Nick Ashton-Jones, with Oronto Douglas and Susi Arnott

“ Rice farming, taking advantage of the annual flooding, is the prime economic activity in Anyama and the major export, so much so that the community celebrates a rice festival at the end of December. The activity is dominated by men. ”

“ Anyama was considered important enough by the British to have a District Officer in 1928.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, a human population, having grown due to the ending of the slave trade, would have had a substantial impact on the ecosystem, which nonetheless would have remained dominantly forest, albeit depleted of the larger more valuable trees in the more accessible areas. With an insatiable demand for palm oil the oil palm forests would have been opened up for exploitation and the palm favoured in many other areas. ”

“ Future Economic Costs include not only all those mentioned above, which continue, but also others including the concentration of new income into fewer hands, and the reduction of local income. This in turn leads to all the social costs of a fractured society which arise from an unfair distribution of income. ”

“ The society is run by men who make most of the decisions but both men and women work equally hard, although the raising of children and cooking is entirely undertaken by women.
Anyama does not exhibit the frustration here that is felt in many other Niger Delta communities, because the young men do have something to do in growing and processing rice, although the 1994 crop was ruined by disastrous floods, conceivably made worse by the Risonpalm dyke on the other side of the river. ”

“ Population densities on the levees of the Anyama district are high, and the "settleable" land in the area is as densely populated as other parts of Southern Nigeria. Pressure is mitigated by the large areas of swamp and semi-swamp that provide additional resources (and a refuge for bio-diversity) but on "dry" land modern populations suffer the same problems as do poor rural communities everywhere: declining agricultural yields and poor sanitation. ”

“ The mammal population was substantially reduced by hunting and those not able to take refuge in the more inaccessible swamps were extinct or close to extinction - elephant, chimpanzee and hippopotamus - although, due to people's farming activities, the variety of birds was greater than in the natural ecosystem of the area. ”

“ The young rivers erode the unstable alluvial deposits and spread fresh alluvium on one side of a river as they erode the other. Ox-bow lakes are formed and as the rivers shift their positions they capture sections of each other so that they may quite suddenly (in geological terms) carry a lot less water abandoning fossil levees, or a lot more water, eroding a young flood plain. Settlements are confined to the levees which are the only areas that are entirely safe from the wet-season flooding. ”

“ The populations of some of the slower moving animals such as the hippopotamus (the most dangerous large mammal from people's point of view) may have felt the impact of people's hunting, while their dogs would have worried smaller faster moving animals such as duikers. ”

“ The more settled life encouraged by the British for easy economic exploitation, and improved health care, initially encouraged by the missions and later by the government, will have caused a rapid growth in human population from the 1920s onwards. ”

“ Thus they are sandy loams, fine sandy loams and silty loams with a low permeability so that if they are not flooded in the wet season there may be, nonetheless, standing water at times. Some of these soils may be quite deep, as seen at the Anyama waterfront in the dry-season, when the village is 3-4m above water level, but generally they are shallow because of the permanently high water table. When they are cleared for agriculture and without the addition of humus, such soils rapidly lose fertility.
The flood plain soils are like those at Okoroba also. ”

“ Other arable farming takes second place to rice: it is subsistence and dominated by women. The main crops are plantains and cassava, but maize and sugar cane is planted on the most recent alluvial deposits that are exposed in the dry season. ”

“ This loss results in an immediate financial cost to local people and to the down-stream economy (rattan furniture makers and gin distillers for example) which affects the wider local economy and puts additional pressure on the resources arising from the remaining forests. ”