enable people of a particular locality to take actions in defense of particular livelihoods. The rest of the article illustrates this argument. After a brief overview of the boom and

near-bust of market gardening in Sakaby and Dogona, I discuss the relationship between processes of material de- cline and the degeneration of several distinct, though overlapping, social institutions.

Salad Days

The reference point of decline for the villagers is the

period just after World War II until about the mid-1960s, a period some older gardeners refer to as the "honeymoon years." The colonial agricultural ministry introduced the

crops and methods of European-style intensive gardening to the area in the 1920s as a form of compulsory cultivation, intended mainly to provision the dinner tables of local French administrators. In fact, Sakaby was home to a small forced-labor vegetable plantation, known euphe- mistically as the jardin publique.13 Only after the official abolition of compulsory labor in 1946 were men in Sakaby and Dogona able to take advantage of the specialized skills they had been forced to acquire and become the re-

gion's first "professional" market gardeners. These gardeners relied primarily on sons and nephews

to help them in their gardens. (Although during these

early years at least some women helped water their hus- bands' or fathers' gardens, they soon withdrew from this task and instead took over the marketing of household garden produce.14) As compensation, it was understood that sons would eventually receive a garden plot of their own, usually at marriage. On days women took their hus- bands' or kinsmen's produce to market, they were al- lowed to spend some of the earnings on "sauce" ingredients, such as spices, oil, and vegetables. These were foods women were expected to provide (complementing men's

expected provision of staple grains) and would otherwise have had to obtain through gathering and processing or barter. Husbands also typically gave their wives gifts of cloth or cash at the end of the gardening season. Overall, compensating family members for their labor was rela-

tively easy, partly because watering still did not take much time or effort and thus interfered little with indi- viduals' own domestic and trade activities.

By all accounts, earning the revenue needed to com-

pensate family members was also easier during the post- war "honeymoon" period. Because at the time the Sak-

aby and Dogona gardeners were among the few producers of "European" vegetables, they had little difficulty find-

ing buyers. Bobo-Dioulasso's elite consumers included not only European expatriates but also African war vet- erans and civil servants, many of whom had adopted at least certain aspects of the "Westernized" diet. Popular consumption of garden vegetables also increased during this period, as street vendors, canteens, and bar-restaurants

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began to offer European-influenced meals and snacks. Gardeners' efforts to produce both the quality and quantity of fresh produce demanded by the city's rapidly growing population was encouraged by the provincial colonial administration, which provided seeds and technical as- sistance and held annual market fairs, giving prizes to the growers with the finest vegetables.

For the first time, market gardeners found themselves able to buy goods for themselves and their family that once only city people had owned: imported cloth, house- wares, tin roofs, bicycles, even mopeds. For Bobo men, long renowned as hardworking and skilled cultivators (Saul 1991), market gardening represented a "moder," commercially rewarding, yet culturally meaningful way to fulfill their roles as food producers and family providers. In short, European-style gardening, once an activity as- sociated with forced labor, took on new meanings in the postwar period. It became an occupation that fulfilled both customary responsibilities and relatively recent ma- terial desires, and was considered by many men prefera- ble to wage labor in the Ivory Coast-even, some said, preferable to salaried government work.

Hard Times

The salad days did not last. Gardeners in Sakaby and Dogona began to notice the falling water levels and dete- riorating banks of the river Houet in the early 1970s. At the time, most belonged to a recently accredited gardeners' cooperative, so some men took advantage of their mem- bership to purchase subsidized motor-pumps from the state-run union of gardening cooperatives (Union regionale des cooperatives agricoles et maraicheres de Bobo- Dioulasso, URCABO). However, they were motivated at least as much by the desire to increase their output as by any concerns about the river, which in any case was dropping only gradually.

In the early 1980s, the economic conditions of market gardening began to deteriorate along with the water supply. The coup d'etat of the self-proclaimed revolutionary so- cialist Thomas Sankara in 1983 disrupted the important tomato trade with Togo and the Ivory Coast and provoked a minor exodus of expatriates and business elites (Labazee 1988). Even before Sankara, the population of affluent and Westernized consumers most inclined to buy green beans and lettuce had been drifting out of Bobo-Dioulasso and towards the increasingly primate city of Ouagadougou, which had replaced Bobo as the capital of independent Upper Volta in 1960 (Skinner 1974; Engelbert 1996).

