Gahungu’s experience mirrors other stories familiar to Burundi for decades—stories that are multiplying and worsening as the country copes with a veritable explosion of people. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million, according to the U.N. Development Programme, or roughly 40 percent more than a decade ago. The population growth rate is 2.5 percent per year, more than twice the average global pace, and the average Burundian woman has 6.3 children, nearly triple the international fertility rate. Moreover, roughly half a million refugees who fled the country’s 1993-2005 civil war or previous ethnic violence had come back as of late 2014. Another 7,000 are expected to arrive this year.
The vast majority of Burundians rely on subsistence farming, but under the weight of a booming population and in the long-standing absence of coherent policies governing land ownership, many people barely have enough earth to sustain themselves. Steve McDonald, who has worked on a reconciliation project in Burundi with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, estimates that in 1970 the average farm was probably between nine and 12 acres. Today, that number has shrunk to just over one acre. The consequence is remarkable scarcity: In the 2013 Global Hunger Index, Burundi had the severest hunger and malnourishment rates of all 120 countries ranked. “As the land gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces,” McDonald says, “the pressure intensifies.”
