Suggests that production systems in the Sahel have reached and even exceeded their capacity to respond to the needs of a growing population. Productive land is fully occupied, and there is now a decline in production capacity whilst producers see no alternative but to over-exploit existing resources. The author further suggests that development aid has only had a neglible impact on the trend to over exploit, since it has provided adequate reponses neither to population growth, nor to the relative proportion of the population engaged in subsistence production and consumption, nor to the production intensification through domestic- or export-market-related mechanisms.