Shortly before Sankara was assassinated in 1987, he set Burkina Faso on a course of "auto-adjustment," which further squeezed the market gardeners. Salary freezes and

benefit cuts reined in the buying power of civil servants, while the deregulation of fertilizer prices raised production costs. By the time Sankara's successor Blaise Campaore agreed to a World Bank adjustment plan in 1991, com- mercial gardeners were experiencing what they described as une chute in market demand, as consumers cut back on purchases of nonessential foodstuffs. The 50 percent de- valuation of the West African franc (FCFA) in January 1994 did not help matters any. Nor did it help that more and more villagers, as well as city-dwellers, had taken up market gardening over the past several years (Bosch 1985). Now, the days when the gardeners of Sakaby and Dogona had the urban market to themselves are decidedly over. These days, according to both gardeners and the women selling vegetables in town, "there are more pro- ducers than consumers." And these days, in those first villages to specialize in market gardening, producers find, not only that their market is increasingly saturated, but that their daily work is increasingly grueling.

Higher costs, slower sales, soil exhaustion, and the falling river all amount to a classic reproduction squeeze or, as the peri-urban villagers put it, gweleya, or "hard times." People's efforts to cope with these hard times have generated, not just diversified livelihood strategies, but also divisive tensions both at the household and village level around rights and duties that no longer seem as fair or feasible as they once did. This deteriorating social cli- mate has in turn further undermined the environmental and economic conditions of market gardening, in at least four ways: first, in the atomization of garden production, second, in the collapse of village cooperative relations; third, in the isolation of villages from broader networks of resource access, and finally, in tensions within the conjugal household around duty and money.

First, the atomization of garden production reflects how household patriarchs have experienced declining prosperity. Men in their forties and fifties, who are ex-

pected to act as their families' chief providers, have found that, not only can they no longer afford generous gifts nor repairs of their now-aging mopeds and tin roofs, they can barely assure even the minimal needs of their offspring. In order to trim their responsibilities as providers, many of these older men have divided their gardens among teenage and young adult sons (which might mean splitting a quarter of a hectare four ways). The sons are then expected to buy their own clothes, perhaps pay for their own or their siblings' school fees, or even help buy grain for the family. By dividing up their land, the fathers relinquish their once-prestigious status as the villages' "big gardeners," but they are also freer to devote their time and capital to other ventures, such as trade or artisanal work in town or commercial fruit orchards on lineage land.

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Gardening on the Edge

Because most of the young men who cultivate small individual plots do not have much money to spend on inputs (or on anything else), they necessarily make gar- dening decisions according to what they can afford at the moment and what will earn cash most quickly, not what they know might yield higher profits. Therefore, most of them plant their gardens with a mix of leaf lettuce and green onions. These are considered less lucrative than other common commercial vegetables, such as tomatoes and cabbage, but they can be raised from last year's seeds and are ready for market in only 30 days. These gardeners do not usually have access to manure, for the few house- holds who own cattle graze them out in the "bush," where they are tended by hired Peul (Fulani) herders. Most buy at least a minimal amount of chemical fertilizer, along with a cartload of "compost" (mixed garbage from a municipal landfill). However, as with crop choices, fertilizer use is typically limited by budgetary constraints.

Because these young men have little confidence that more effort spent on their gardens would bring signifi- cantly higher returns, given the depressed local market, they tend not to spend much time on upkeep. They clearly cannot afford to neglect crucial tasks such as wa- tering and harvesting, but once those are accomplished many of them spend their days in downtown Bobo, either working as trade apprentices (e.g., in masonry or electrical repair) or simply looking for odd jobs and small-time bizness (e.g., buying and reselling used clothes). Some work as day laborers on public works or construction sites whenever possible and pay young boys to water their gardens while they are away. Some culti- vate only a few square meters of their already-small plots, to keep maintenance time to a minimum.

It would be easy but inaccurate to typecast these young men as part of a "citified" generation that neither values nor understands agricultural skills. On the con- trary, most have grown up working in their fathers' or brothers' gardens as well as in the family's grain fields. They speak highly of older gardeners known to be partic- ularly strong and adept, and some say that they would gladly become "professional" gardeners themselves if only they could afford motor-pumps and adequate inputs. In other words, gardening under ideal circumstances re- mains a respected occupation. In the meantime, the young men need an income, and they know that they will never find either the occasional day labor jobs or the even rarer opportunities for longer-term urban employment if they do not actively seek them out.

