Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/145

The Resources of the Niger Delta: Agriculture River we came across a similar system used for growing rushes (?spp.) for the manufacture of thick matting (e.g. doormats).

However, all these systems require very careful management. For instance if the polders of the rain-fed system are not breached in the dry season the soils rapidly become highly acid and sterile. Not a serious problem on small scattered farms, but a disaster if large 'anti-salt' barriers are built, as in Guinea Bissau, to serve many rice farms, and subsequently mismanaged. Moreover, if large areas of the Niger Delta mangrove forest are converted into rice farms then the whole marine fishing industry of Nigeria will be compromised. Then, once people start to grow rice for themselves and the huge local and regional market, it will be difficult to stop them extending cultivation.

13.4.2 THE RESOURCE CONFLICT IN THE FRESH-WATER ECOZONE

Thus the Brackish-Water ecozone is set to become the battlefield of a classic conflict for resources fed by the need to produce food for a rapidly growing population. The conflict will have four protagonists: the marine fishing industry; the needs of forestry; rice; and fish-farming. With proper planning there is room for all and for the maintenance of the ecological integrity of the ecozone. However ignorance about relationship of the marine fishing industry to the mangroves, and the immediate need for food over the longer term considerations of forestry, mean that in the next century, there is a good chance of rice and fish-farming destroying the mangrove forests of the Niger Delta.

13.5 AGRICULTURE AND THE BARRIER ISLAND ECOZONE.

Cultured Forests on the Sand-Barrier Islands of the Niger Delta - Akassa

With the advent of viable society in the Sand-Barrier Islands of the Niger Delta, at least 5000 years ago, the natural ecosystem of Akassa began to be substantially altered: the very accessibility of the Niger Delta estuaries and their abundance of fish would have made them especially attractive to human activity.

Akassa will have been influenced by early groups of people moving through the numerous protected and interlinked creeks and lagoons inland that stretch from the Volta Delta to the Bonny Estuary. Today, Akassa is settled by Ijo people who separated from other Ijo groups about 1000 years ago and moved Westwards from the Brass Estuary. Settlements favoured the East sides of the estuaries because the West sides have mangrove forest.

The Sangana and other Akassa people have always been fishermen as opposed to farmers or even hunters. Moreover they would have been involved in fish and salt trade North and into the interior of Africa. This trade will have been extended by their inevitable contact first with European traders from the 15th and 16th centuries onwards, although the Sangana River is too shallow to have been a major trading centre. The impact of the slave trade was felt throughout the region and although there was a small slave loading point at Kongho on the Nun Estuary, the major slave-trading corridors were to the West (Benin and Warri) and the East (the Bonny River).

The palm oil trade, which grew strongly after the middle of the 19th century, had the greatest long-term influence on Akassa and a large part of the population concentrated on the production of palm oil and palm kernel, at first for local traders, and later for the Royal Niger Company (later the United Africa Company U.A.C.) which established as a major trading centre at Akassa (Bekekiri) towards 143