Climate change as the last trigger in a long-lasting conflict: the production of vulnerability in northern Guinea-Bissau, West Africa

ABSTRACT

Climate-related conflicts, although expected to also cause cross-border tensions/fights and intra-state civil strife among Southern countries, have been mostly framed as a problem for the rich Global North citizens produced by the poor, more environmentally vulnerable Global South potential migrants. However, violence under a climate change scenario might be more frequently expressed as small-scale and local level ‘invisible’ uprisings and armed conflicts, namely around land. This article focuses on a conflict over land involving a few villages of northern Guinea-Bissau, which is transforming the inhabitants of a maritime island into climate migrants/landless people. We conclude that climate change was not a direct driver but the last trigger of a long-lasting conflict with multiple and complex causes.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change conflicts
• land tenure
• socio-environmental change
• agrarian climate justice
• cash crops

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Luísa Acabado, Ramon Sarró, Joseph Sandoval, Ana M.S. Santos, Rui Sá and Luísa Pereira for their comments and critical insights. The first author wants to pay tribute to her friend Sumba Dias, who was killed in a cowardly way due to his support to Djobel islanders in their attempt to settle in dryland. The first author designed the research, conducted fieldwork and conceived and wrote the manuscript. The second author performed all the remote sensing analysis, including pre-processing and processing of satellite images, and wrote the respective methodology and analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use Diola instead of Felupe considering that the latter is a colonial designation rejected by this ethnolinguistic group in Guinea-Bissau.

2 Labor groups must be booked in advance without previous knowledge of the behavior of the rainy season and, on the scheduled day, the soil conditions often do not allow plowing because either the soil is still dry or the parcel is full of water that cannot be drained out.

3 The 2017 UNHCR Guinea-Bissau Factsheet states that there was a total of 8.374 Senegalese refugees in the country (https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/58590, last accessed 31.07.2020).

4 Foucher (2007) argues that warfare is not a full-time occupation, which is consistent with the testimonies of our interviewees in Guinea-Bissau.

5 Around the 1920s, the colonialists started the military and administrative occupation of Guinea-Bissau. One of the first interventions consisted in the construction of roads with forced labor within villages’ limits defined according to each village population. Since then, the road had to be cleared yearly and, before the introduction of cars, each village had to provide men to carry the colonial authorities with a hammock on their shoulders within the limits of their defined territory.

6 However, during the anti-colonial war an afforestation process took place in former shrublands, abandoned agricultural cultivation areas under palm oil trees and secondary forests that in 1990 were also classified as cashews. This fact explains the small expansion and reduction in the area covered by cashews, which corresponds to the slashing of the natural vegetation, and the growing of cashew trees and densification of the orchards (see Temudo 2012 for a comparison with a similar process occurred in another part of the country).

7 The same was stated in relation to Arame by villagers of Susana, who did not take refuge in Casamance and had to provide soldiers to the colonial army (informal conversation, 12.02.2019).

8 See, e.g., the unpublished reports written by AOFASS (21 of January 2017), the minister of territorial administration’s legal adviser (Luciano Patron, 8 of January 2019), AFAEL (8 of February 2019), and AFAED (5 September 2019). In a forthcoming article, we will focus on the conflict itself and the nature and intervention impact of both grassroots and external organizations, and the state.

Additional information

Funding

This article was written with the financial assistance of the European Union, DeSIRA project ‘Mangroves, mangrove rice and mangrove people: sustainably improving rice production, ecosystems and livelihoods’ (Grant Contract FOOD/2019/412-700). CEF is a research unit funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia I.P. (FCT), Portugal [grant number UID/AGR/00239/2019].

Notes on contributors

Marina Padrão Temudo

Marina Padrão Temudo is a senior research fellow at CEF, Department of Natural Resources, Environment and Land, School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal. She has conducted extensive ethnographic field research on development and conservation in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, S. Tomé and Príncipe, and in the Republic of Guinea. Some of her most recent articles have been published in Human Ecology, Agroforestry Systems, the Journal of Land Use Science, the Journal of Agrarian Change and Conservation & Society.

Ana I. R. Cabral

Ana I.R. Cabral is a senior research fellow at the Department of Natural Resources, Environment and Land, School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal. She is a Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing expert, working in tropical regions, mainly in African countries, in the areas of deforestation, mapping and modeling of land cover/land use change scenarios and quantification of carbon emissions. Her most recent articles have been published in Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change and Applied Geography.