Such an outlook, combined with gardeners' uncertain and generally unsatisfactory revenues, is hardly condu- cive to any kind of sustained collaboration within the

village itself. This is the second area in which changes in the social relations of production both reflect and con- tribute to the declining economic rewards of peri-urban gardening. Brothers and neighbors commonly help each other with labor-intensive tasks, such as transplanting seedlings, but they reject the idea of pooling resources or even coordinating production, on the grounds that it would create more problems than it would solve. Everyone has different schedules, they say, and different personal and family needs to meet. They see any cooperation that would involve dividing up revenue as particularly un- workable, given the growing gap between how much money people feel they need and how much they can

expect the gardens to generate. As one man said, "in to- day's world you can't get along with your son, much less

your brother, because of money. Everyone in our house- hold works independently and alone, because when

gardening is not profitable, it's better that each fends for himself."

It was gardeners' efforts to fend for themselves that led to the disintegration and eventual decertification of the Sakaby and Dogona cooperative several years ago, after a

large number of the members (who had apparently been selling off fertilizer intended for their crops) failed to repay loans from the agricultural ministry. The mass default earned them not only a bad name at the agricultural min- istry but also a standing debt of several thousand dollars. Until this is repaid, no future gardeners' cooperative from these villages will be eligible for credit from the state. Still, it is unclear whether many gardeners in Sakaby and Dogona would be inclined to join, much less organize, a future cooperative or other form of village self-help group, even though they realize they are otherwise un- likely to secure state or foreign assistance. Some claim their peers are simply not trustworthy or reliable-look what happened last time, they say. Many regard any out- sider's interest in "organizing" villagers (which often means collecting information and monetary contribu- tions) as inherently suspicious. Perhaps in part because of their proximity to town, these two villages have seen

many one-time visitors, ranging from state officials who

promise gifts of materiel that never materializes to "busi- nessmen" who arrange with gardeners to produce crops they never return to buy to fake "union organizers" who collect dues, hand out membership cards, and then dis-

appear. Stories about scheming strangers are rampant, vague, and probably embellished, but they accurately re- flect a pervasive sentiment of apprehension in these vil-

lages (Freidberg 1996b). This sentiment, combined with the peri-urban gar-

deners' meager yields, has contributed to a third sort of degenerative process: increasing isolation from crucial

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Freidberg

trade, aid, and credit relations. In the 1950s, gardeners from Sakaby and Dogona won prizes at annual market fairs for their flawless tomatoes and giant cabbages; today most have neither the soil nor the capital needed even to grow these crops. Renown for high quality and yields now lies in more distant villages, 25 or even 75 km from town, many of which have taken up commercial vegetable production only during the past fifteen to twenty years. Most are organized in state-recognized cooperatives, so they have access to credit and subsidized inputs from URCABO and better possibilities for attracting more substantial aid from foreign agencies. Indeed, over the past several years a few villages in the Bobo hinterlands have received donor funds (from the Canadian govern- ment, among others) for mechanized canal irrigation sys- tems, storehouses, packing materials, and improved inputs. These sites are most attractive to contract-exporters, partly because they are well-equipped, but partly also because the growers have demonstrated, through their organized efforts to obtain foreign assistance, qualities the exporters seek in growers: namely, a commitment to "modem" production methods, access to disciplined family and village labor, and at least some familiarity with Western institutions.

Only a few gardeners in the more distant areas of the close-settled zone have contract relations with the large- scale exporters, but most benefit from the patronage of the women vegetable wholesalers based in Bobo-Dioulasso. Over the past three decades, these wholesalers have be- come not only the region's main traders in garden pro- duce, but also the primary source of credit for small-scale producers (Freidberg 1996b). Although gardeners often characterize the wholesalers as aggressive bargainers, it is well known that they offer better lending terms and higher prices than URCABO, and pay for produce much more quickly. And it is only because of wholesalers' loans that gardeners who sell to them regularly can buy the seeds and fertilizers needed for high yields of high- demand crops, such as tomatoes and cabbage. Yet most of these wholesalers bypass Sakaby and Dogona, despite the high costs of transport to more distant villages. They say, somewhat scornfully, that the peri-urban gardeners do not grow anything they want to buy, and in some cases do not even want to sell to strangers, especially not on credit.

