Africa's other famine
Franke, Richard W. & Chasin, Barbara H.
Africa's other famine RICHARD W. FRANKE & BARBARA H. CHASIN THIS year, once again, famine threatens large parts of Africa. In the East, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Tanzania have been hit by...
...Recent investigations have shown that fields manured by cattle have an organic carbon content-a simple rule-of-thumb indicator of soil fertility-two to three times higher than those where cattle were kept out...
...Mali has appealed for 123,000 tons of cereals in aid...
...It was Timbuktu, however, a city closest to the edge of the desert, that became the economic and cultural center of Songhay...
...Ironically, it is the local initiative of the Federation, which started its own development project in the region three years before the outside experts became involved, which provides the justification among these very experts for their enthusiastic endorsement of the project in congressional hearings and in the USAID regional office in Dakar...
...Even the long-term outlook for the Sahel is now considered bleak by many experts, despite an ambitious development program there...
...Instead of reviving this relationship with its ecologically sound set of interchanges between animals, crops, soil, and humans, most development projects in the Sahel seem designed to further pit the two groups against each other...
...Over 40 percent of livestock of Tuareg and Fulani herders are believed to have died, while over vast regions harvests dropped to just 50 percent of their pre-drought levels...
...IN the wake of the 1968-74 Sahel drought and famine, there has been organized one of the most eleborate development programs in modern times...
...Farmers would grow millet or sorghum as staple grains...
...The need for rapid and effective development of the region is recognized by Sahelians and the international community alike...
...In 1973, Gao was a major scene of famine and flight of refugees to camps farther to the south...
...Peanut cultivation had numerous detrimental effects on the ecology of the Sahel...
...French researchers in Niger found that a World Bank irrigation project was flooding lands that herders needed for dry season pastures...
...Peanut cultivation was expanded after both World Wars in the twentieth century and again during the 1950s and 1960s...
...Large parts of Mali did not have rain for much of 1979 and most of 1980...
...By extension, it has come to mean the countries of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Upper Volta, Chad, the Gambia, and the Cape Verde Islands...
...Hundreds of thousands of lives may be at stake, but relief aid so far has been below what is considered trie.minimum necessary by major agencies such as Catholic Relief Services and organizations within the affected areas...
...Benefiting from extensive agricultural resources, good pastures, and a strategic location along the transsaharan trade routes, the Sahel became the scene of major African empires such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhay...
...The result was severe overgrazing, especially around the watering sites which often turned into patches of desert...
...At a French-African ministerial conference in April of 1980, the French Ministry of Co-operation estimated that by the year 2000, the French-speaking African countries will be able to produce only 60 percent of their food requirements as compared with 80 percent at the present...
...Bank officials seem enthusiastic about getting water onto fields where rice could be produced, but if herders are driven from the pastures, they will be forced once again to move towards the desert fringe, where overgrazing would then threaten to turn fragile grasslands into the advancing Sahara Desert...
...Milk from the cattle and goats was exchanged for grains from the farmers' fields...
...Overall production richard w. franke, associate professor of anthropology at Montclair State College in New Jersey, has carried outfield research in Surinam, Bougainville and Indonesia...
...The officials are part of a government corporation which is intended to utilize the irrigation technology to produce rice for the urban market in Dakar, the capital city of 750,000 in a country with 5% million people...
...The decline of Timbuktu parallels that of the Sahel region as a whole, and was brought on by a multitude of inter-related factors...
...As the peanut spread, traditional exchanges between herders and farmers-the basis of the ecologically sound traditional economy described above- were disrupted...
...The Arab explorer Ibn Batuta described Gao, one of the principal cities, in 1353, as "one of the finest towns in the Negroland...
...It is also one of their biggest and best provisioned towns with rice in plenty, milk and fish, and there is a species of cucumber there which has no equal...
...Violence erupted, and the nomads were pushed toward the desert...
...The Senegal River, an important source of irrigation for staple crops, was so low in 1980 that only 13 percent of the area normally irrigated could be brought into cultivation, while the main cash crop, peanuts, was down by 50 percent...
...any misuse of this fragile environment will exacerbate the effects of the periodic droughts which seem to come to the region about every seventy years...
...One of the many Arab scholars residing in the city in the fifteenth century described it as unequaled "in the security of persons, its consideration and compassion towards foreigners, its courtesy toward students and men of learning, and the financial assistance which it provided for the latter...
...Herders would bring their animals and camp on the edges of the fanners' villages, especially during the dry season...
...Herders and their animals are forced to undertake arduous journeys for water, and the animals can be taken to drink only once every two or three days...
...The regions of Gao and Timbuktu in Mali have become near-famine zones for their 850,00Q people...
...It should not be allowed to happen...
