 So hello everybody and I think it's just gone half past two so we'll get started. Welcome to this event, land investment and migration, a portrait of village life in Mali. I'm Juliet, IID's events officer. This event today forms part of the IID debate series which through which we aim to create a space for conversation and debate on key and current sustainable development issues. So we've got an excellent panel of speakers today who are going to be introduced shortly and I can also see a lot of you already on the call and the number keeps going up so welcome and thank you for joining us from all over the world. So that's it from me, I'm going to hand over to Andrew Norton, IID's director who's going to introduce our panel and chair this session. Thanks very much. Thank you very much Juliet and huge thanks for all the great work you've put in to setting this event up. Much appreciated. So the title of the session as Juliet said is land investment and migration, a portrait of village life in Mali and it's a real pleasure for me to introduce our first speaker, a keynote speaker, Camilla Thulmin who's an economist with great experience and expertise on dry land Africa and she was actually my predecessor as director of IID and I first met Camilla in fact in 1982 and when I just started doing field work in Mali and she was still in the Longibu this extraordinary community which the book that this is based on which I really do recommend all of you to try to get hold of it's an extraordinary study based on 35 years that Camilla has done research in the village going to and fro but some very deep dives indeed within that and it's a next a portrait of extraordinary depth of social change in the Sahel in Mali so really looking forward to this. Let me also quickly introduce the two discussants who are going to comment on the presentation Professor Nicola Stern is the chair of the Grantham Research Institute on climate change in the environment and head of the India Observatory at the London School of Economics and I'm sure known to very very many of you for an extraordinary track record of influential policy work. Many of you will have heard I'm sure of the Stern review into the economics of climate change which was a seminal work in the field that we work in so really delighted to have Nic with us as well and the other commentator also a complete delight to have Barra Gay joining us from Senegal. Barra is a rural economist with more than 35 years experience of development practice in Francophone West Africa and also a member of IID's board one of our trustees so a huge pleasure to have Barra with us as well so without further ado Camilla is going to give a presentation which will give you a taster of the richness and depth of the work that she's presented in her book and then we'll move to commentary from Nic and from Barra and then a Q&A session using the tools that Julia just outlined so Camilla please do start. Great well good afternoon and welcome. I'm just going to set up the slideshow so that we can have some pictures and you can get a bit of a sense of the place that I'm going to be talking about. Thank you to everyone for joining us and thank you also to Andy Norton my fellow panelists Barra Gay and Nic Stern I really appreciate the time you've given to read my book and provide your comments today. I've been very lucky in following the village of Delonga Bugu in central Mali that's the little blue star which I hope you can see on the map so I've been following it for the last 40 years. Bugu means hamlet or village so Delonga Bugu means the hamlet of Delonga who was the founder of the settlement. I first went there as a 25 year old researcher in 1980 at the height of the hot season and I was last there in July 2017. While it's currently off limits due to the presence of various jihadist groups in the vicinity I stay in regular touch via my wonderful research assistant Siddiqi Jarrah who's based in Bamako. Both Siddiqi and one of the villagers Makano Dembele have been great to work with because they're committed both to field work and to gossip and gossip is a really core skill for this kind of mix of economics and anthropology. I'm hoping to get back there one day soon there's so much more to learn about and I'd like to see how to help this village commune and wider region address the multiple problems they face so I'm going to give a 15-20 minute introduction to the village so you've got an idea of where it is, what it looks like and who lives there as well as some of the principal trends over the last three to four decades. Please do send in your questions. So I'll outline five elements that shape how people make a living and how these have changed over 35 years and you see in the main topics there. You could say that to study one small settlement is only going to be of limited interest but I hope to show that what's been happening in this one village represents a microcosm of the powerful forces operating more generally across the region. Sholongibugu now is a small town of 1600 people which has become a lot more prosperous since I first went there in 1980 but if you were to drive past it you'd be deceived by the traditional brown mud houses there's not a tin roof in sight but if you look carefully you'll catch sight of some of the solar panels they've bought and the odd satellite TV dish and if you go into one of the houses you'll find that actually it's a shop where you can buy more than a hundred things like cloths, flip flops, underpants, motorbike parts, medicine, sugar, tea and mobile phones. When I first went there in 1980 you could only buy eight things salt, sugar, tea, cola nut, sweets, batteries, kerosene and cigarettes so there's been an explosion in shopping. In 1980 I went to do two years field research working with an anthropologist Duncan Fulton to document village life and patterns of farming livestock investment and demography. We were working for Jeremy Swift and the International Livestock Research Institute. I wrote my PhD and also a book, Cattle, Women and Wells, on the village and I've kept going back to Dolongibugu every two or three years to find out how my friends are doing. I continue to work with Siddiqi Jarrah who's top left, my research assistant from 1980 and he and I supported Karen Brock, bottom centre, an IDS researcher who was there in the mid-90s. The village chief is up top right and his deputy and the president of the Women's Association is top centre. So when I stopped running IID in 2015 and handed over to the much more capable hands of Andy Norton I sought a research grant to explore in more depth what's been happening in Dolongibugu and I'd like to thank the Open Society Foundation's New York and the Binks family trust Edinburgh