Beyond the violence: How farmer-herder conflict is reshaping rural livelihoods in the Sahel

IFPRI Blog

Key takeaways

• Farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria and across the Sahel reshapes livelihoods by changing how households work, invest, farm, and plan for the future.
• Adaptation does not always build resilience, as coping strategies can reduce productivity and trap families in long-term vulnerability.
• Women experience conflict in different ways, and effective policies must account for how exposure to violence shapes opportunities, decisions, and aspirations.

Rural southwestern Nigeria is not typically considered a conflict hotspot, yet violence there has been on the rise. In 2023-24, there was a 40% chance that a woman farmer in the area lived in a household that suffered crop damage from farmer-herder violence, roughly a one-in-three chance that assets or irrigation equipment were stolen or destroyed, and a one-in-eight chance that someone in her household was physically assaulted. These statistics from our recent study point to how rapidly and broadly such quotidian forms of violence are reshaping rural life in Nigeria and elsewhere in the Sahel region.

Synthesizing evidence from recent CGIAR studies examining how conflict affects farming households across the Sahel region, with the bulk of the evidence focused on Nigeria, the study reveals a striking pattern: farmer-herder conflict is not simply destroying lives but also transforming livelihoods.

When farmer–herder conflict makes headlines, the focus is understandably on lives lost, communities displaced, and villages destroyed. But recurring, more low-level forms of violence also have major impacts. On top of their immediate harms, they change economic behavior and attitudes, specifically how rural households make a living—what they plant, where they work, how they invest, what they aspire to achieve, and how they prepare for the future. Those changes often persist long after individual attacks have ended, quietly reshaping agricultural systems and rural economies.

With 2026 designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, these challenges are even more urgent. The IYRP’s focus on the importance of healthy rangelands and sustainable pastoralism for food security, biodiversity, and rural livelihoods is a reminder that farmer-herder conflict cannot be understood or resolved by looking only at one side.

Just as farmers face many impacts from conflict, pastoral communities are enduring their own serious and under-documented losses, including displacement from traditional migration corridors, livestock theft, and erosion of legal grazing rights. The evidence base on how conflict affects herding households remains thin compared to that on farming, and expanding it is essential.

Growing conflict

Conflict in the Sahel region is growing due to a number of interlinked causes. Competition over land and water is intensifying as populations grow, agricultural land expands, grazing routes contract, and climate variability increases. While farmer–herder relations have historically been cooperative, with mutually beneficial exchange common across many communities, longstanding institutions for managing disputes are increasingly under strain.

Nigeria helps illustrate the scale of the challenge of addressing this issue. Among countries in the Sahel, Nigeria stands out for its consistently higher fatalities from farmer-herder conflict (Figure 1). Roughly 70% of Nigerians depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, yet farmer-herder conflict has become one of the country’s most persistent forms of rural violence, disrupting not only individual households’ production but also labor markets, food systems, and agricultural input markets.

These livelihood disruptions are unfolding against a troubling national backdrop. FAO data suggest that the share of Nigeria’s population experiencing severe food insecurity has risen sharply over the past decade, from around 11% in 2014-16 to more than 26% in 202325. Conflict is not the only force behind this deterioration, but persistent insecurity in agricultural areas is one important part of the picture. Understanding how violence changes farmers’ decisions can therefore help explain why the consequences of conflict extend well beyond the households directly attacked .Read More