By Reverien Mfizi

Land and resource scarcity is a major under-examined cause of conflicts in Africa. An environment of mistrust is created when people no longer see each other as neighbors but as competitors for a scarce supply of food, land, and water. These tensions are then exploited by opportunistic politicians who see their power as a way to control a country’s resources and enrich both themselves and the ethnic group they belong to.

Africa has been ravaged by conflicts that have displaced and killed millions of people. Most of these conflicts are seen as tribal disputes that erupted during the post-colonial period, the wake left behind by colonizers exiting their territories after bringing certain tribes to power over others. While colonization has been a major factor, little attention has been given to the fact that the increase of population, coupled with diminishing land and water resources, exacerbated post-colonial tensions. The genocide that ravaged the country of Rwanda in 1994 is a good example.

The Rwandan Genocide—committed by Hutu extremists against the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus—took the lives of more than one million people and is often simplified as a series of tribal killings like any other conflict on the continent. But Rwanda was also facing aggravating factors such as population increase, soil degradation, and chronic food shortages.

Rwanda has one of the highest population densities in Africa (829/sq mile), and more than 90% of the population still practices subsistence farming, with an average farm size per household of just 1.1 acres.

Furthermore, decades of over-cultivation have made the land unproductive and the country has experienced food shortages since the 1980s. While environmental scarcity cannot be solely blamed as the cause of the 1994 Genocide, it provided an environment where unrest and disorder grew and lead to an open conflict. Destitute Hutus who had no land, jobs, or other means of survival were manipulated by corrupt politicians and became the tools of genocidal machinery.

In order to understand the complex relationship of land and conflict, it is very important to examine the effects of human activity and how scarcity of land, water, forests, and fisheries contributes to violence. In his extensive research on environmental scarcity in Rwanda, Thomas Homer-Dixon, currently at the University of Waterloo, explains three ways environmental scarcity could arise:

First, there is “demand-induced scarcity” which is a result of extensive population growth that leads to shortage of resources. Second, there is “supply-induced scarcity” which arises from the degradation of resources and lack of an ability to resupply or renew available resources. Third, there is “structural scarcity” which arises from the inability of a given society to equally distribute resources. These scarcities can affect the social order in different way,s which include food shortages or famine, economic decline, population displacement, and disruption of the social or political order.  A combination of these effects can produce conflict between social groups and therefore lead to violence when these social groups are organized around ethnic or religious divisions.

In Rwanda the increase of the population led to a demand-induced scarcity. The population density increased tremendously during a period ranging from the 1950s -1980s, which led to a reduction of family farm size, making it difficult for subsistence farmers to feed their families. According to the census, the population in 1978 stood at 4.85 million and increased to 7.17 million by 1991, an increase of nearly 40% in 13 years.

 
Supply-Induced scarcity in Rwanda was caused by erosion, falling levels of soil fertility, and depletion of forests. More than 70% of the forest had been lost since the 1950s due to the need to create new agricultural lands for the production of food for the ever-increasing population. Land was not left fallow to keep up with demand, further depleting the soil. Local farmers had no access to modern agricultural technology to increase yield or access to irrigation systems. Statistics show that per capita food production decreased by 25% since 1984. This situation coincided with the dramatic fall of coffee prices of the 1980s, which severely affected farmers and pushed them into poverty. According to the organization African Right, this sense of hopelessness by the Hutu majority may have been the main cause of popular participation during the 1994 Genocide.

Structural Scarcity was not necessarily in evidence because the land was distributed relatively evenly between both ethnic groups. But in the 1960s there was a wave of internal immigration from the North towards the East to occupy the lands previously occupied by Tutsi who fled the country following the 1959 Hutu revolution. In an effort to gain support for their genocide ideology, Hutu extremists ignited fears among Hutu peasants that the Tutsi would reclaim their lands. So while it was not a fact, fear of structural scarcity was created and exploited. The Hutu government continued to argue that there was not enough land to accommodate the return of the Tutsi refuge population.

The genocide in Rwanda was caused by a multitude of political, economic, and environmental factors. It is not an easy task to unravel the conflict and understand the degree to which each factor played a role. But it appears that without environmental scarcity at play, political and economic disparities between Tutsis and Hutus might not have developed into one of the worst genocides in recent history.

Reverien Mfizi is a survivor of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. He is a graduate student in the University at Buffalo’s Department of Urban Planning.