for the funding that made it possible. I've tried to develop a set of infographics to illustrate these changes in ways which bring statistics to life, beautifully designed by Kate Lines and Anna Mill. So Dolongibugu, the village, is inhabited by bamboo farmers settled on the northern edge of the farming zone, 50 kilometres north of the River Niger at Segu. The Bambra are a farming group that has spread across much of Mali. The village was founded probably around 1700. It was certainly there when Scotch Explorongo Park travelled through the region in 1796 looking for the River Niger and he stayed the night there. By this stage he was at the end of his tether. He'd lost everything except for a broken down horse which was so weak he was obliged to drive it before him so he must have looked a sorry sight. Following the French conquest of Segu in 1890 this area on the north bank of the Great River Niger was seen by the colonial administration as very impoverished, not worth much tension. Instead they invested money and lives in building a large irrigation scheme which you can see to the east of the village constructed in the 1930s and this is now the focus of a lot of attention from government donors and foreign investors because irrigated farming is seen as the best way to grow food for the Sahel in an era of growing climate uncertainty and that contrasts with the rain-fed millet farmers of Delongibugu and beyond who are described as traditional, stuck in their ways, reliant on the hoe, unable to modernise. But I hope my study shows that that assessment of Delongibugu misses much of what's been happening in this and similar Sahel villages. So settlement and farming thin out as you move northwards from the River Niger. Delongibugu gets an average of about 450 millimetres of rainfall per year but this is highly variable. Rainfall has actually increased a bit over the last 35 years in terms of total volume but is more concentrated in the four months of June, July, August, September. There are also larger more extreme events. Farmers say distribution of rainfall within the farming season is much more important than the total amount of rain. What farmers like best is medium sized rainfall every four to five days with plenty of hot sun in between. Then the millet flourishes. Last year the village received an astonishing 160 millimetres of rain in 24 hours that's six inches, a third of the expected rainfall for the year. There was standing water everywhere for days. Many houses and granaries fell down, latrines collapsed and much the millet was drowned. Some villages in the commune have abandoned their settlements completely as the damage from the flood was so devastating. Climate science confirms this big increase in intensive convective weather systems which lead to the large storms responsible for 90 percent of the Sahel's rainfall and this seems to be due to the fact that the Sahara Desert is warming much faster than the Sahel. Turning to land, in 1980 the villagers of Dallabugu said the bush is so big it can never finish. Going north from the village there seemed to be a never ending supply of land to farm and for cattle to graze. But when I was back there visiting in 2006 they said sadly the bush is finished. It's destroyed. So I was interested in asking how has land abundance turned to scarcity in 25 years? Why has the bush filled up with people? On the left you've got the image from the 1960s and on the right you've got the image from 2016. So one of the things that happened is that in the 1970s farmers living next to the irrigated zone to the east of Dallabugu started seeking new land because irrigated crops like sugarcane harbour large numbers of birds which ravaged dryland cereal fields before harvest time. By 1997 when Karen Brock was doing her study there were hundreds of people from close to the irrigation scheme who'd come to the Dallabugu area to farm and to escape these the bird pests from the sugar. But by the year 2000 the villagers of Dallabugu had sent them all away they got fed up with all these migrants and they blamed them for crime harassment of their women and general moral turpitude. Sounds familiar doesn't it? But after a few years many came back begging their cousins in Dallabugu and neighbouring settlements to let them farm a plot of land in the name of their common humanity. Then in 2009 20,000 hectares was given by the Malian government to a Chinese company and Sukula for irrigated sugarcane. The company has evicted hundreds of farmers from their land and they're now all flooding into the Dallabugu area begging to be giving a plot to cultivate. As you can see from these satellite images the sugarcane fields just occupy all of the land. The village settlement is still there but people have lost all their land. The consequence is as this 2016 image for land around Dallabugu would you show you is that all of the space around the village has now filled up with fields. Population growth within the village itself is important but the largest share of land around Dallabugu is now in the hands of stranger farmers most of whom have come in the last 10 years following the arrival of the sugar company. This diagram shows you what's happened to the total area under cultivation with the increase in the area cultivated which is the size of the blocks and the relative importance of different forms of land use has also changed a lot. There's been a big rise in strangers fields that's in blue and of private fields they're the ones in yellow. Private fields refer to the growing number of plots of crops such as sesame grown by individuals for their own cash revenue rather than the millet farms fields farmed by the household as a collective group which are the ones in green and purple. As land becomes scarcer there are damaging consequences for the farming system. There's a shortage of grazing, a fall in livestock numbers and a fall therefore in cattle dung which leads to a fall in soil fertility and millet yields. So yields of millet have rarely tumbled catastrophically since 1980 to 82 and much formerly manure land has been abandoned so this slide shows what's happened to the size of the millet harvest and the proportions coming from extensive bush fields in purple versus manure land in green. Overall the weight of millet harvested per person has fallen from an average of 500 kilos to 180 kilos per person which is a huge fall with major consequences for food security and the size of household grain reserves. Heard of farmer relations have also become very tense with conflicts escalating into lethal clashes in this and neighbouring area so the farming system is under real stress. Let me turn to talk about the second important element of village life over the years. Demographic