...For the many thousands of hectares in need of recovery, the work force in the region is hopelessly inadequate, yet thousands of people from this very region eke out a living in other parts of West Africa where they went as migrants...
...In Senegal, over 100,000 sheep, cattle and goats have died of hunger or disease in recent months and a half a million more are in great danger...
...A third major dilemma facing Sahel development is the misallocation of labor-a direct effect of French colonial policies...
...Here a $3.5 million U.S.-sponsored irrigation project has become a battleground between Senegalese government bureaucrats and the local Federation of Soninke Peasants...
...The Sahel is highly susceptible to soil erosion and desertification if not carefully and rationally exploited...
...In addition to the basic production of food, Sahel empires derived prosperity from the trade of gold and slaves coming from the forest regions of West Africa...
...Today, Timbuktu is a remote town of 15,000 inhabitants where nearly everything is in short supply...
...Along the upper reaches of the Senegal River is a dramatic case of the effects of competing interest groups...
...The interests of these elites in accumulating riches from the development program threaten to steer several major development projects off the course of environmental rehabilitation...
...In 1974 they began their research on the Sahel drought and famine and in 1976 they joined the World Agricultural Research Project at the Harvard University School of Public Health...
...Unlike millet and sorghum stalks, the peanut provides insufficient fodder for cattle...
...Memories are still fresh, however, of the overwhelming tragedy which, from 1968 to 1974, brought the Sahel into major media prominence when crops failed, livestock perished, and more than 100,000 people died...
...Necessary resources were also lost...
...When grown as a monocrop, however, as compelled by the French, the peanut became a source of soil exhaustion and desertification in agricultural areas and an indirect cause of pasture degradation in herding regions of the Sahel...
...According to many government officials, journalists, and aid experts, the recent catastrophe and continuing food problems of the Sahel are a result of the weather alone, of overpopulation, or of irrational behavior by animal herders who supposedly built up excessively large stocks of cattle for reasons of "social prestige...
...An increase in local consumption of fish would result in major improvements in the health of Sahelians, but the development program document agreed upon in the 1977 Ottawa meetings calls for fish to be used to gain foreign currency to help finance the program...
...DURING THE seventeenth to twentieth centuries, the transsaharan caravan routes, were progressively destroyed by European military expeditions, the slave trade, and the opening of sea routes to the southern coastal areas of West Africa...
...The decline of the caravans brought on a general impoverishment of nomads and of the urban centers which had thrived on the transsaharan trade...
...In past times of rainfall shortage these had been a source of supply...
...Sound development policies for the Sahel require a thorough rethinking of past failures in attempting to organize an ecologically rational exploitation of the region's resources...
...French colonial researchers were put to work developing more drought-resistant varieties of peanuts, while taxation policies forced the farmers to expand into ever more arid zones to get cash to pay the taxes...
...Barbara H. Chasiri is associate professor of sociology at Montclair State College...
...During the colonial period thousands of Sahelians were forced to migrate to plantation and urban work-sites in the coastal and rain forest areas of West Africa...
...On the one hand, the Sahel is an ecological zone with a rainfall of twelve to twenty-five inches per year...
...One major dilemma is created by the tension between export crops and local consumption needs...
...Other forms of environmental destruction were also brought about by these mistaken policies...
...An investigation into the Sahel's previous history, however, suggests that far more complex factors have been at work than those recognized so far by most development experts...
...By chopping the soil so that rain water can soak in rather than run off the overtrampled and hardened earth, seeds long held dormant and dry were found capable of sprouting...
...In the fragile ecology of the Sahel, such increases can best be described not as production, but as over-production...
...In 1978 they spent five months in the Sahel gathering data on current development projects and problems and in 1980 they published Seeds of Famine: Ecological Destruction and the Development Dilemma in the West African Sahel (Allanheld, Osmun...
...In the past year, severe inadequacies in rainfall have occurred in much of this region...
...in the country is down to 950,000 tons compared with a yearly average of 1,900,000 from 1970-79...
...This calls for a creative break with the policies of the most recent past, but Sahelian farmers and herders continue to find themselves in competition with international businesses, foreign government interests, and local merchants, landowners, and bureaucrats, many of whom are placing their own enrichment above the needs for environmental reconstruction and preservation...
...The term "Sahel" comes from the Arabic word for "border'' and has acquired two meanings...
...While overproduction was exhausting the soils and bringing on the overuse of pastures, it was also destroying peoples' traditional means for surviving drought...
...Because people had to grow cash crops, they had smaller cereal reserves stored in their granaries...
...Most hard hit were the children, who succumbed to diseases or died from starvation...
...Despite the enormous commitment of resources, however, the Sahel Development Program faces serious dilemmas, many of which are holdovers from the recent colonial past and which seem to be poorly understood by current development planners...
