Prickly pear cactus and pastoralism in southwest Madagascar

Abstract

Madagascar's Mahafale cattle raisers have adopted several species of the prickly pear cactus (Opuntia) into their subsistence patterns. Their use of Opuntia has had the economic effects of both sedentary and transhumant intensification. It lengthens the stay of pastoralists at their villages and structures the timing of their seasonal migration to distant pastures. (Cactus-plant cattle fodder, pastoralism, sedentarization, Mahafale, Madagascar) This article explains how several thousand Mahafale pastoralists in southwestern Madagascar have incorporated prickly pear (Opuntia) into their pastoral economy, which depends on assisting their cattle through the dry season, when grass and water are scarce. Rather than relying on nomadism in the pursuit of water and pasture for their livestock, the pastoralists have turned to cactus to keep stock alive. So pivotal is Opuntia in the cattle diet that they categorize it as sakafon-drano (water-food). This plant-human relationship, therefore, is central to an understanding of Mahafale economic life. Prickly pear, a cactus of the genus Opuntia, recognized by its characteristic thorned, flattened segments, has thrived in places far from its original New World homelands. In the Mediterranean region, people have cooked with fresh, broad, flat, segmented Opuntia stems (called nopalitos in Spanish) and its ripe, fleshy pears (L'Allemand 1958:113). In Sicily, varieties of the tree-shaped Opuntia ficus-indica, which can grow to a height of twenty feet or more and forms a woody trunk at the base, have been valued for their fruit as well their hedging, foraging, and wind-breaking (Barbera, Inglese, and Pimienta-Barrios 1995:18). Cactus pears have been a principal fruit crop of North African nomads, who also boiled down the fruit juice, which is rich in vitamins, as a molasses substitute (Meyer and McLaughlin 1981:108). Outside of rice-growing areas in India, farmers have maintained large hedges of thorny O. dillenii (Donkin 1977:44). O. hernandezii has been grown in Senegal for hedging, opposing the expansion of sand, and for its fruit (Chevalier 1947:453). Agriculturalists in North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya) have lined their cropped land, roads, and camel trails with cactus fencing (Monjauze and Le Houerou 1965). Sheep and cattle ranchers in Australia have colonized dry lands by feeding prickly pear to their stock (Commonwealth Prickly Pear Board 1925; Dodd 1940). Pastoralists have used cacti as cattle fodder in Sicily, Tunisia, South Africa, and Madagascar (Monjauze and Le Houerou 1965:104). THE CACTUS REGION IN MADAGASCAR Prickly pear has affected the Mahafale pastoralist way of life, particularly in terms of mobility, diet, and gender relations. Women harvest cactus, collecting tuna, the prickly pear fruit, for their families to eat. They also sell the surplus as a cash crop. Male herders work cactus as a vegetable crop for cattle. They singe truncated cactus nopales, the fleshy leaf pads, over a fire to remove the thorns before feeding the succulent fodder to their cattle. For these benefits, pastoralists sow, prune, and shape prickly pear into living fences, plantations, enclosures, and even mazes of fences within fences, around their corrals, hamlets, and villages. In doing so, these herders have become cactus cultivators, and reduced their mobility. In addition to increasing sedentarization, Opuntia also has affected the timing of Mahafale transhumance. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Among the conditions affecting pastoralist peoples around the world, scholars have pointed to failures at the state level to keep mobile pastoralists viable as encapsulated groups (Ellwood 1995; Hiatt 1984; Mohamed Salih 1990; Olson 1990). Others have emphasized how some states have followed colonialist agendas by relocating, training, or pressuring pastoralists to sedentarize by implementing policies that favor farming rather than herding activities (Galaty and Johnson 1990; Hinderink and Sterkenburg 1987; Khogali 1981; Silitshena 1990). …