growth has been remarkable over the 35 years. There's been a tripling of the village population with an annual growth of 3%. This high level of growth is the result of a patrilineal family system involving early in which a very age of very early outside of marital relations and this family pattern combined with better water supply, improved healthcare and the absence of any modern form of contraception all spur population growth. In 1980 I thought that the large domestic groups found in Dalangabu would see a breakdown in future as smaller nuclear households became the norm but that's what's happened elsewhere in rural Africa but rather than falling apart I found that there's been a big increase in average household size from 18 in 1980 to 35 people today and there are now five households with more than 100 people in size, the greatest of this with 184 people. These are enormous domestic enterprises able to marshal large amounts of capital and labour for farming but they also need careful management in balancing the rights and obligations of households to their members. Having run IIID for 12 years an organisation of 100 or so people I can testify to the difficulty of balancing individual against collective interests and in the case of IIID they weren't even my family or relations. The household or gua is defined by having one common field one common granary and a single household head who represents that household in the village council. Within the household some activities are carried out at the level of individuals. If your household head you want lots of young men like these to farm the millet field but you also have to find ways of keeping them loyal to your family. These large domestic groups have been of a special importance as a means to reduce the multiple risks facing people in this low rainfall environment. Risks which you mitigate by diversifying your income assets. Despite the advantages of large household size there are also a number of cases where households have broken up as shown in these slides. The smallest households are unlikely to do well in farming and I expect that if they go back in another 10 or 15 years many of the smallest households won't be there anymore. Turning to assets and investments everybody in the village admits that they've got better off they've increased income and wealth and the business of farming has got easier thanks to plows and donkey carts. I did a quick tally of assets and their value today in long boo-boo and they come to around half a million pounds 328 million francs cfa that's a big sum of money and it gives a lie to smallholders being unable to invest in their farms. This shows the pattern of asset distribution between different households according to the different asset. Women in particular acknowledge that they're better off than before so Hawa Kulibali president of the women's association says now we've got richer we've discovered all sorts of wants and needs we didn't know we had before. As a village Dalonga boo-boo is known for its competitive rivalry which pushes individuals and families to outdo each other in getting the biggest harvest or having a large cattle herd. This rivalry between people and families has contributed to a sequence of investment boons. First were ox and drawn plows in the 1950s and 60s which led to a big growth in groundnut production. Then in the 70s and 80s there was a rush to dig wells which led to a big expansion in water manure contracts agreed with visiting herders which brought lots of dung and better millet yields. Then in the 1990s lots of people set up shops they were the next important money-making venture and today there are 13. After that sesame fields became widespread in the 2000s and have been a big cash earner while solar panels are today's newest assets. Shopkeepers often buy big panels costing a hundred and fifty a hundred and fifty thousand francs that's about 250 euros so they can run a fridge and offer cold drinks to their customers. Since 2000 a total of more than five million francs has been invested by villagers in solar panels that's seven thousand pounds none of that is project money it's all money that individuals and households have invested so each investment cycle follows a similar pattern to that which you see with solar panels. One person brings back a new idea two or three others copy it others watch and wait and when it's shown to be a big thing a good thing everybody else piles in as soon as they can. Migration is also much more common today than 35 years ago and takes multiple forms almost all unmarried men and women go away each year for nine months over the dry season to earn money once the weeding is over. Young men go to the capital Bamako sometimes to the gold fields in western Mali or Ticot du Voir young women workers maids in Bamako. This pattern is similar to what was going on in 1980 but people leave much earlier and come back much later they're often away for nine months or sometimes several years instead of three to four months. But the biggest difference the biggest difference between 1980 and today is the number of people who have left Dalonga Buga definitively like Ganaba Dembele here there are more than 25 men with their wives and children who are making their lives away from the village building a house in town investing money in their children going to school and learning a profession. A couple of men have reached Europe one's in Cote d'Ivoire another in Angola and five have just disappeared no one knows if they're living or dead. People from Dalonga Bugu who live in Bamako say it's tough you need cash for everything food water shelter school but they can't see themselves going back to life in the village even if life in Bamako is tough they say their children are Bamako and they wouldn't be able to stomach the food and water if they went back home. Finally a couple of words about attitudes and values the people of Dalonga Bugu say that life has changed immeasurably since 1980 there's been an explosion of consumerism and much greater individualism most people want to acquire more stuff and people compete to get the biggest motorbike or fanciest hair and clothes it's in marked contrast to the simple threadbare days of 1980. Older folks say this focus on consumption has come at the cost of social cohesion the village chief says no one wants to be together anymore and points to the old shade trees where people used to gather and chat they're now empty and abandoned he's very worried that so much time spent on private production means less effort is spent on the household's big collective millet field which ultimately is responsible for feeding everyone the collective granary shrinks while individual pockets expand and the figures for