In Senegal, climate change is adding to historic tension between farmers and herders

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Cheikh Diouf and his father had just delivered a load of manure to the family’s fields near their village in January when Diouf, returning home for a second load, got an urgent phone call from his sister-in-law: His father, she said, was arguing with a group of herders. By the time Diouf raced to the field, his father was dead, struck down by machete blows.

There was no trace of the attackers, but Diouf and his family blame herders whose animals had grazed into the cassava fields that Moussa Diouf was cultivating. The elder Diouf, in his 60s, spent most of his time in the fields or at a mosque where he served as muezzin, performing the daily call to prayer.

“It hurts so much,” Diouf, 18, said. “If only I had been there, he wouldn’t have died. Either I or the herder would have died — but not my father. If I ever meet that herder, I will avenge him, that’s for sure.”

Tension between farmers and herders has long been a fact of life in West Africa, but climate change is ramping it up. Declining rainfall and rising temperatures have dried up pasture land at the same time agricultural use has expanded. And that’s meant more frequent conflict as nomadic herders, and their cattle, sheep and ...