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Sub-Saharan Africa is often portrayed as a region of chronic hunger, conflict, and poverty. The country of Burkina Faso is a bright spot on the continent where government agencies, NGOs, and development organizations have progressively improved food security to the point where citizens often state, "Famines of the past could never happen again." This study evaluates such claims by looking at food security trends over the last 18 years using ethnographic participatory fieldwork and grain price data. Community members have invested in numerous soil and water conservation (SWC) measures that buffer their crops from droughts and agro-climatic variability. There is also a national famine early warning system in place and improved infrastructure that helps the government and NGOs efficiently provide food assistance in times of need. Thus, fewer households are affected when droughts occur due to these adaptations, and food insecurity is not as severe or widespread as in the past. Local grain prices are, however, rising and becoming more closely linked to world food markets. Just as most households are becoming more food secure, those who are dependent on grain purchases are becoming more food insecure.
Key words: food security, Sahel, Burkina Faso, Mossi
Mba-Katré, the hyena, and Mba-Soâmba, the hare, were friends.
There had been such a famine that no one had anything to eat.
So the hare made an offer to the hyena. He proposed that each one of them sell his mother in order to buy some grain. (Sissao 2010:29)
The lines above are from a famous Mossi folktale called "The Hare and the Hyena." No one really knows when this story was first told, but people in northern Burkina Faso are very familiar with its various versions in which the cunning hare tricks his naïve and trusting friend the hyena. Undoubtedly very old and deeply rooted in Mossi cultural history, certain facets of it resonate with the everyday lives of contemporary Mossi people. First of all, it references a "famine" and the northern parts of Burkina Faso lie within the West African Sahel region where food shortages commonly occur. The tale also describes conditions whereby "no one" had "anything" to eat, which suggests a widespread and extreme food deficit. Two recent famines of this magnitude affected this part of...