The peri-urban gardeners have indeed been less de- pendent on the wholesalers than more distant growers, because they have been able to send their produce to town on the head-pans of their wives, daughters, and mothers. Although a kinswoman on foot cannot carry as much as a wholesaler with a pickup truck, at least, the gardeners reason, she is duty-bound to come back with the day's revenue. However, even these domestic mar-

keting arrangements have come under strain, especially where gardening is the male household heads' primary if not only source of cash income. This is the fourth and final realm where the social consequences of material

hardship are themselves undermining the sustainability of market gardening, albeit in subtle ways.

One source of domestic tension is the uncomfortably wide gap between the principle and reality of gardeners' roles as household "providers." Of all the responsibilities they are expected but not always able to meet, the provision of food grains is the most deeply embedded in Bobo norms of manhood (LeMoal 1980). Most peri-urban gar- dening households must now supplement their own mil- let harvests with purchased grain, but often the women end up buying it, using income from their personal trades. How often is difficult to say, because the issue is so sensitive that men and women alike prefer to discuss it only in the abstract, rather than to specify who buys the grain in their household. The different daily work activities of women and men offer few clues, unlike the situation in the city itself. There it is not uncommon to find house- holds in which women spend the day trading while men-perhaps seasonal or laid-off factory workers-are relatively idle. In Sakaby and Dogona, however, the gar- dens remain sites where men with no other sources of in- come are obliged to make an effort-to demonstrate to family and neighbors that they are working hard to fulfill their responsibilities. As one man explained, his garden brought him no profit whatsoever, but in the interests of conjugal tranquility he toiled there day after day. He could not, he said, "just sit there, arms crossed."

The other source of domestic conflict lies in the women's responsibility for selling the vegetables and then turning over the revenue. When the market is glutted and sales are slow, the women often bring home much less money than the men would like, raising the suspicion (especially when the women in question are the wives, rather than mothers or sisters) that some part has been diverted. Many men claim that their wives regularly "pocket" part of the revenue from the vegetable sales; a few even say they spend it on beer on the way home. Whether guilty of these charges or not, women of course resent them. Selling their husbands' vegetables rarely brings them any personal rewards (end-of-season gifts of cloth and cash are rare now), but it does takes time away from their own trades, such as selling firewood or brewing beer. Because they almost invariably spend much if not all of the revenue from these trades on their children or other household members, women find accusations of selfishness doubly frustrating. In some households, hus- bands profess complete faith in their spouses and at- tribute their poor earnings to the gweleya. Times are

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tough for both men and women, they say. In others, the small pile of change brought from the market each evening is clearly a major source of conflict. Some women described quarrels leading to beatings; a few claimed that when their husbands complain excessively about their earnings, they simply refuse to go to market the next day. Thus just as every trip to the gully to fetch water has become a reminder of the river's decline, so too do the frequent if not daily confrontations over income bring home, quite literally, the reality of hard times.

Clearly, these "hard times" have transformed the so- cial as well as the material meaning of work. As market gardening in Sakaby and Dogona has become less remu- nerative, it has undermined gardeners' ability to fulfill so- cial obligations. As the work has become not only more grueling but also a source of household and community strife, it has become the work many men do only because they have no other, work they hope their children will have the choice of avoiding. It might generate enough revenue for a young bachelor's second-hand wardrobe; it might help keep a household fed, when cobbled together with odd jobs and petty commerce. But it does not gen- erate much sense of security, or confidence in the future. Most important, it does not sustain the social institutions needed to mobilize both local and extra-local resources- and needed, ultimately, for the broader project of sustain- ing land-based livelihoods on the urban periphery.

Conclusion

Residents of Sakaby and Dogona face a paradox famil- iar to many commercial food producers in the close- settled zones surrounding African cities: their livelihoods are simultaneously dependent on and threatened by a dy- namic urban economy. The threats themselves derive from a paradoxical mix of exclusion and opportunity. Often excluded from the services of both the nearby mu- nicipality and the rural development bureaucracy, these residents face serious, but also easily overlooked environ- mental problems. State and foreign agencies overlook them not because they are new or obscure but rather, I would argue, because they are simply no one's top prior- ity. At the same time, the opportunities offered by the city may mean that environmental conservation is not a top priority for many people who live on the urban periphery either. Even an urban economy constricted by structural adjustment, as Bobo Dioulasso's was in the early 1990s, offers both women and men, both young and old, many possible ways to earn a day's keep-provided they ac- tively pursue them. Thus, even though people living in close-settled zones may retain a strong sense of village

