🇳🇪 The cattle breeds of Niger

Niger's cattle are herded above all by semi-nomadic peoples of the dry north and centre, moving seasonally between southern pastures and the edge of the Sahara. Live cattle bound for Nigeria are among the country's top non-mineral exports, and livestock overall is said to support 29 per cent of the population. Repeated drought has wiped out whole herds, making cattle keeping a risky mainstay.

• Livestock, cattle included, makes up about 14% of Niger's GDP and supports 29% of its people.
• Earnings from livestock are Niger's second largest source of foreign exchange, after uranium.
• Tuareg, Wodaabe-Fula and Toubou herders move cattle south in the dry season, north for the rains.
• Herding families lost whole herds more than once in the droughts from the late 1960s into the 1980s.
• Zinder and Maradi, in Hausa country, are noted centres of leatherwork from hides and skins.

Cattle in Niger

Niger is a dry, landlocked country on the southern edge of the Sahara, where most people live from subsistence farming and herding. Cattle share the rangelands with camels, sheep and goats, and the livestock sector as a whole is said to support about 29 per cent of the population and to yield roughly 14 per cent of GDP. Herding is concentrated in the drier north and east, where families move their animals with the seasons, and much of the trade flows south into Nigeria. Alongside uranium, livestock is the country's main source of foreign money. The same herds carry risk: repeated droughts since the late 1960s have destroyed whole herds more than once.

Regions and communities

The country divides broadly into farming south and herding north. Crop growing clusters in the south centre and south west, where the Sahel, the semi-arid belt south of the desert, brings 300 to 600 mm of rain a year; arable ground is thickest along the border with Nigeria. Hausa country in the south centre is noted for leatherwork, with Zinder and Maradi as twin centres of craft and trade. Northwards lies dry pasture where herding peoples range widely. The far north-west and east are semi-nomadic country, while the Aïr Massif and the Kaouar oases support small patches of cultivation.

Milk, butter and beef

Cattle leave Niger chiefly as live animals, herded across the border into Nigeria, where they rank with groundnuts as the leading non-mineral exports. The 1994 devaluation of the West African CFA franc, the regional currency, gave this trade a further push. Hides and skins form a smaller trade: some are exported raw, others worked into handicrafts. The Hausa districts of the south centre are especially known for their leather industries, and Zinder and Maradi serve as the main centres of leatherwork and its trade.

Today

Livestock brings in foreign money second only to uranium, though the trade is hard to measure, since large herds cross into Nigeria informally and go unrecorded in official figures. Drought remains the great risk: herding families lost whole herds more than once during the long dry spell that ran from the late 1960s into the 1980s, and rainfall still swings sharply from one year to the next. Livestock production is nonetheless said to support 29 per cent of the population and to yield 14 per cent of GDP.