The famine unfolding in Africa is rightly dominating news and comment around the world, the more since it is now “official”. One recurrent theme is that the disaster could have been, and was, foretold … and ignored. Jeffrey Sachs says he warned the US President.
[T]wo years ago, in a meeting with US President Barack Obama, I described the vulnerability of the African drylands. When the rains fail there, wars begin. I showed Obama a map from my book Common Wealth, which depicts the overlap of dryland climates and conflict zones. I noted to him that the region urgently requires a development strategy, not a military approach.
Obama responded that the US Congress would not support a major development effort for the drylands. “Find me another 100 votes in Congress,” he said.
I shouldn’t think the votes are there now, either, but Sachs’ fourfold prescription remains at least partially valid. Whether this particular drought can be laid at the door of climate change is not relevant; climate change will make droughts (and floods) more severe an we need to deal realistically with the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change. Fertility rates are high, but if history is anything to go by, they won’t come down until living conditions and prospects improve. The region is poor and so, as Sachs notes, shocks that other regions might shrug off push it towards calamity. And unstable politics exacerbate the other problems; food security is hard to achieve in a region without other forms of security.
The big question is what sort of development strategy would work best in the region. Sachs, naturally enough, favours something like the interventions going on in the Millennium Villages Project. None of those, however, seem to me to address the root problem, which is that the land is too dry and too unpredictable to support anything other than pastoralism, and that pastoralism is a victim as much of modern geopolitics as it is of climate change. I have no idea what to think when I read things like this:
The government [of Kenya] has announced plans to immediately put 10,000 hectares of land in the River Omo delta around Lake Turkana under irrigation to produce maize, sorghum, vegetables and fruits to ease the food crisis frequently experienced in the region.
Can that possibly be the right approach? It seems very unlikely. Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye on the information being shared at ILRI’s newsy blog.
The Voice of America analysis is bunkum. Famine in this region is nothing to do with past colonialism pushing locals to grow cash crops for export – there are no such crops in the affected region. It is far more to do with conflict, either national or tribal. I have worked in the area (northern Kenya) during a drought. Periodic drought pushes pastoral tribes into cattle raiding and killing, which in turn causes movement of refugees and the need for food aid. An irrigation project on the Omo river will not attract local tribesmen but marginalized farmers from elsewhere in Kenya and certainly lead to future inter-tribal conflict. As to geopolitics, there are Sudan/Kenya/Ethiopia and also Ethiopia/Kenya/Somalia tri-border meeting points in the area – a recipe for continued conflict with the uncontrolled movements of pastoralists, who sensibly do not move their livestock as politicians might wish.