World Public Health Nutrition Association home page August 2011
Africa. Sahel crisis
Africa’s pastoralists: being left to die?
Sahel, 2010 and now 2011. Hoping against hope that seeds will grow in Niger;
women and children now in grossly overcrowded refugee camp in Somalia
The news team reports. Once again there is dreadful news from the Sahel, the arid and
semi-arid strip of Africa bordering on the Sahara. Despite all food aid efforts over
the years, populations within at least ten countries are close to or already enduring
mass hunger and starvation. In July the worst reports have come from Somalia and
neighbouring East Africa. Yet in much of the region there still is – or should be –
more than enough food.
The Sahel is shown in brown. Populations most likely to be severely short of food,
or starving, are (from west to east) in Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso,
Niger, Chad, Sudan (North and South), and also in Ethiopia and Somalia
Please cite as: Anon. Africa, Sahel crisis. Africa’s pastoralists being left to die?
World Public Health Nutrition Association home page, August 2011
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Populations in Somalia, and also in Ethiopia and northern Kenya, are now suffering
from the impact of what most reports term ‘drought’ or ‘famine’. But an increasing
number of commentators do not see this latest crisis in these terms.
Certainly the Sahel, the strip of Africa south of the Sahara (see map above) is
becoming increasingly arid, and it’s highly likely that one reason is human-made
global climate change. But what continues to happen in the Sahel is not just a ‘silent
tsunami’, a natural disastrous process whereby more of sub-Saharan Africa becomes
desert There’s more to it than that. Political and economic policies and practices are
creating conditions of acute food insecurity and even of famine.
Last year the hardest hit region of the Sahel was in the west, including in Niger. A
report then stated: ‘The paradox of this year's worsening food shortage is the
presence of plentiful quantities of food in many markets throughout the country’. A
local witness stated ‘There is a relatively good flow of food into the markets in Niger,
yet prices remain extremely high. Since 2008 there has been a lot of speculation and
tension in the markets. There has been good food production in neighbouring
countries, yet prices are abnormally high’.
The report continued: ‘Speculation in agricultural commodities on the international
financial markets since 2006 has been blamed for price increases of up to 300 per
cent for some basic foodstuffs, including rice and cereals, a phenomenon described
by [then] UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, as “silent mass
murder”.’
Sahel, 2010 and now 2011. A Niger chief walks by a cow dead of starvation;
mother and child waiting for emergency aid in a refugee camp in Somalia
Urban Jonsson, an Association Council member with long experience of work in
Africa, a former UNICEF chief of nutrition now based in Kenya, comments: ‘The
people of the Sahel will continue to need emergency aid. But the underlying and
basic causes of this perpetual crisis need to be recognised and addressed, not just as a
Please cite as: Anon. Africa, Sahel crisis. Africa’s pastoralists being left to die?
World Public Health Nutrition Association home page, August 2011
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matter of charity to communities in distress, but as a fundamental issue of human
rights and entitlements. One cause of acute food insecurity in the Sahel is climate
change, in turn caused by the overuse of resources in materially rich countries.
Another cause is political and economic programmes forced on African countries in
return for extortionate foreign loans, which require food to be grown not for the
people of those countries, but for export, in order to earn dollars. The aid that Africa
needs, above all, is lifting of its foreign debt burden’.
Claudio Schuftan was in Senegal earlier this year with the World Social Forum, and
has also worked in sub-Saharan Africa. He comments: ‘So many of us are trained to
think that poverty, and all that comes with poverty, is just “one of those things” and
that “the poor will always be with us”. But actually what continues to happen in the
Sahel is not a tragedy, it is an outrage. We are indeed seeing the social and other basic
determinants of undernutrition and starvation at work in Africa. This is in good
measure a consequence of the policies and practices of powerful countries. Certainly
food and medical aid is needed. What is needed above all, are conditions of mass
social mobilisation that lead communities to stand up for their rights’.
