| Niger, ranked by the United Nation's Human Development Index (HDI) as among the three least developed countries for the last decade and as the very last this year (UNDP, 2005) faces the severe challenges of how to feed its increasing human population.; I tested the hypotheses whether (1) the food status in Niger Republic is becoming more precarious, most importantly increasing the susceptibility to drought, (2) pastoralism generates food security by having less year to year variability than crops; and (3) there is an expansion of cropping land at the expense of grazing land, increasing national vulnerability.; My methods consisted of a series of temporal and spatial analysis at the national and regional levels using the methods of Hall et al. (2000), de Ridder et al. The main results are that at the national level from 1961 to 2002: (1) total cropland has increased (2) average food production per hectare has decreased as well as total production per capita (3) increases in human population have been slightly greater than increases in food production, so that Niger's food security is decreasing and Niger is increasingly susceptible to drought. At the regional level, the trends are the same as at the national level, but their severity depends on the combinations of human population density, rains, size and composition of livestock herds. |
