LAND COVER CHANGES, PROTECTED AREAS AND AGRO-PASTORAL CONFLICTS IN MENCHUM, NORTH WEST CAMEROON

ABSTRACT: Agriculture, particularly crop cultivation and livestock farming are amongst the main activities sustaining the lives of a cross-section of rural people across the world. Whilst these are both important economic activities destined to coexist within the same geographical entity, the smooth functioning of this mixture has been weakened in the past decades across Sub-Saharan Africa. The competition for scarce land resources by farmers and mobile pastoralists is now creating a new wave of conflicts in and around protected areas. The new paradigm today across Africa is not only wildlife attacking farmers and livestock but rising depletion of biological resources linked to encroachment of protected areas by farmers and mobile pastoralists. The study sought to evaluate the contributions of land cover/use changes and changing land rights as a result of protected areas creation to the recurrent agro-pastoral conflicts in Menchum. In its research methods, the study used a spatial analysis approach including remote sensing data acquisition for land cover/use classification and GISbased overlay analysis to visualise land cover/use dynamic zones and farmer-graziers conflict hotspots in the study area. The results showed that changing land cover/use and the carving of protected areas have partly contributed to the ceaseless land conflicts between farmers and graziers, graziers and graziers, as well as between farmers in the zone. This was very visible in the Wum-Esu-Subum farming-grazing triangle and in the north east of the newly carved Kimbi-Fungom National Park. Only a bottom-up conservation strategy can help conserve the rich biodiversity of the zone and partly reduce conflict recurrence and biodiversity loss in and around protected areas.
Keywords: Changing land cover and tenure rights, protected areas, agro-pastoral conflict hotspots, Menchum,
Cameroon