Back40 sees hope even in the Horn:
[S]killfully managed pastoral systems help retain water and halt or reverse desertification in arid regions in Africa. See Allan Savory. (Link added. Ed.) That doesn’t solve the entire food problem, but it helps. Over time catching and holding more rain can improve a whole region and enable some amount of cropping as well as livestock. There are limits to what a place can produce. We may not know those limits precisely, but they exist.
We’ve written about Savory before. And slowing down the run off. But those are mavericks. Is the mainstream smart enough to find out how we can work with the existing system, rather than against it?