ABSTRACT
The social and cultural diversity of populations in dryland Africa is vast, with population densities ranging from less than five to more than 300 per square kilometre. As Mortimore (1998:17) has emphasized, this range in population densities cannot be explained by differences in climate: ‘there is a weak relation between aridity and population density. While high densities are rare in the arid zone, the higher ones are found not in the moist, but in the dry semi-arid zone.’ It is evident that the distribution of different farming systems, especially in the semi-arid lands, reflects social, economic and political factors at least as much as environmental factors.
