Interviewer: Kristin Wood
Interviewee: Leones
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Gender: Male
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Time Lived in Area: About 50 years
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Occupation: English Teacher
Location: Rhotia, Tanzania
Date and Time: February 11, 2017 at 10:00am
Rhotia is a small village in the Karatu District of Northern Tanzania. Most of
the community members are farmers and pastoralists. They depend on crops and
livestock for their life source, but in recent years, they have faced many struggles
due to an increase in droughts. Because of the lack of rain, many livestock are dying
of dehydration and crops are unable to grow. Furthermore, the lack of water not
only affects the income of these people, but it affects their well being as well.
Currently, the residents of this area obtain their water from the Ngorongoro forest
where it travels by gravity through water pipes into the village, but during droughts,
when water is scarce, the price skyrockets to prices that many people cannot afford,
especially when the lack of rain is already having a significant effect on their income.
Because so much of the local economy is based in agro-pastoralism, it is
difficult for local people to find another source of income, and therefore, they are
forced to compensate for their losses in other ways. Due to the fact that the drought
has reduced the income of many individuals and has also lead to an increase in
livestock deaths, which consequentially raises the price of beef, many people turn to
cheap bushmeat as an alternative. Although this response may have the short-term
benefit of having meat on the table, it may have devastating long-term impacts on
wildlife and biodiversity as it increases the amount of poaching and will further
perpetuate the negative impacts of climate change rather than alleviate them. In
terms of alternative solutions, it seems as though the locals have no means to escape
the feedback loop between poverty and climate change. In order to change this, it
may be necessary for an intervention from an outside organization to occur,
possibly with the goal of shifting the local economy away from agro-pastoralism and
towards wildlife tourism or alternatively, with the goal of educating locals on more
sustainable agricultural practices in order to conserve water.
Figure 1 Farmland during the dry season in the region surrounding Rhotia