DORI (Burkina Faso): Goring the air with their horns and pawing the earth with their hooves, dozens of bony cattle file into a market in Burkina Faso to be sold under the anxious eyes of their owners.

The frenzied haggling in the northeastern town of Dori is a sign not of roaring commerce, but desperation among Fulani herders struck by the same drought that has left millions hungry in neighbouring Niger and Mali.

With their crops ruined because of failed rains, the herders are now being forced to sell their most precious commodity at prices that will barely raise enough to buy three days of grain for their hungry families.

“There are far too many animals being sold at this market at the moment,” says Brahima Bokou, a market middleman. “If the year is good, then the people here don’t sell too many animals. This year, we have to sell each Friday, just to pay for cereal.”

The food crises affecting parts of Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Mauritania are partly the result of drought and locusts wrecking harvests in West African countries that rely on subsistence farming.

But the herders’ plight reveals a more complex poverty trap in which a natural shock upsets finely balanced, loosely regulated markets, sending the most vulnerable people into a downward spiral from which they may never fully recover.

The Fulani herders — nomads who form one of West Africa’s largest ethnic groups — suffered the first blow when drought and locusts hit their millet harvest, forcing them to sell livestock to buy food they would normally have grown themselves.

The influx of cows onto the market created an excess of supply and drove prices down to 15,000 CFA francs ($28) for a cow that might have fetched 100,000 CFA francs ($187) last year.

Even cows that did not succumb to the drought make a sorry sight at the market, their sunken flanks testimony to three months without grazing, further reducing their value.

The World Food Programme (WFP) says herders in Burkina Faso lost an average of 23 per cent of their stock to drought and starvation and have had to sell a further 50 per cent to survive.

Many simply cannot raise the money to feed themselves, leaving an estimated 945,000 people in need of food aid, of whom about half have received help, according to the WFP.—Reuters