millet production per head support this concern. There are other big shifts in values and behavior such as the abandonment of traditional religion they've converted to Islam and built a mosque with decentralization and setting up a local government Dalonga Bugu has acquired a primary school and a health clinic which is all good but the new commune boundaries have fragmented Dalonga Bugu's customary lands so they've lost control over their resources. So I hope this has given you an idea about the history of the village the purpose of my study and how some things have changed over 35 years many of these changes have been very positive but some set the village big challenges for the future challenges which are common to many other places in the Sahel. Thank you. Thank you very much Camilla that was great really fascinating there's a lot of questions coming in already please just to remind you to use the Q&A box if you want to raise a question for Camilla or for Nick or for Barra. Now let's move to the discussants and Nick you've kindly agreed to go first. Okay thank you very much Camilla that was absolutely fascinating and I think somebody on this call has to show the book so it might as well be me this is the book that Camilla was telling you about and there's another one from Andrew. It's a special pleasure to join this group there are people who study villages over long periods of time but they're not very many of them I've been working on one village in Pradesh in India since 1974 and we've got data that goes back thank you very much there's Nick's book data that goes back to the 1950s so you find that people they're not many of them but some who've done these long longitudinal village studies exchange ideas talk to each other so I've been talking to Camilla about this for many years and I knew the book was coming and it's absolutely a tremendous pleasure to see the book now. What the book shows and very clearly and you saw it clearly in Camilla's introduction here is how much you can learn about how lives change from the close study of one place if you look at the statistics of countries you see lots of what are essentially time series of cross-sections there's lots of surveys that go on that tell you what how many people are at school now and so on and you see graphs which show change but they don't tell you how individual lives change how the lives of people change in the same way that the close study of one place can do if economic development and I'm an economist so excuse me for focusing there but if economic development is how lives and livelihoods change then a key part of the understanding of that question how lives change is through a village study and this is just a wonderful example of course longitudinal stuff by definition takes time that's the point that's what it is so you have to start young and you have to live long those are essential requirements if you're going to engage in this but I do know that Camilla hasn't lived for quite as long as I have but there'll be more 35 years I'm sure 10 15 years from now we'll see the half century of this story and we look forward very much very much to it now what kinds of things can you learn well the first thing is that you can learn how to study development essentially I've just referred to that but talking to people observing directly collecting the numbers in in one place that's a very important way to study development I stress that because so much of development studies now is about randomized controlled trials for example which are very important and valuable but they do not tell you the story of how lives change over time in the in the same kind of way so as we get enthusiastic about one tool for studying development we shouldn't forget the basic here which is such a fundamental part of our understanding it tells you secondly it tells you directly how lives change you follow people in terms of their assets in terms of their lives in there and their deaths you follow the education and we saw it just now from Camilla how instructive that story can be certainly you understand the place now I I've worked quite a bit in Africa I mean much more in India and other places but I don't know Mali and the book told when telling its story in this way brings Mali to life for those of us who have not yet had the privilege of of being there so I found that very valuable and at the end in chapter 8 it turns to the big question of where the world is going through the eyes of Blongo Bu Bu and that I think and let me finish what I want to say around that because I think that is a fascinating part of the story I know it's not fashionable and for understandable reasons to quote Winston Churchill at this time but I'll take the risk of bearing in mind all the footnotes and that we have to attach but he said that you know the farther back you look the further forward you can see and I think that is an important observation reading chapter 8 I felt very much that looking back in that way you could see so much further forward and we have to remember that looking back over these 35 years in a sense it's not any old 35 years and there's a long history there you could have imagined a snapshot from the 19th century or the early 20th but this is an extraordinary 35 years with a tripling of a population the arrival of all kinds of different ways of doing things connectivity with the outside world which is always a question around villages it's an extraordinary 35 years so it's telling us a lot about change and so we can look forward and ask about the future and I think back I've been I started teaching economic development around 1970 and we tried for students who hadn't been all over the place to give them a picture of the difference between different parts of the world and we used to talk I mean it was very broad brush but we used to talk of India South Asia being land scarce and Africa being land abundant now it wouldn't be right to talk about Africa being land abundant anymore we didn't talk much about climate in the 1970s we have to talk about climate now and we spoke much less about conflict at that time too when we were studying development so because the world has changed our subjects and our thoughts have had to change and there are ways of doing analysis have had to change so let me finish just with one or two questions which you might expect from an old village studies person thinking about those kinds of change in Pallanpur the village that we've been studying in India there's been a big move to the nuclear family previously villagers used to live in quite big households not quite as big as in Dhwonga Bhugu but still quite big households there's been a big move to the nuclear household and it'd be very interesting to hear perhaps