ABSTRACT
The northern Central Plateau Region of Burkina Faso faces several extreme environmental and climatic stresses. On the one hand, there is widespread and severe land degradation that makes farming risky. On the other, there have been large-scale and long-term fluctuations in rainfall including a thirty-year period of desiccation and droughts, which are attributed to global climate change. Two anthropologists have conducted long-term intermittent ethnographic fieldwork among Mossi rural producers from 1997 to the present. They have documented how households have adapted to land degradation and drought over time. This chapter combines ethnographic fieldwork and spatial analysis to explain the unique process of agricultural intensification in this context. The study compares the adoption of soil and water conservation (SWC) measures between two communes (Kongoussi and Boulsa) and how household engagement in this process differs between the two study areas. This is done by exploring trends in precipitation, land-use/land-cover (LULC), and vegetation using a geographic information system (GIS) integrated with local narratives.
