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Paper short abstract:

The Felupe society – well adapted to the environment and holding a set of knowledge and techniques that, for centuries, allowed ensuring their own food, religious and prestige value needs – is now confronted with sudden changes of parameters that affect its stability and resilience.

Paper long abstract:

The Felupe society, before constraints and turbulences generated by external dynamics, has been able to adapt their internal dynamics to ensure its stability. Diversifying the agricultural production and serving up of the specificity of their social organization, the location of their ground and the ties with other Joola subgroups, the Felupe society strengthened and restructured traditional networks that allowed the improvement of their own conditions of life.

However, today, new factors are constraining its social cohesion and resilience: rainfall changes decrease the surface of mangrove rice; migration, even though seasonal, reduces the required hand labor; dependence, risk and uncertainty inherent to annual fluctuations of food prices in foreign markets, weakens the economy; the growing strength of the external and invasive dynamics strengthens the capacity of resilience. In fact, the growing and rapid increase of world market inconstancy makes more difficult the timely establishment of strategies of adaptation to turbulences caused in the balance of food security and, consequently, in social stability. Unstable flows of influences, ideas, illicit trades, etc., at Guinea-Bissau state level, promote coups d'état that, by inducing political instability and/or security, change the social organization, aggravate existing constraints, generate new turbulences, weaken social cohesion and, consequently, the social stability. This paper explores these aggressive and abrupt changes of parameters which may strongly restrict the stability and resilience of the Felupe society.