we have time towards the end speculation as to how far that will happen there's been a big move to off-farm income more than half of the village income in Pallanpur is off-farm and there's a very big difference there between India and Africa at least the parts we're talking about in that the population density in India in the Indigachatic plain is so strong that there's always a nearby town so there you can live in the village and do work in the nearby town you commute you don't have to migrate and you've seen lots of activity making bricks, marble, polishing and so on renting out tractors to work elsewhere you've seen lots of income off-farm now and that seems to me to be very interesting because in the discussion of Dhwonga Bhugu a lot of the off-farm incomes associated with Bhamakal and it'd be very interesting to see how that changes over time in other words if you want to leave agriculture you need as opposed to doing diversification within the place that you stay maybe that's the difference between the Indigachatic plain and this part of Mali but the rise of off-farm income is very important and it's informal it's normal here off-farm income isn't about going to get a job in a factory somewhere I mean occasionally it's that happened but it's much more about informal activities with brick they're making bricks or marble polishing or fixing people's motorbikes or you know all the kinds of things that that you see there so I'd be very interested to hear more about the about non-farm income and finally there's a fascinating discussion in chapter eight about re-greening and as a world we have devastated the soil we mined the soil we depleted the soil that's true I'm speaking to you from rural Sussex in southern England that's true when I look out my window and I go for a walk it's true there too so whether you look at India whether you look at Mali whether you look at Europe we've been mining soil and undermining destroying degrading soil so re-greening I think could be a really big part of the future and of course re-greening benefits the people who do the re-greening because productivity goes up but it also benefits the world and you capture carbon in soil so in a world better organized than our own we would be finding ways of rewarding people for re-greening that's not impossible perhaps it's not even that difficult but you have to make up your mind to do it but that I felt was a fascinating part of the story at the end so thank you so much Camilla it was an absolute treat to talk about it for many years with you to read the book and hear you just now this is something that I hope students of development across the world will read thank you very much indeed Nick some fantastic insights there Camilla can I ask you to take the questions from Nick with the questions from Barra and just and that way we can try and also move to some from the audience as well so Barra please you go next thank you Andy I would like to join my voice to yours and to Nick's to congratulate Camilla for a very very interesting book which I would recommend for not only researchers but also I think development workers and students there are a lot to learn about rural life but also about longitudinal research having said that I will focus my comments on all this question of change I think the book the book is about change and how change apple in rural life and what are the drivers of change I'm using just three markers for my comments to reflect on the change that is that has happened in this village I think one of the the first keyword or marker is the concept of stability we know that in our traditional society the household or the family is at the heart of the life of the system and all the strategies that have developed within the family or around how you keep stability or the unit since the whole life to the whole system depend on family labor so it's very critical that you have a control on these sort of resources and the way it is managed within the family and at the large sense within the community and I think if you look from the 80s to now with all the changes that's happening with this concept of stability where in the more more traditional area where period the focus was only on agriculture and under all the labor was within the family and it was easier to manage compared to now where you have a lot of as Nick was saying off farm activities happening outside the village and this is a critical challenge on how you allow people to go out of the society and the community at the same time keeping the spirit and the stability and I think it's a very critical sort of how old management challenge that all the rural communities are facing now because of the change that happened and I think you will see it in the village the older challenge that the fact that young people are traveling is bringing in the management of the the household I mean the labor within the household so that's the first thing other thing I think is that the notion of reciprocity reciprocity is key in our traditional society and most of the relationship with you have first within the family you have reciprocity between members of the same family combining farming private farm and collective farm which is a certain way of really exchanging and managing reciprocity within the larger group which is the village you also have this the different families within the village maintaining a certain level of cohesion based on the way they manage the reciprocity you have family originating from different social different different villages but at the same time they try to have a common sort of homogeneous mix which is based mainly on that through marriage through also the whole issue of how they sort of manage power at the village level and this I think is also based on some form of reciprocity among between the different families and the third level of reciprocity is between the household members and people coming from our site and good example or for example the relationship between the household and the herders who come seasonally to I mean with the animal and this kind of reciprocity based the fact that you allow the herders to access to water at the same time they bring animal and they are fertilizing your land so you are having you know a way of making your soul more fertilized but without having to have a cash expenditure and this has changed over time because this relation has become loose now and with they have moved from a type of reciprocity which based on on kind type of change to a new relationship where money is intermigrating in me getting this kind of relation and this is also a very big change which change the whole landscape of how this concept of reciprocity is managed within the village and the third marker is the