There may be an even more basic issue, indicated by John Vidal of The Guardian in
the report summarised below. The natural way of life of the peoples of the arid and
semi-arid lands of Africa south of the Sahara, is pastoral. Their economy does not
depend on cash or credit in what is now the usual sense. Communities and families
trade in goods, including brides, animals, crops, and other valuables, and make
relatively little use of coins, let alone bank accounts.
So their regions and countries are identified as ‘least developed’, because the
measurement of ‘development’ is made in terms of cash turned over, assessed as
gross national products. Those forces eager to ‘develop’ Africa and make it work for
international business, most of all areas where minerals and other resources may be
found, would find it easier to do so if pastoralist societies vanished – if they became
extinct. By this analysis, what is happening in the Sahel is a version of what happened
in the US in the 19th century, as a result of which the remnants of the original people
were and remain stockaded.
Please cite as: Anon. Africa, Sahel crisis. Africa’s pastoralists being left to die?
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Box 1
The basic causes of the Sahel crisis are not ‘natural’
This is an extract from a report in The Guardian of 21 July, written by their
distinguished environmental correspondent John Vidal.
A massive drought, as if out of nowhere, has settled over the Horn of Africa, and
the people fleeing to the camps are said to be ‘climate’, ‘drought’ or
‘environmental’ refugees. The land, we are told by the international agencies
rushing relief to the region, can no longer support its people.
Fifty or so years ago, the region had regular 10-year climatic cycles which were
mostly followed by a major drought, and now the droughts are coming more
frequently and are lasting longer. In the 1970s, say the pastoralists – the nomadic
herders who move their cattle ceaselessly across the region in search of pasture –
they started having droughts every seven years; in the 1980s they came about
every five years and in the 1990s every two or three. Since 2000 there have been
three major droughts and several dry spells, this one being not the worst, just the
latest.
But to pin this crisis on drought or climate change is wrong. This is an entirely
predictable, traditional, man-made disaster. The 10 million people who the
governments warn are at risk of famine this year are the same 10 million who
have clung on in the region through the last four droughts and were mostly being
kept alive by feeding programmes.
The fleeing Somalis seen on TV are the same people the UN warned about in 2008
when it said that one in six were at risk of starvation. Josette Sheeran, head of the
UN's World Food Programme, appealed for US$300 million emergency aid this
week – just as she did in 2008 when she told of ‘a silent tsunami [of hunger]
gathering’.
Nor was the crisis unexpected. The rains failed early this year in Kenya and
Ethiopia, and there has been next to none for two years now in Somalia. Aid
agencies and governments have known for almost a year that food would run out
by now. But it is only now, when the children begin to die, and the cattle have been
sold or died, that the global humanitarian machine has moved in.
Just as in 2008, the war in Somalia is primarily responsible for the worst that is
happening. But remember too, that Somalia has been made a war zone by the USled ‘war on terror’. It's our fault as much as anyone's.
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But another, more insidious war has also been taking place across the region. This
one is being waged by governments and businesses against the pastoralists. Over
the years, they have been steadily marginalised and discriminated against by
Ugandan, Kenyan and Ethiopian governments, and now they are further
jeopardised by large-scale farming, the expansion of national parks, and game
reserves and conservation.
For the politicians in Kampala, Nairobi or Addis Ababa, the lifestyle of these people
seems archaic and outmoded. They are said to be outside mainstream national
development, and to be pursuing a way of life that is in crisis and decline. So the
politicians think little of taking away their dry season grazing grounds or blocking
their traditional routes to pasture land. However, as seen in major international
studies, the pastoralists produce more and better quality meat and generate more
cash per hectare than ‘modern’ Australian and US ranches.
Instead of starving the region's people of funds and then picking up the pieces in
the bad years – as governments must do now – Britain, the EU, the US and Japan
must help people adapt to the hotter, drier conditions they face. With better pumps
and boreholes, better vaccination of cattle, help with education, food storage and
transport, people can live well again.
Please cite as: Anon. Africa, Sahel crisis. Africa’s pastoralists being left to die?
World Public Health Nutrition Association home page, August 2011