Water and Africa 
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| Title: | An Early Experiment in the Reorganization of Agricultural Production in the French Soudan (Mali), 1920-1940 |
| Author: | Becker, Laurence C. |
| Year: | 1994 |
| Periodical: | Africa: Journal of the International African Institute |
| Volume: | 64 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Pages: | 373-390 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Mali |
| Subjects: | agricultural projects irrigation History and Exploration colonialism Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Development and Technology |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1160787 |
| Abstract: | Water control has long appeared an attractive technological solution to risky farming in zones dependent on rain-fed cropping systems, especially in semiarid regions. From the early twentieth century, European technicians and administrators sought to develop irrigated agriculture in African colonies. In the French Soudan the earliest colonial waterworks date back to the 1920s, just outside Bamako, in the vicinity of Baguineda, in present-day Mali. From Baguineda the French went on to develop a much larger-scale irrigation project north of Ségou known as the Office du Niger. This study uses archival documents to show that a new system of crop production was imposed on peasants by the colonial State. Using labour requisitions and in some cases forced resettlement, the colony introduced new crops and technology for rapid intensification, and in so doing organized a new agricultural system oriented primarily towards the market. The Baguineda project began as, and remained, an enclave, spatially distinct from the surrounding dryland grain and pulse cropping system oriented primarly towards lineage reproduction. In common with many subsequently introduced agricultural development projects in Africa, its lack of success was due in part to the conflicting interests of poor peasant workers and powerful foreign promoters. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. |