whole around the also of assets and how the asset portfolio has evolved over time in the past where you have mainly asset around land labor and water and now with a more open society with more interaction with the outside world you have new form of assets Kamila was talking about the solar panel access to electricity and other good also change the the asset portfolio at the same time it changed also the whole organization of the local economy and the economic system and I think this change sometimes bring opportunities and advantage but at the same time they are associated with with a lot of challenge and the fact the fact that cash and money is playing a stronger role in the transaction is really having a quite key impact on on the relationship between any video within the family but at the company at the village at large and even between the village and the outside thing and I think these are very important change that we have seen happening over time and we can anticipate that maybe it will I mean develop even more in the future and there are a question mark regarding the future the second point is around the role of policy and the relationship between or the role of central government I mean if you read the book the first impression you have is that the government is not really you can't see sign of the presence of the government except of a few very minor things but the only present you see is sort of a sort of disruptive presence which means that for example the investment in in the office de niger and the implication it has in terms of really disturbing the whole this issue of I mean this stability I was talking about by bringing in new migrants and putting more pressure on the key resource which is the land and that's policies not enabling but policy which are disruptive of local economy and local stability and I think this is a very very sort of critical thing which we can see and which tend to over time the other impact of policy also is the fact that the traditional boundaries of the village has been sort of disrupted in a sense that the administrative boundaries imposed by by the government doesn't match with the traditional boundary and in the future this might end up with some conflicts and the fact that people you know belong to a village but their land may be in on another administrative unit what are the implications on the future and all this change I think you have said very well said it very well I think Camila we have increased conflicts happening because of these external exchanges the monetization of the relationship the relation between I mean farmers and orders and even within the within the society and I like one saying what an old person say he was saying that in old days it was the household was rich and the individual were poor but nowadays individual are rich and household is poor and I think it's a quite strong scent sort of scent and showing the big change that has happening and the tendency to go to a more individualistic type of way of life and which I think over time can be very descriptive of these three markers I was saying which was stability the the the whole system of reciprocity and also the idea around asset building so I think this is a very very very interesting and maybe one last point on this comment is the impact of climate change and I think we have seen it you say it I mean the rainfall pattern has come as the change even though in terms of quantity of water it doesn't have maybe change but the the way this the rain season is spread over time has complete change and is bringing a new threat in the economy but what is interesting is how people people attitude regarding climate change I read somewhere I mean was saying that people are trying to add up but they don't explain actually what are the main cause of climate change you are giving this example where they were seeing they have this sort of supernatural explanation of climate change which mean that the implication will be that I think the strategy will be more focused more on adaptation than on attenuation in a sense that if they don't explain maybe they what the strategy are only meant to adapt to the to the phenomenon but not really to really act as game changer in a sense that they understand the cause and they try also to really act on on on those schools so there are a lot of question now for the future and I think one particular question is really in 10 years or 15 years time what will be the perspective of the youth because that's very critical migration is is one important asset so far it's national and you have few a few case of regional migration most of the time it's seasonal they they come back to the village but you know what the future look like in terms of how the the migration partner will be is is is a quite important question the second question of the future policy narratives in a context of insecurity I think the government of Mali is putting a lot of resource you know in addressing the addressing the question of insecurity and we are in an era where all our government are really thinking about you know future agricultural policy and other economic development economy policy in in in large but we don't know what will be the patterns of this narrative in the future and the last last question is about role the role of education it's we don't see so far I mean it's there but what will be the part of education over time until now I think it's quite small but will we be seeing more investment in education people going more to to school or or abandoning if if young people turn to travel they may remain school and and and others so these are I think some of the of the question which maybe will require a future reflection and of course one question to challenge Kamilai will be the what will be the next book the next 15 years or 20 years you're writing another another book thank you very much I really enjoyed it thank you so much Barra again a great set of comments very very rich Kamilai let me just add a couple of thoughts that have come in on the Q&A if I may which are in the same areas that have been highlighted I know I'm giving you a lot to deal with at once Kamilai but I'm sure I'm sure you'll be fine on the question of climate change we which was mentioned by Barra we have a question in from Laurie Goering on the whole thing seemed better but this is complex do you expect that to continue or will problems including climate change shift that trajectory on the methodological questions which Nick raised a question from Dan Brockington who's recently undertaken some longitudinal studies in Tanzania and he's asking you know how did you capture this in the different periods you were in the village and how well do you think the changes you have described are