| A farm in Nigeria’s Middle Belt. Photo © Immanuel Afolabi
HotSpots H2O: Farmer-Herder Violence in Nigeria’s Middle Belt Persists, a Consequence of Drought and Climate Change
Nigeria’s central states, a region referred to as the Middle Belt and nicknamed the country’s “food basket,” have been overwhelmed with violence for the better part of a decade, Circle of Blue reported last year.
Videos posted on social media show exasperated farmers burning the homes of nomadic herdsmen, newcomers to the Middle Belt in search of fertile land. In other footage herdsmen are seen retaliating, releasing stampedes of cattle to graze on crops, ruining farmers’ harvests. And in other accounts, direct and devastating violence, by and against both sides, is proof of the escalation of the farmer-herder conflict. Researchers at the International Crisis Group say that more than 10,000 people have been killed, and 300,000 people displaced, in Nigeria’s Middle Belt this past decade.
The conflict is a consequence of extreme heat and worsening droughts, byproducts of climate change, which bruises Africa’s Sahel region and nearby countries more deeply than almost anywhere else in the world. Temperatures here are rising 1.5 times faster than the global average. The land has become too arid to absorb water, so when seasonal rains do occur, they trigger abounding flash floods and landslides. Traditional open-well water reserves and irrigation systems are a struggle to maintain amid inconsistent precipitation.
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