identity (as do the residents of Sakaby and Dogona), their working lives are characterized by a much higher degree of daily mobility and atomization than those of most rural dwellers (even, arguably, those of seasonal mi-

grant laborers). For individuals, this kind of working life can be liber-

ating, offering a daily escape from the watchful eyes of

family and village and-for women especially-a route towards greater economic autonomy. It is worth noting that women in the villages around Bobo-Dioulasso have achieved this relative autonomy largely without the help of "gender-sensitive" development aid (Schroeder 1999) but with the benefit of easy access to urban markets. For households, the combination of several small and irregu- lar incomes, whether spent separately or pooled, may well provide for a higher degree of day-to-day economic security than any kind of joint agricultural commodity production.

However, as this case study has shown, the very appeal and logic of diversified, mobile livelihood strategies in the urban periphery means that the practical and social conditions for environmental stewardship are quite dif- ferent from those in most rural village communities, and in at least two ways considerably more difficult. First, people who have the possibility of earning much-needed short-term cash in the city are not necessarily inclined to

spend much of their limited time and energy on conser- vation practices that only might yield eventual rewards. The uncertainty lies not so much in the technical viability of conservation-as Mortimore's (1993) research dem- onstrates, smallholders have maintained the fertility of

intensively cultivated land for generations-as it does in the urban market. Second, the livelihoods practiced in the close-settled zones around African cities typi- cally take place in many different sites, with different schedules and natural resource requirements. This means that the "community" needed to plan and imple- ment the kinds of measures characterizing village-based rural conservation projects in contemporary Africa (for example, soil terracing or microdam construction) may not really exist for those purposes. Critics of "participa- tory" development have noted development agencies' tendencies to overlook messy intravillage social in-

equalities and conflicts in their project sites, often with

negative social and environmental consequences (Ribot 1996). It is also important to consider how location- and, in particular, urban proximity-can weaken the

potential for community-based development and con- servation initiatives.

In sum, the environmental changes accompanying ur- ban growth in Africa often threaten the natural resource base of the surrounding close-settled zones. As this article

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has shown, precisely how local people experience and confront these changes is an empirical question. In the case of Sakaby and Dogona, the experience of changing ecological conditions combined with structural adjust- ment austerity has been decidedly trying, both physically and socially. Although it has not seriously jeopardized physical survival, the resulting hardship and tensions have taken their toll on norms and relations of trust, rec- iprocity, and sociability, both within and beyond the im- mediate communities. In turn, this has undermined local will and capacity to address the most pressing threats to peri-urban land-based livelihoods.

While such changes are impossible to quantify, they can, like changes in the land and market, be traced historically. Equally important, they must be located geographically. A range of disciplines now looks to social institutions and their normative frameworks to help ex- plain, on a variety of scales, why some places prosper while other languish-why in some places resources, both human and natural, are actively sustained, while in others neglected. However, most such analyses do not really examine changes in these institutions-to the extent that they examine change at all-in their material, geo- graphic contexts. People work with land, capital, and each other quite differently in different historically con- structed places. More research needs to consider these differences as, not peripheral, but central to the analysis of social institutions and sustainability.

Acknowledgments The fieldwork for this project was funded by grants

from the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foun- dation, and the Rocca Family Foundation for African Studies. I thank Mahir Saul for his insights on the Bobo region and Michael Watts, Gillian Hart, and Jesse Ribot, as well as three anonymous referees, for their construc- tive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. See Hart's 1997 article for a critique of the new institution- alism as defined by economics (Williamson 1985; Bardhan 1989) and sociology (Granovetter and Swedberg 1992). Much of the recent interest in social institutions centers on their role in cultivating trust and other forms of social capi- tal (Putnam 1993). The latter concept has proved useful in studies showing how specific institutionalized relationships and practices have been beneficial to specific instances of economic growth (Evans 1996) and environmental sustain- ability (Bebbington 1997). However, the term "social capi- tal" has also been used rather less carefully to describe what-

ever customs and character traits appear prevalent in "prosperous" societies (Fukuyama 1995). One review of Put- nam (Boix and Posner 1996) argues convincingly for more cautious analyses of the links between social capital and "success stories" such as Northern Italy. This article focuses on the institutionalized social practices and relationships that govern day-to-day production and exchange relationships in a particular place, and makes no attempt to generalize about the quality of trust and associational life at a regional or national level. Since the term "social capital" is so often understood at these levels, I avoid using the term in this ar- ticle (although I did so in an earlier draft).

