Cross-border cattle corridors — the Sahel transhumance economy under strain

<p>Sahelian transhumance — the seasonal movement of cattle herds across hundreds or thousands of kilometres in search of forage — is one of the largest organized cross-border economies on the continent. Estimates from the Comite Permanent Inter-Etats de Lutte contre la Secheresse dans le Sahel (CILSS) and the Reseau Billital Maroobe put the herd at over thirty million cattle and roughly twice that number of small ruminants moving annually across the corridors between Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, northern Nigeria, northern Benin, and into coastal markets in Cote d&#x27;Ivoire, Ghana, and Togo. The aggregate value of meat marketed at the coastal destinations runs into the billions of dollars annually.</p> <p>The corridors are governed by a layered set of agreements. The ECOWAS Transhumance Decision A/DEC.5/10/98 from 1998 establishes the legal framework for cross-border movement using the ECOWAS International Transhumance Certificate (CIT) and designated entry and exit points. The UEMOA Sectoral Policy on Pastoralism (PAU) from 2013 adds harmonized rules within the franc zone. National pastoral codes — Niger&#x27;s Pastoral Code of 2010 is the most developed — set the rules within each country. Local conventions at the commune level govern access to specific corridors, water points, and forage reserves.</p> <p>The legal architecture has not prevented the corridors from breaking down. The first stress is climate. Sahelian rainfall variability has increased markedly since 2010; isohyets have shifted southward; the boundary between the Sahel proper and the Sudanian zone has moved with them. Herders who used to move within a more predictable range have had to push further south earlier in the year, which puts them onto cultivated land at moments when crops are still in the field. Conflict over crop damage and the compensation owed to farmers is the most common spark for farmer-herder violence in the Tahoua region of Niger, the Boucle du Mouhoun of Burkina Faso, and the Middle Belt of Nigeria.</p> <p>The second stress is insecurity. Jihadist insurgencies in central Mali, northern Burkina Faso, and the Liptako-Gourma tri-border have produced no-go zones along historic corridors. Herders who try to move through find their cattle taxed, their herders abducted for ransom, or their animals stolen outright. Roland Marchal, Yvan Guichaoua, and the work of the International Crisis Group&#x27;s Sahel programme have documented how transhumant communities have been progressively criminalized in national security discourse — labelled as cover for jihadist movement — and subjected to ad-hoc state responses that further disrupt the corridors.</p> <p>The third stress is national-level securitization at borders that were historically porous in practice. Benin closed the Malanville corridor in 2019 after the rise of JNIM activity across the Niger border, and the regime in Cotonou has used cattle movement as a vector to assert control over its northern Borgou and Alibori departments. Nigeria&#x27;s open-grazing bans, rolled out by Benue, Taraba, and other Middle Belt states since 2017, have functionally closed the Plateau-to-southern-savanna corridor that historically fed the Lagos and Ibadan livestock markets. The ECOWAS framework gives the herder a right to move that the national-level governance is increasingly unwilling to honor.</p> <p>The economic consequence is meat price inflation across the coastal markets. The Abidjan livestock market data show wholesale cattle prices rising over forty percent in real terms between 2018 and 2024, with the share of imported frozen meat — much of it Brazilian via Cotonou and Tema — rising in parallel. The coastal cities are substituting away from the Sahelian supply chain in real time. If the substitution becomes structural, the Sahelian herd loses its principal market, and the household economy of millions of pastoralist families collapses to the level the system can support without the coastal export.</p> <p>What would stabilize the corridors is a combination the region has not been able to assemble: corridor demarcation enforced at scale, herder-farmer compensation funds with real fiscal backing, security operations that distinguish transhumant movement from jihadist movement, and recognition of pastoralism as a legitimate land-use category in national land law. The Reseau Billital Maroobe&#x27;s advocacy at AU and ECOWAS levels has produced documents on each of these. Implementation lags. The transhumance economy is one of the structural features of Sahelian life that the region&#x27;s institutions inherited and has been unable to update.</p>