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By Root 1874 0

The whole country looked like a garden and banana plantation. Steep hills were being farmed right up to their crests. Even the most elementary measures that could have minimized soil erosion, such as terracing, plowing along contours rather than straight up and down hills, and providing some fallow cover of vegetation rather than leaving fields bare between crops, were not being practiced. As a result, there was much soil erosion, and the rivers carried heavy loads of mud. One Rwandan wrote me, “Farmers can wake up in the morning and find that their entire field (or at least its topsoil and crops) has been washed away overnight, or that their neighbor’s field and rocks have now been washed down to cover their own field.” Forest clearance led to drying-up of streams, and more irregular rainfall. By the late 1980s famines began to reappear. In 1989 there were more severe food shortages resulting from a drought, brought on by a combination of regional or global climate change plus local effects of deforestation.

The effect of all those environmental and population changes on an area of northwestern Rwanda (Kanama commune) inhabited just by Hutu was studied in detail by two Belgian economists, Catherine André and Jean-Philippe Platteau. André, who was Platteau’s student, lived there for a total of 16 months during two visits in 1988 and 1993, while the situation was deteriorating but before the genocide’s explosion. She interviewed members of most households in the area. For each household interviewed in each of those two years, she ascertained the number of people living in the household, the total area of land that it owned, and the amount of income that its members earned from jobs off the farm. She also tabulated sales or transfers of land, and disputes requiring mediation. After the genocide of 1994, she tracked down news of survivors and sought to detect any pattern to which particular Hutu ended up being killed by other Hutu. André and Platteau then processed this mass of data together to figure out what it all meant.

Kanama has very fertile volcanic soil, so that its population density is high even by the standards of densely populated Rwanda: 1,740 people per square mile in 1988, rising to 2,040 in 1993. (That’s higher even than the value for Bangladesh, the world’s most densely populated agricultural nation.) Those high population densities translated into very small farms: a median farm size of only 0.89 acre in 1988, declining to 0.72 acre in 1993. Each farm was divided into (on average) 10 separate parcels, so that farmers were tilling absurdly small parcels averaging only 0.09 acre in 1988 and 0.07 acre in 1993.

Because all land in the commune was already occupied, young people found it difficult to marry, leave home, acquire a farm, and set up their own household. Increasingly, young people postponed marriage and continued to live at home with their parents. For instance, in the 20- to 25-year-old age bracket, the percentage of young women living at home rose between 1988 and 1993 from 39% to 67%, and the percentage of young men rose from 71% to 100%: not a single man in his early 20s lived independently of his parents by 1993. That obviously contributed to the lethal family tensions that exploded in 1994, as I shall explain below. With more young people staying home, the average number of people per farm household increased (between 1988 and 1993) from 4.9 to 5.3, so that the land shortage was even tighter than indicated by the decrease in farm size from 0.89 to 0.72 acre. When one divides decreasing farm area by increasing number of people in the household, one finds that each person was living off of only one-fifth of an acre in 1988, declining to one-seventh of an acre in 1993.

Not surprisingly, it proved impossible for most people in Kanama to feed themselves on so little land. Even when measured against the low calorie intake considered adequate in Rwanda, the average household got only 77% of its calorie needs from its farm. The rest of its food had to be bought with income earned off the farm, at jobs