ABSTRACT
In Mali, largely a semi-arid to arid country with extensive pastoralism and a famine in 1972–1974, international and national rural development policies were detached from actual rural change. Costly programs focused on intensifying farming in irrigated areas. Rice production there was frail in the 1970s and 1980s, and many producers were half-starved serfs of the state. After output rose later, their lives improved a bit. More important changes occurred in rainfed agriculture where many peasants turned to keeping livestock (while nomadic pastoralism declined, together with formerly dominant ethnicities), and manure and draught animals helped expand farmed areas. By contrast, the use of most technical inputs, promoted in regional development schemes, remained low in staple food production. Social differentiation in the countryside was limited and depended in part on a family’s settler status as new soil was taken under cultivation, often by domestic migrants. Mali remained a country of famines but less than others of chronic hunger. 20 to 30 percent of the citizens lived abroad after 1980, mainly in Africa. This labor migration had a mixed impact in rural areas but was connected with the rise of commercial urban capital.
