386 Modern Agricultural Reforms
cut-off drains in Kenya. Their function was to intercept and divert storm water,
but many were constructed in a way that caused erosion. As one review put it: ‘The
most severe mistakes were that cut-off drains were laid and constructed on the
wrong sites. They were designed with steep gradients... The water is discharged
into gullies which are deepening. The channel ridges were bare... All these factors
have made the structures more dangerous than useful. More problems were cre-
ated. Gullies have widened, soil was eroded and crops destroyed’ (Hunegnaw,
1987).
More recently, in Malawi, the Lilongwe Land Development Programme
(1968–1977) terraced some 288,000ha of land using heavy earth-moving machin-
ery, but as farmers had few incentives to maintain these terraces, many of the diver-
sion ditches silted up and breached to form severe gullies. The same story was
repeated in nearby Swaziland from 1977–1983, where the Rural Area Develop-
ment Programme built terraces with heavy machinery (IFAD, 1992). These
destroyed all previous practices, but none of the new ones were maintained.
In Oaxaca, Mexico, a large-scale government soil conservation programme is
also establishing contour bunds based on the US models. It is an area noted in the
1970s and 1980s by various ‘expert’ missions as having ‘massive soil erosion’ and
‘the world’s worst soil erosion’, but recent evidence is suggesting that erosion has
only become serious following the imposing of terraces and bunds (Blackler, 1994).
Rill erosion has been recorded within one year of their establishment, and degrada-
tion has been so severe that less than 5 per cent of the bunded area is cropped.
Induced social disruption
The impact of these programmes has been to make many things worse. A failure
to involve people in design and maintenance can have considerable long-term
social impacts. The enforced terracing and destocking in Kenya, coupled with the
use of soil conservation as a punishment for those supporting the campaign for
independence, helped to focus the opposition against both authority and soil con-
servation (Gichuki, 1991; Pretty and Shah, 1994). After independence, this led to
the deliberate destruction of many structures because of their association with the
colonial administration (Anderson, 1984).
In Rwanda, the massive terracing programme using forced labour of the Belgian
administration prior to 1960 created such negative feelings towards soil conservation
that no further activities were possible until the late 1970s (Musema-Uwimana,
1983). In the Uluguru mountains of Tanzania, where ladder and step terraces were
common, the Uluguru Land Usage Scheme introduced compulsory bench terrac-
ing in the 1950s – the scheme had to be abandoned after serious riots by local
people (IFAD, 1992). Elsewhere in Tanzania, the HADO project completely
removed livestock from whole communities, with tens of thousands of animals
removed from individual districts. Such a policy was only possible ‘after mustering
the cooperation of the ruling party and government machinery at village, district,
regional and national levels. Inevitably some of the actions necessary to reverse soil