Michael Mortimore Explained

Michael J. Mortimore
Birth Date:1937 9, df=yes
Birth Place:Bermuda
Death Place:10 September 2017, Somerset, UK
Occupation:Geographer, African drylands specialist
Alma Mater:University of Leeds, UK
Spouse:Julia

Michael Mortimore (7 September 1937, in Bermuda – 10 September 2017[1]) was a British geographer and a prolific researcher of issues in the African drylands.[2] He was an academic in Nigerian universities for over 25 years. He ran a British research consultancy, Drylands Research. He is best known for an anti-Malthusian account of population-environment relationships, More People, Less Erosion, and field-based studies of adaptation to drought.[3]

Background

Mortimore's father worked for Cable & Wireless plc and as a result, Mortimore was born in Bermuda and educated on Ascension Island, before boarding at Monkton Combe School in Somerset when his father was posted to Aden. He attended the University of Leeds (BA Geography 1960, MA 1962) where he met his wife, Julia. He left the UK in 1962 to become a lecturer in Nigeria.

He was involved in building Nigeria's capacity to train and support its own interdisciplinary research into human-environmental dynamics. He first taught and researched at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, between 1962 and 1979, during which time he trained many students, built a map library, and edited the journal Savanna. He was then Professor of Geography at the relatively new Bayero University, Kano, from 1979 to 1986. He then left Nigeria, preceded by his family, after religious extremism in Kano that targeted Christians.

Subsequently, he continued research studies as a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, the Overseas Development Institute in London, and as an Honorary Fellow of the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham.

He was a partner of a policy consultancy set up with Mary Tiffen in the 1990s, Dryland Research. He was an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He was a consultant for DFID, CIFOR, the UNCCD, DANIDA, the Natural Environment Research Council, and the Drylands Development Centre in Kano. He was a frequent visitor to Nigeria, latterly in 2016.

Research contributions

Mortimore is known for his extensive studies of farming systems, environmental change and human adaptation to drought in the drylands of northern Nigeria, and comparative work in Kenya, Niger, and Senegal. He assessed local and regional human adaptations to a harsh and complex environment.

Mortimore produced several influential and thought provoking texts; these include Adapting to Drought (1989), Working the Sahel (with W.M. Adams, 1999) and a revisionist account of livelihoods in Machakos, Kenya entitled More People, Less Erosion (with M. Tiffen and F. Gichuki, 1994).

Mortimore's research and publications were all concerned with the drylands of Africa. Adapting to Drought was a summation of his long-held view that even the most disadvantaged African smallholders 'adapt' more or less successfully to climatic change and severe drought, rather than submitting to it. It was based on first-hand, blow-by-blow observation over 25 years, and particularly of the Sahelian famines and droughts of the late 1970s and 1980s. Wood fuel in Kano (with Reg Cline-Cole et al.) was an exhaustive study of the fuelwood market also conducted in the late 1980s following the major droughts.

One project Mortimore undertook from the UK in the 1990s was conducted with Prof. Bill Adams (Cambridge) and Nigerian colleagues, and using ESRC funding. It brought his earlier Nigeria research up to date and extended it through new field studies in the region, presenting a model of how agropastoralists deal with environmental and economic pressures in the region (see Working the Sahel, 1999).

From 1991, Mortimore embarked on a major project with Mary Tiffen and Francis Gichuki, in the Machakos Hills of Kenya. This region was long held to have suffered serious erosion accompanied by population growth. The researchers – after securing funding from a variety of sources – set about testing population-environment models and relationships. Leaning on (and improving on) Ester Boserup's work, they discovered population growth and environmental enhancement occurred thorough multicropping and other farming methods, terracing, and strong community organisations. Mortimore's comparisons of photographs from 1930 and 1990 revealed an improvement in landscapes and in resource management (rather than degradation and impoverishment, widely assumed to have been present), albeit with much higher population densities and altered labour regimes.

This finding 'controverted' Malthusian thinking. The 1993 launch of More People, Less Erosion at the ODI in London was electric – several staff members of the UK Department for International Development, the World Bank, and academic researchers from East Africa were there, and the study has echoed through revisionist thinking about African degradation myths and agrarian policy ever since. It remains a controversial and talked-about thesis on African development paths.[4] [5] It has been cited over 1800 times.[6]

Mortimore's comparative work led him to speak with some authority about 'desertification', a word associated with the Sahel and with Africa. He was a long-term critic of the argument that the Sahara is 'spreading' as a result of poor land management, or that farmers and herders tend towards destroying their natural capital. In Adapting to Drought he challenged the well-funded international desertification apparatus and challenged it to listen to farmers who, with the right support, were improving biodiversity and halting land degradation without expensive and inappropriate interventions. Almost two decades later, and following interest in the Machakos model, he was actually engaged by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification to make this case to them (Mortimore 2005).

Awards

Death

Mortimore was active until close to his death, and two hip replacements meant he was cycling, his favourite mode of transport, until 2017.[8] He died from aggressive cancer in September 2017.

Key publications

BOOKS

SELECTED PAPERS

http://www.agriculturesnetwork.org/magazines/global/changing-farming-practices/managing-agricultural-transition-in-african/at_download/article_pdf

Trans.

2006. Transiçao da agricultura no semi-arido africano, Revista agriculturas experiensias em agroecologia 3/3: 29–32

2006. La transition agricole dans les zones arides d'Afrique, Agridape. Revue sur l’agriculture durable à faible apport externs 22/2: 29–31

2006. La transición agrócola en las zonas áridas africanas, Revista de Agroecología 22/3: 18–20.

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Mike Mortimore obituary. TheGuardian.com. 18 December 2017.
  2. Web site: Mike Mortimore obituary. TheGuardian.com. 18 December 2017.
  3. Web site: Home . drylandsresearch.org.uk.
  4. see Malakoff, D. 2011. Are More People Necessarily a Problem? Science29 July VOL 333:544–546
  5. http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/details.asp?id=1703&title=re-examining-more-people-less-erosion-hypothesis-special-case-wider-trend
  6. Google Scholar September 2017
  7. Web site: Michael Mortimore. 24 October 2012.
  8. Web site: Hip replacement is no barrier for this long-distance cyclist.

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