A2 · Elementary
8 min
food securityagricultureconflictclimate
Cattle Don't Respect Fences
El ganado no entiende de fronteras
More than a hundred Fulani bandits attacked a village in Nigeria's Plateau State, killing eight people. Fletcher and Octavio dig into an ancient conflict between herders and farmers that is quietly threatening the food security of two hundred million people.
Más de cien bandidos Fulani atacaron una aldea en el estado de Plateau, Nigeria, matando a ocho personas. Fletcher y Octavio van al fondo de un conflicto antiguo entre ganaderos y agricultores que amenaza la seguridad alimentaria de doscientos millones de personas.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| tierra | land / soil / homeland | El agricultor trabaja la tierra todos los días. |
| ganado | cattle / livestock | Los ganaderos tienen muchas vacas. El ganado necesita agua. |
| agricultor | farmer | El agricultor cultiva maíz y yuca en su campo. |
| cultivo | crop / cultivation | El cultivo de maíz es muy importante en Nigeria. |
| hambre | hunger | Hay mucha hambre en algunas regiones del país. |
Picture two men walking toward each other on the same road.
Both are trying to feed their families.
Neither will move.
That image is basically the whole story of what happened in Plateau State, Nigeria, yesterday, and it goes back centuries.
Sí.
Yes.
Es una noticia triste.
It is sad news.
Ocho personas muertas.
Eight people dead.
Eight dead, fifteen wounded, more than a hundred armed Fulani bandits.
And the immediate instinct is to file this under routine Nigerian violence and move on.
I want to resist that, because there's something much bigger underneath it.
Claro.
Exactly.
Los Fulani son ganaderos.
The Fulani are herders.
Tienen vacas.
They have cattle.
Necesitan tierra para comer.
They need land to feed them.
And the people in the villages being attacked are farmers.
They need that same land to grow their crops.
So at the most basic level this is a story about food, not politics.
Two food systems fighting over the same ground.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Los agricultores cultivan maíz, yuca, ñame.
Farmers grow corn, cassava, yam.
La tierra es su comida.
The land is their food.
And for the Fulani, cattle aren't just a livelihood.
Cattle are food, cattle are wealth, cattle are identity.
You can trace that culture across the Sahel for a thousand years.
This isn't a new argument.
No, no es nuevo.
No, it is not new.
Pero ahora es más peligroso.
But now it is more dangerous.
Hay menos tierra.
There is less land.
Hay menos agua.
There is less water.
That's the climate piece, and it's the part that turns an old tension into a current catastrophe.
The grasslands in northern Nigeria and across the Sahel have been shrinking for decades.
Lake Chad has lost something like ninety percent of its surface area since the 1960s.
The herders have to go somewhere.
Van al sur.
They go south.
Al estado de Plateau.
To Plateau State.
Allí los agricultores ya trabajan la tierra.
There the farmers already work the land.
And that southward push has been accelerating since roughly the 1990s.
Plateau State is particularly contested because it sits at this ecological transition zone.
Fertile enough for farming, open enough historically for grazing.
It used to be both.
Now it can barely be either.
Mira, el problema también es la comida de las vacas.
Look, the problem is also the cattle's food.
Las vacas comen los cultivos de los agricultores.
The cattle eat the farmers' crops.
Which is devastating.
You spend months growing a field of sorghum or maize, you're counting on it to feed your children through the dry season, and a herd of cattle walks through it overnight.
That's not an abstraction.
That's a family going hungry.
Y los ganaderos dicen: los agricultores cierran los caminos viejos.
And the herders say: the farmers close the old paths.
Los caminos para las vacas.
The paths for the cattle.
The cattle corridors.
Traditional migration routes that the Fulani have used for generations, some of them literally older than the Nigerian state, and farmers have fenced them off or built on them.
Both sides have a legitimate grievance.
That's what makes this so hard.
Sí.
Yes.
Y cuando hay violencia, los agricultores huyen.
And when there is violence, the farmers flee.
Dejan la tierra.
They leave the land.
No hay comida.
There is no food.
And that displacement cascades.
A farmer who abandons his land doesn't just lose his harvest.
He becomes a burden on an urban food system that's already stretched.
Nigeria has two hundred and twenty million people to feed.
It cannot afford to take productive farmland out of circulation.
Nigeria tiene mucha tierra.
Nigeria has a lot of land.
Pero tiene poco orden.
But it has little order.
El gobierno no controla bien.
The government does not control things well.
That's blunt but fair.
The Nigerian state has repeatedly failed to mediate this conflict.
There have been peace agreements, grazing reserve proposals, special commissions.
Very little sticks.
