AFRICA: Gov'ts Fail to Invest in Hungriest, Poorest Regions
By Stephen Leahy
CHANGWON, South Korea, Oct 21 (IPS) � For millennia, people have coped
with drought in the Horn of Africa, comprised mainly of drylands. Yet
today, more than 13 million people there are starving because of
political instability, poor government policies and failure to invest
in the world's poorest people, say experts here in Changwon.
2.5 billion dollars in humanitarian aid is needed to cope with a
devastating hunger crisis in parts of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and
Somalia.
Two billion people, half of whom are extremely impoverished, live in
drylands around the world, according to Anne Juepner of the Drylands
Development Centre at the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Nairobi.
"Drylands are not wastelands, as is often thought. More than half of
the world's cattle, sheep, goats and most of its grains are grown in
drylands," Juepner told IPS in an interview outside of the United
Nations Convention to Combat Desertification 10th Conference of the
Parties (COP 10) in Changwon.
Juepner is here to launch UNDP's "The Forgotten Billion", a report to
call attention to the fact that despite its productivity, drylands
that comprise one third of the world's land mass are also home to
world's poorest and most at-risk people.
Drylands include the Great Plains of North America, the Pampas in
Argentina and the wheat regions of the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Major
cities like Los Angeles, Mexico City, Delhi, Cairo and Beijing are
situated in drylands.
Although much of North America is drylands and suffers from land
degradation, it is the rural drylands in developing countries where
the poorest people are found. They are often neglected or ignored by
their own countries and by development organisations, said Juepner.
Many have survived for thousands of years in very dry conditions, but
they live on the edge of survival. If governments impose borders or
create protected or settlement areas to restrict the movement of
pastoralists and their animals, a drought can tip them into crisis.
Governments often invest very little in infrastructure like roads and
schools in these poor regions. Similarly, development agencies and
other donors don't think these are the best places to make
investments, according to Juepner.
Successive droughts have plagued much of Kenya, leaving some with
literally nothing and making recovery nearly impossible without
assistance. "Small targeted investments in affected communities can
help them recover," she said.
A small UNDP project helps the Turkana people in northwest Kenya turn
aloe vera plants into hand soap that is in high demand at local
markets. According to Juepner, these types of low-cost investments,
not annual humanitarian responses, are effective in preventing crises.
Some of that massive sum of 2.5 billion dollars for disaster response
for the Horn of Africa needs to be allocated to those kinds of
investment to increase the resilience and ability of local communities
to adapt, Juepner said.
Pastoralism is often thought of as a lifestyle that is either
backwards or highly risky, and nomads, otherwise known as
pastoralists, are often blamed for degrading land. But in fact,
research now shows that drylands are adapted to livestock and animal
movement and suffer when they are removed.
"Degraded lands recover much faster with right number of livestock
than when animals are fenced out," Juepner said.
Mobile pastoralism is part of the solution to the crisis, said Pablo
Manzano, global coordinator of the World Initiative for Sustainable
Pastoralism. Being mobile is the best way to adapt to shifting
rainfall patterns, as pastoralists have been for thousands of years,
emulating the migrations of wild animals.
Mobility is also critical for adapting to a changing climate, he said.
Irrigated crop farming is expensive and not a panacea for food
security problems in drylands, as irrigation schemes exhaust water
resources and lead to conflicts with pastorialists, Manzano told IPS
in Changwon.
Land tenure is key to ensuring pastoralists can control and manage
lands properly. Political boundaries also impose arbitrary barriers.
"In the Horn of Africa, not a single border runs along cultural or
ecological lines," he said.
Long-term strategies, which have been key during other food crises,
should be based on allowing people to move with their livestock across
manmade boundaries.
Famines are more related to political turmoil, and in fact, the
current crisis in the Horn of Africa was predicted a year ago, Manzano
said. He added that political instability and war in Somalia are the
main reasons why four million Somalis are in desperate straits.
"This crisis (in Horn of Africa) has been going on for 20 years, so we
must change the way we work," said David Morley, president and CEO of
the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Canada.
Preventing drought-related famine requires investing in the
development of small business to provide extra income for
pastorialists, Morley said in a release. They also need flexible
schooling, decentralized health services and local management of water
points.
"The key is to listen to and learn from the community."
(END/2011)
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