Burundi: Population growth, poor farming methods weigh on the land

In Busoni, northern Burundi, the Mbarushimana clan is receiving a hard lesson in the limits of natural resources. Three sons, and other relatives, are trying to survive on land inherited from their father, amidst doubts that the small property is up to the task of supporting them.

"We are heirs of a property of one hectare, to be shared between the three of us. We are busy having children in an uncontrolled way. Is this to say that an entire family will live only from one hectare? What will be become of our children?" asks Sylvestre Mbarushimana, one of the sons, who fears the children will become landless.

As with the Mbarushimanas, so with many others in Burundi. Subsistence farmers in this small Central African country are struggling to find land to cultivate.The result? Plots are subdivided to meet the needs of growing families, which over-exploit the portions of land they receive, leading to soil degradation and its attendant problems. Farmers are also starting to plant on barely arable land, areas previously reserved for pasture, and to encroach on forests.

"Agricultural land is not just insufficient, it no longer has the quality necessary to give good harvests," said Salvator Ndabirorere, co-ordinator of the National Programme of Action Against Land Degradation.

Burundi has a population of almost eight million - about double what it was in 1980 - and a surface area of 27,834 square kilometres; this gives the nation a population density of 270 inhabitants per square kilometre, according to government figures. The West African state of Benin, with a similar sized population, has a density of 70 inhabitants per square kilometre.

But for Emmanuel Nshimirimana, an independent environmental consultant, the problems relating to land use cannot be attributed to rapid population growth alone. He claims they are also a result of "lack of agricultural inputs, of the lack of effective equipment, of bad agricultural practices and of a high rate of illiteracy that hampers the receptiveness of the subsistence farmer vis-à-vis innovations."

According to the latest United Nations Human Development Report, Burundi had an adult literacy rate of about 59 percent in 2004. According to the 2006 Human Development Report, Burundi's population is set to top 10 million by 2015, at a growth rate of just under three percent.Failure to address land problems may have consequences that extend beyond soil degradation, to acts of violence, with the legacy of violent ethnic clashes that resulted in more than a decade of civil war from which the country is still recovering.

IPS