And in the meantime the violence has killed tens of thousands of people over the last two decades.
En el estado de Plateau, la situación es muy difícil.
In Plateau State, the situation is very difficult.
Hay muchos ataques.
There are many attacks.
Muchas aldeas.
Many villages.
I covered parts of this story back in 2009 when I was doing a piece on food insecurity in the Middle Belt.
The thing that struck me then was how local it felt.
Village by village, field by field.
And how completely invisible it was to the outside world.
Es verdad.
That is true.
El mundo no habla de esto.
The world does not talk about this.
Pero la gente tiene hambre.
But people are hungry.
Nigeria's food inflation right now is running above forty percent annually.
That's before you factor in the production losses from conflict.
People in Abuja and Lagos are paying more for tomatoes, more for yams, more for everything, and part of that price increase traces back directly to insecurity in farming communities like the ones being attacked.
Cuarenta por ciento.
Forty percent.
Eso es mucho.
That is a lot.
Las familias pobres no pueden comprar comida.
Poor families cannot buy food.
And the Fulani side of this is also a food story, which sometimes gets lost.
These are not people who want to be in conflict.
They want their cattle to eat.
They want to sell beef in the market.
The cattle are their pantry, their savings account, their everything.
Sí.
Yes.
Para los Fulani, la vaca es muy importante.
For the Fulani, the cow is very important.
Es comida, es dinero, es familia.
It is food, it is money, it is family.
There's actually a word in Fula, the Fulani language, that roughly means the feeling of grief when your cattle die.
No direct English equivalent.
The emotional weight they place on their herds is comparable to what a farmer feels about land that's been in the family for generations.
Entiendo.
I understand.
La comida no es solo comida.
Food is not just food.
Es cultura.
It is culture.
Es vida.
It is life.
Exactly.
And that's what makes the outside framing of this as a security problem so inadequate.
You cannot solve a food competition with more guns.
You need water management, you need grazing land policy, you need early warning systems when herds approach farmland.
Technical problems with technical solutions that nobody is seriously funding.
Hay un problema grande también.
There is also a big problem.
El clima cambia.
The climate changes.
Las lluvias llegan tarde.
The rains come late.
O no llegan.
Or they do not come.
And that disrupts both sides simultaneously.
A late rainy season means the grass in the north doesn't grow enough to support the herds, so they move south earlier than expected.
And it means the planting window for farmers shrinks, so they're under even more pressure to protect whatever they do manage to grow.
Dos grupos con hambre.
Two groups that are hungry.
En el mismo lugar.
In the same place.
En el mismo momento.
At the same time.
Eso es peligroso.
That is dangerous.
That sentence right there is the whole thing.
I've been reading reports on this conflict for twenty years and nobody has put it that cleanly.
Two hungry people in the same place at the same time.
That's the equation.
Y el mundo mira a otro lado.
And the world looks the other way.
Ocho muertos en Nigeria.
Eight dead in Nigeria.
Una nota pequeña.
A small note.
A single line in a news digest.
Meanwhile those eight people were somebody's grandfather, somebody's uncle, somebody who knew where the good fishing was.
And the village that survives the attack will plant less next season, because some of the farmers are dead, and some fled, and the ones who stayed are scared.
Less food.
Higher prices.
The ripple runs.
Oye, usaste una palabra interesante antes.
Hey, you used an interesting word before.
Dijiste 'tierra'.
You said 'tierra'.
En español, 'tierra' tiene dos significados.
In Spanish, 'tierra' has two meanings.
I noticed that too.
You used 'tierra' earlier when talking about the farmers losing their land, and it struck me because I wasn't sure if you meant the soil itself or the land as a plot.
Walk me through it.
Bien.
Good.
'Tierra' es el suelo.
'Tierra' is the soil.
También es el país.
It is also the country or homeland.
También es el campo de un agricultor.
It is also a farmer's field.
So when someone says 'mi tierra', they could mean 'my homeland', 'my land', or even 'my soil', depending on context.
That's a lot of weight for one word.
English parcels all that out into separate words: earth, land, soil, home country.
Sí.
Yes.
Y para un agricultor, todo es lo mismo.
And for a farmer, it is all the same thing.
La tierra es su casa.
The land is his home.
Es su historia.
It is his history.
Es su comida.
It is his food.
That actually deepens the whole conversation we just had.
When a Plateau State farmer says he's defending his 'tierra', he's not being poetic.
He's being precise.
It's all of those things at once.
I've been using that word wrong for years, haven't I.
Sí, Fletcher.
Yes, Fletcher.
Pero hoy aprendiste algo.
But today you learned something.
Eso es bueno.
That is good.