Thursday, May 23, 2019

Iris Publishers- Open access Journal of Agriculture and Soil Science | Foragers and Food Production in Africa: A Cross- Cultural and Analytical Perspective


Authored by Robert K Hitchcock

Virtually all hunters and gatherers in Africa today not only depend on foraging for their livelihoods but they also engage in food production and trade of domestic crops, livestock, and other resources. Many of them also take part in various kinds of work for other people in exchange for cash, food, and other goods. Drawing on case studies from western, central, eastern, and southern Africa, this paper assesses the causes and consequences of the shifts from hunting and gathering to agriculture, pastoralism, and small-scale business activities. Today, there are few ‘isolated hunter-gatherers’ who depend completely on foraging and are not enmeshed in the global, national, and local socioeconomic systems. Climate change, globalization, and the expansion of markets are leading to significant changes in local subsistence and livelihood strategies. These and other factors are also contributing to an expansion of innovative efforts to cope with the many serious challenges facing Africa’s indigenous peoples. Foragers and Food Production in Africa: A Cross-Cultural and Analytical Perspective. Paper for the 48th annual Society for Cross- Cultural Research (SCCR) meetings, Jacksonville, Florida, February 13-16, 2019. In Africa today, there are approximately 533,850 huntergatherers in 24 different countries on the continent (which contains a total of 54 nation-states) (Table 1). Some of the people who have been defined as hunter-gatherers or foragers include the Batwa (Pygmies) of Central Africa, occupying a dozen countries in the Congo Basin and its surrounding areas. In southern Africa, the San (Bushmen), reside in 7 countries, a large proportion of them in the Kalahari Desert, but some of them are also found in Afromontane areas such as the Maluti-Drakensberg Mountains of Lesotho and South Africa. There are also sizable numbers of former foragers who reside today in Central and East Africa, from the Haddad of Chad [1] to the Hadza of Tanzania [2] and from the Ogiek of Kenya to the Eyle of Somalia [3,4]. Virtually all of the huntergatherers and former foragers in Africa obtain a portion of their livelihoods from agriculture or from trade of wild meat and other forest products for domestic crops. A substantial number of former foragers raise their own crops, as seen, for example, among virtually all San, eastern African hunter-gatherers such as the Chabu and the Boni, and most if not all Batw

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Iris Publishers-Open access Journal of Hydrology & Meteorology | Influence of Community Resilience to Flood Risk and Coping Strategies in Bayelsa State, Southern Nigeria

  Authored by  Nwankwoala HO *, Abstract This study is aimed at assessing the influence of community resilience to flood risk and coping str...