captured in standard or existing development indicators and finally on conflict which Barra mentioned a question from Musa Jiri I would like to know if there is a link between the situation you've described and increasing local conflicts or the conflict in the centre of Mali and how did that impinge on Dilangabugu and there are one or two other questions I'd love to get to because it's a very rich set but Kamilai there's a huge amount there please pick from it as you will right well thank you very much that gives me lots to respond to I'll try and be reasonably quick and then if there are a couple more questions we can take them before the end Nick you talked about the move to the nuclear family and what's been happening in Palanpur and certainly that shift to a nuclear family is what you find really throughout many other parts of Africa particularly West Africa so I was really gobsmacked to find that you'd seen something very different in this particular community and I don't think it's the only place where the maintenance and investment in that domestic large domestic group continues because there are such you know strong advantages from being able to pool labour to be able to pool your demographic successes and failures to be able to cope with the risks you face but obviously it does also require that individuals subsume their own personal interests and agree to be managed by a household head that household head retains respect and loyalty for so long as he's able to meet the expectations of the people within that group which I mean essentially are giving people a certain amount of room for their own individual activity while requiring them to also invest in the collective enterprise and young men will stay in Bamako unless they have heard that arrangements are being made for their marriage so it's really old men's capacity to provide wives for their young men that brings them back home and settles them back in the village working and investing in the domestic group it's interesting what you said about how dense the gangetic plane is at the moment as you say rightly people have to go away if they want to diversify their incomes bit by bit that's changing though and Dalangabugo now feels like a small town rather than a large village it has a weekly market and there are several people now living there like a butcher and a carpenter you know who have a profession which is largely non-agricultural and there's in fact a settlement quite close by which is made up of blacksmiths again who spent at least half their time on their blacksmithing profession rather than farming so that gives you some sense of the diversification which I'm sure will continue to expand on the soil fertility front I'm glad that you're also a somebody who's really interested in keen on soil because I mean it is so much at the heart of everything that really matters it's world desertification day today in fact one of the reasons why we chose this state because the question of how you maintain and improve the fertility of soils how you use vegetation to do that how you use livestock and other supplements to maintain that soil fertility is pretty critical and one of the things I would like to do were I able to spend a bit of time back there would be to talk through with people both farmers and herders how some of the benefits of that integrated livestock crop relationship which used to work so well how elements of that could be brought back into manage the current situation there are lovely comments which I fully subscribe to the whole question of households and needing to control labour yes that's stability and maintenance the household as a domestic group I think is really critical in the 18th and 19th century these households relied in part on captive labour for their for their farming one third of the population of Delonga Bugu and the wider area was made up of captive labour in the 19th century and women and young women in young men say today I'm nothing but a slave of the household meaning that they recognise that they give an awful lot more than they they get back but as long as you stay in the household bit by bit the reciprocal obligation towards you tends to be returned over time but I was fascinated by this you know the shifting balance over time between private and collective rights and obligations because at the same time as I was there first Mrs Thatcher was taking over in in the UK you know and there was an awful lot of discussion about privatisation and the importance of establishing private and individual economic incentives and so it was it rang an awful lot of interesting bells and echoes this question of reciprocity versus rights and and the shift from a non-cash to a money-based system your last point about central government and policy I mean villages basically said we are really lucky because we are a long way away from regional and national government you really don't want to be too close to the farmer the governor the source of power you know and as long as you're a bit far away you can be ignored and the assets that you've got won't you know be the envy of the the ruler and so you can just carry on without it but clearly with the establishment of communes as I implied there's quite a impact on the fragmentation of customary power over land and other resources I'd like to turn to those three questions the first one was around climate and I suppose the main issue that I see around climate is is it going to make it impossible to farm in these dry land areas after the last rainy season a number of the farmers in in DeLonga Bugu said you know with rain like that we should start growing rice you know it's you can't grow millet if your fields are flooded by this extraordinary downpour I don't think they will get round to growing rice because the soils are so sandy it wouldn't really make any sense but if if that whole area north of the river Niger were not able to support a farming population I suppose it'd be a great thing for people who rely on livestock and so probably you'd see a kind of shifting back to the south of a lot of that agricultural activity and a stronger presence of more livestock based systems of production north of the river Niger but but currently it's not really possible to get a decent harvest of of millet with the pattern of rainfall that they're having at the moment of course they could possibly find different seed varieties that were better suited and one of the things they had been doing is is kind of checking around in neighboring villages to see if people other farmers have got millet that's doing well under the current circumstances. Dan your question about data and the extent to which this is backed up by other more official sources of government statistics I