Michael Kirk (1996):
The Role of Land Tenure and Property Rights in Sustainable Resource Use: The Case of Benin

5.2. Conflicts between involved parties

Using the example of Mali, the various types and levels of conflicts over resources and the consequences for their preservation are made very clear (Coulibaly 1991, Crowley 1991).

Border disputes between old established agriculturalists over increasingly scarce fertile land are increasing and become violent. Efforts are indeed made to resolve many of these conflicts within the family or lineage, however they constantly break out even more strongly. Border conflicts over the sphere of influence (terroir) of villages is also increasing. Utilization rights for immigrants are becoming more strongly conditioned than in the past, and a strict differentiation is drawn between fallow land and land which has not yet been cleared. There is a growing fear amongst land owners that share-croppers will get land allotted to them from the courts in the long term since they put a value on it and the state will grant the right of ownership after 10 years of cultivation. The result of this is extremely short renting periods which forbid sustainable pattern of cultivation. Women have to give back their temporary titles to the men more and more frequently.

Conflicts between autochthonous livestock owners in the Niger-Delta grow when their land priests give grazing land to farmers or overtax the carrying capacity of the pastures in that they accept non-local transhumant groups on to the land. Non-locals do not stick to the time limits for utilization and overgraze the region. Traditional taxes for alien users are often avoided; State law allows no disciplinary action, since local regulations are not legitimized, rather these regulations are only tolerated and the State has scarcely any means for enforcement.

New external users make claims: influential city-dwellers like civil servants, traders and retirees use paid herdsmen for their animals. They hardly know or respect the traditional rules of common resource management and accelerate overstocking. Competition is also growing between freshwater fishers and problems to limit fisheries are mounting up. Non-local users increased the pressure on fish stocks.

The worst tension exists between agriculturalists and livestock owners. As in Benin, wandering animals are a permanent arguing point, cropping and livestock zones overlap more and more, and channels of appeal for complaints which both sides accept are lacking: the chiefs of each group are not impartial and biased, the State is not present or is compromised by recent history.

The rights of agriculturalists are strengthened in all the rules; those of all other groups, in particular livestock owners and freshwater fishers are weakened where they originally possessed clearly defined or overlapping rights to one and the same resource. Disadvantaged groups in Mali are the low-ranking ethnics (former slaves), new immigrants, women, and the younger generation without power over the land. In more recent times, the groups disadvantaged by structural adjustment are young school leavers or other qualified, dismissed State officials or early retirees who themselves only difficultly get access to land in their home villages. This very problem is increasing in Benin: the rural training centres for unemployed school leavers are at present only a drop in the ocean.