...Further rainfall problems in 1978 led to another 50 percent drop in harvests, and half a million tons of grain were urgently sought by the Food and Agriculture Organization to help the Sahel's people through several harsh months...
...These empires were based in part on the surplus production from ecologically sound farming and herding economies...
...Originally introduced from the New World to provision the slave ships, the peanut is ideally suited to the sandy soils and long dry season characteristic of much of the Sahel...
...development funds are channeled through the Senegalese bureaucracy, thus they become resources to be used in the government's attempt to break up the Federation...
...One of the most famous of the Sahel empires was Songhay, which lasted from about 1473 to 1600 A.D...
...A failure to come to grips with these factors may damage the ambitious development program that has been set up since 1973...
...Though less dramatic at the moment, a crisis also looms in the West African Sahel countries, scene of a major drought and famine from 1968-74...
...From $827 million proposed in 1973, the Western nations, led by the United States and France, agreed in 1977 at an Ottawa, Canada meeting on a $ 10 billion program for food self-sufficiency and ecological reconstruction to culminate in what is called "self-sustaining development" by the year 2000...
...A test plot of only one-hundred square meters, however, required sixty-four hours of hoeing...
...The land is thus left undeveloped despite scientific discoveries of great potential...
...PREVIOUS to the sixteenth century, the Sahel was one of the most prosperous parts of Africa...
...LOOKING BACK ON THE MEETING How the females put an end to male oppression he females put an end to male oppression...
...These would meet camel caravans loaded with dates, textiles, and salt from North Africa...
...Equally important, however, the cattle grazed the millet or sorghum stubble left on the fields after harvest while depositing their dung as a natural fertilizer for the next year's planting season...
...Because of its regional orientation and because of the existence of an "Interstate Committee to Combat Drought in the Sahel," organized by the African nations themselves, many aid experts in the United States have hailed the Sahel Development Program as a ground-breaking venture in development...
...Fish, for example, provide as much protein per person in the Sahel as do cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs combined, even though 60 percent of the fish catch is exported...
...Without major alterations, the latest development program could well lead to a revival of rather than an overcoming of famine vulnerability in the Sahel...
...Half of the countries referred to in the report are in the Sahel...
...Beginning in the nineteenth century, France, the main colonial power in the Sahel, demanded that farmers grow peanuts to provide low-cost food and industrial raw materials for the expanding economy of Marseilles...
...Because of the late arrival of measles vaccination equipment and serums from overseas donors, many thousands died from this disease throughout the Sahel...
...The Federation has chosen to plant millet, a crop with a higher market value locally and the mainstay of the villagers' diets...
...A final major dilemma facing Sahel development derives from the often competing interests between local elites and local producers...
...This was the situation at the time of independence in the 1960s...
...This would be a human tragedy of terrible dimensions...
...During this same period, forces were at work to destroy the ecology in the agricultural and pastoral zones as well...
...As peanut-growing spread northwards towards the desert fringe, farms began to encroach on the nomads' grazing lands...
...Vaccination programs and well-digging projects added more animals and more watering sites, but not more pastures...
...In Niger, one of the countries hardest hit by the drought, the recorded incidence of measles rose from 2,886 cases in 1971 to 29,999 in 1972 and had reached more than 35,000 in 1973...
...Nonetheless, production of animals and of peanuts continued to expand: Mali's cattle population increased from 2,365,000 in 1946 to 4,872,000 in 1969 while peanut production in Senegal went from 45,000 tons exported in 1884 to more than one million tons shipped out in 1965...
...While attempts to revive peanut production have met with resistance from farmers in many regions, other food products are continuing to be shipped out...
...This drought, if it continues as seems to be occurring, could well set in motion again the migrations of herders from their pastures, and the transformation of much of the Sahel into refugee camps where peoples' lives will depend entirely on gifts from overseas...
...In the East, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Tanzania have been hit by drought compounded by wars and a massive flow of refugees...
...The new national governments, with funds and advice from foreign development experts, added to the problems by encouraging the expansion of cattle herds with the idea of developing an export beef industry...
...The loss of the animals will also make the farmers dependent on commercial fertilizers which most will not be able to afford...
...While Sahelian societies were traditionally stratified, colonial policies left a legacy of national bureaucracies which are the centers of wealth and power...
...The rains did return in 1974 and 1975, but failed again over large areas in 1977...
...In 1978, a team of Dutch soil experts discovered in a region of Mali that simple hoeing of degraded pastures could revive the schoen-feldia grass cover within two rainy seasons...
...Another dilemma concerns the important relationship between farmers and herders...
...Trees-which hold topsoil in place and help in water absorption-were cut down for firewood and animal fodder...
...At the time, Timbuktu had a population of 100,000, a university, and 150 Koranic schools...
Vol. 108 • July 1981 • No. 13