was very interested to compare our demographic data with what's in the government census and we've got a whole number of points at which that's possible to do and in general the census figures are about 15 to 20 percent lower than the figures that we've got in the village and particularly at risk of being left over are older women and also quite a lot of children particularly children who are not in the household of their original birth mother or father so there's quite a lot of children who are brought in adopted by another household so there were there were significant differences between our data and what government data said what what I also found marked was that much of the narrative in government is about how you know these are areas where everybody is just so impoverished life can't go on anymore you know which gives the government the the sort of right and duty to clear those lands and put them under irrigation so there's a there's a narrative of impoverishment and traditionalism which I think really doesn't pick up the vitality and the intelligence of the people and how they've been trying to adapt and change so the data don't really fit I think with quite a lot of the the more formal indicators of what's going on. Musa your question on how far the big conflict in central and northern Mali impinges on what's going on here there's there's been no kind of direct involvement of jihadists in this village but I am aware of the fact that there are a number of camps of jihadists not very far away and they do visit the village from time to time as does the malian army and villagers are meant to tell the army whenever such visits happen which is obviously also quite a risky thing to do if it's known that people are informing on on them. The main thing I think that the conflict has done is to destroy much of the national and local economy so a town like Segu 50 miles 50 kilometers away used to have you know very quite a thriving tourist economy that into which people could sell a whole variety of goods and services that's completely disappeared the NGOs that used to be present have also completely disappeared so and that's equally true in Bamako so that the national economy doesn't have the capacity to offer employment to the large number of young people who are now needing to find work. Camilla thank you so much and well done also for covering such a lot of ground we're nearly out of time but I do want to give you one fascinating question which is actually the top voted on the the voting system and this is from Jacques Kenjo. Chinese investment in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa is progressively becoming the new norm huge parcels of land are being allocated to them by the Cameroonian government for example for farming at the expense of local farming communities this creates unfair competition with local farmers. I wonder if you have any success stories from Dilongibugu where the evicted landowners were able to thrive after the arrival of the Chinese sugarcane farming giants was competition and rivalry among the villages the most observable trend? Well thanks very much Jacques and very nice to connect with you through the webinar no I think that the impact of the Chinese investment has been really catastrophic it's been catastrophic for the villages immediately evicted because they've lost all their land they have to go and find land somewhere else which they will never have you know total control over so they have to go and beg basically from families from neighbors from people 30 or 40 kilometers away so right now a lot of donkey carts are leaving places like Tegana and they're setting off for two or three days everybody's piled on top of the donkey cart to go and establish for six months a rainy season farming camp out in the middle of the bush so that's how they're trying to cope there were various promises of lots of jobs schools clinics all sorts of wonderful infrastructure that was going to come with the investment and none of that has happened the government doesn't want to make too much of a fuss because China is such a massively important investor in many other aspects of Mali's infrastructure so roads a new bridge a new university a new hospital so as a consequence local people bear the cost of all of this adverse impact there's no there's no benefit to be seen at all and any attempts to try and call the company to account whenever local administrators try to do that to try and get their tax paid or to try and get the water rates paid the company immediately rings up the embassy in Bamako who has a word with the government who then says you know back off you shouldn't be hassling these guys they're too important to us so I'm afraid there's no silver lining to this particular case and it'd be interesting to know if other particular cases can offer a better picture and it you know I may well be that it's not any Chinese investment but UK investment and other investment that shares some of these same difficulties thanks very much Camilla I should apologize at this point to the very many people who've submitted questions that we haven't been able to get to but please if you want to send them in to me for example I'll do my best to forward them to Camilla and get your reply anyone who I wasn't able to get to huge apologies but also huge thanks to Camilla that was a fantastic presentation and again just emphasizing please do try and get hold of the book if you can land investment and migration 35 years of village life in Mali it's incredibly rich but also as Nick emphasized with some really perceptive comments about the future as well and about what we may see in these environments going forward in the next 35 years so Nick or barra do you have any final thoughts you want to offer before we close no Nick saying no Barra Any fun? No. Oh yeah! That's a good point, yeah. Camilla, do you want to say a word about the French translation of the book? Oui, j'ai voulu donner mes remerciements surtout aux collègues maliens, surtout mes amis, comme vous se direz, et Jacob Adam qui m'ont soutenu pendant des années. Le livre est à mi point dans la traduction et j'espère que dans quelques mois ça sera disponible en français. Et j'espère aussi que je viendrai à Bamako pour faire le lancement du livre français dans quelques mois, qui sait, j'espère. Thanks. Fantastic. Thanks very much. Well, huge thanks firstly to you Camilla for a great presentation and for some fascinating discussion, but also to Nick Ambarra for your careful reading of the book and really provocative and excellent questions. So, huge thanks to everyone and thanks also to all the participants for joining us. Thank you. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Nick. Thanks. Thank you.