2. Most of the gardeners in the peri-urban villages produce primarily the nonindigenous vegetables associated with "European" and Lebanese foodways (such as green salad and sandwiches) and/or the eclectic range of "African" dishes found in multiethnic cities (i.e., rice with sauces introduced by migrants from Ghana and the Cote d'Ivoire).

3. The archives of colonial French West Africa in Dakar, Senegal, the archives of the Bobo-Dioulasso Catholic mis- sion, and the Bobo-Dioulasso town hall archives were all consulted for primary sources. A number of University of Ouagadougou theses also provided information (see Refer- ences section). Relatively well documented is the operative term here: the archival record on the Bobo-Dioulasso region is spotty, and colonial agricultural reports in particular focused more on cotton and grain crop farming than on horticulture.

4. In this study, I defined "household" as a unit of shared residence and consumption. I arrived at this definition by initially sur- veying (see the following footnote) the self-proclaimed "household heads" (the chef du menage, or sotigi in Dioula) and then determining who they included as members of their households and why. In most cases it was fairly clear. In the old "Muslim quarter" of Dogona, however, residential and eating arrangements are as convoluted as the tradi- tional Bobo architecture. Adult brothers or cowives living within the same large compound do not necessarily eat to- gether, and vice versa. Most of the adult married men use their garden income primarily to support the "dependents" with whom they live and eat-wives, children, widowed mothers-but those whose fathers are still actively exercis- ing their patriarchal authority are sometimes expected to contribute to the provisioning of the larger family. In these cases the definition of household is more ambiguous.

5. With the help of two research assistants as well as one resident from each village, I surveyed 180 households (50 in Dogona, 130 in Sakaby) in order to collect basic information on household size and composition as well as on the range and scale of market-gardening activities in the two villages. This information was typically, though not invariably, supplied by the household's senior man or an adult son. From the sur- vey pool I selected 50 households (15 in Dogona, 35 in Sak- aby) encompassing as much as possible the diversity of each village's garden operations: large and small households, those with hired labor, mechanized irrigation, or significant off-farm income, and those without these things. I then in- terviewed all the household members who participated in the production or marketing of vegetables, for a total of 135 interviews (45 in Dogona, 90 in Sakaby).

6. "Bobo-Dioula" was originally a French term, referring to Bobo-speakers who were Muslim and also engaged in some kind of trade. The Bobo term for this group, "Zara," origi- nally described Mande traders who settled amongst the

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Bobo beginning in the sixteenth century and subsequently adopted their farming and religious practices. Today both terms describe Muslim religious identity (which did not be- come re-established in the region until the early twentieth century) more accurately than they describe descent from sixteenth-century immigrants.

7. According to Saul (1992, 357), "The primary connotation of the phrase 'a real man' for the southern Bobo is mastery of hidden sciences, and only derivatively superiority in physi- cal strength and the use of arms, or success in farming. These latter abilities are the effects of the former, attributes of a person who has been well endowed (in occult power) by his father."

8. In principle, land is distributed through the patrilineage from a father to his sons or nephews, whereas nonlanded property, such as animals or brewing pots, belongs to the matrilineage. In addition, certain forms of occult knowledge are passed from father to son, while matriclan elders (a mother's uterine kin) have customary rights to arrange the marriage of their nieces and nephews (Saul 1992).

9. Disputes over who belongs to these lineages, on the other hand, are relatively common, as are disagreements over the borders between adjacent gardens.

10. Underlying this suspicion was the conviction that anyone who sought formal title could not be trusted to respect non- written customary property rights. The neighbors of this particular man claimed he was using the titling process to acquire borrowed land that did not actually belong to his family.

11. This value is owed partly to the simple fact that most of the gardens are located very near the areas believed to have been first cleared and settled by the founders of the villages. In addition, some gardens are located near sites, both on land and in the river Houet, recognized as sacred by the Bobo religion (Le Moal 1980).

12. In particular, they mention the increasing scarcity of shea nuts, which are processed locally for butter and also sold to exporters.

13. Information on the jardin publique was drawn from colonial Agricultural Ministry reports (stored in the archives of French West Africa in Dakar, Senegal) as well as from oral histories.

14. The process by which watering and other garden tasks were gendered male is an important, albeit complicated, chapter in these villages' social history (Freidberg 2001).

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, Fairchild 016, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, e-mail: freidberg@dartmouth.edu

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