DESERTIFICATION

Twenty million people face starvation, particularly in Kenya to Somalia and Ethiopia

There was no violence, not even a threat, but the situation is self-explanatory. At the turn of the trail that winds through the arid Isiolo in northern Kenya, men dressed in Shuker (Blanket) coming out of the bush use without asking permission in the water tank a company working on road construction.

The group of pastors Samburu is exhausted. The men were thirsty, very thirsty, and they are determined to fill their jerry cans in the small tank valve. In the dry plains, the wind carries the columns of dust above the trees dry and dead animals. “Some of us have more than twenty miles to find this water. It has lost 90% of our cows. We only want to die,” said Jefferson Leparsanti, jaws clenched, leaning on his lance. Either d ‘water is prohibited, there is more grass around. The rivers are dry. Here is the region of death. “

The point of the nearest water, a place of desolation called Lerat, contains a few muddy liquid. Shepherds, without a word, look at a dying cow fell a few steps, skeleton dressed in skin. Since when this drought lasts she? Opinions differ. Oxfam cites a figure of five years. “Climate change in this region does not necessarily mean less rain, in fact, if we can provide something here that is a slight increase in rainfall in the coming decades. But the rain should be more concentrated and brutal, with intervals drier and more flooding, “said Alun McDonald, spokesman for the NGO which has launched an appeal for ten million euros to help people.

Oxfam believes that in seven countries, from Kenya to Djibouti, 23 million people are affected by drought. The United Nations estimates the number of people now dependent on food aid in the Horn about twenty million, with half the Somali population (3.6 million). The drought is not the only cause. In Kenya, the price of staple foods has doubled, while the country continued to export grain. Massive diversions have affected the stocks of grain from the government. However, while periods of drought were separated by intervals of ten years, the cycle is accelerating: 2000 and 2005, when the herds were decimated, and 2009, with low precipitation.

   In the vicinity of Mount Kenya, a hundred miles farther south, flocks to succeed on the road every few hundred meters, the content along the axis through the barbed wire that led everywhere. A program to slaughter cows was established by the government. Trucks are loaded animals in the north to bring them to slaughter only domestic, near Nairobi. On arrival, unload heaps of corpses, animals are too weak to withstand the road.

In total, an estimated quarter of a million head of cattle has undertaken one of the largest mass migration in recent decades. Some come from Ethiopia, marched two months, three months. Inevitably, conflicts arise here and there.

Towards Isiolo, 300 kilometers from Nairobi, the first violence between groups were reported in January. Fifteen dead. Turkana, Somali, Pokot, Samburu, ethnic groups are caught in cycles of attacks and reprisals against the backdrop of traditional raids to steal livestock. At the exit of Isiolo, Jalal Aideed, youngest son of a Somali family farmers, no longer dares visit his field to the periphery. “There are Shift (bandits) Turkana there. If they see me, they kill me.”

 

  

  The day before, two Turkana were killed by Somalis, in retaliation for an attack Turkana few days earlier. On the other side of town, Jalal Aideed may instead go to the family ranch: 3 000 acres (about 1 200 hectares), more than a thousand cattle and five men to protect the destitute from the plain thirst for preventing access to water the field. These inequalities further increase the crisis.

The scarcity of resources does not provided an automatic escalation of tensions. With the influx of men and herds, violence broke out on occasion. In many cases, negotiated solutions are sought. Question of wisdom about survival.

But these mechanisms are weak. The population has doubled in twenty years in the region. And erratic rainfall combined with the destruction of Kenya’s forests, disrupting groundwater, causing a drop in river levels. In the Baringo area, large landowners to political power have been digging deep wells to irrigate their vast fields of grain. Two steps, farmers saw their animals die of thirst.

Now another danger threatens the region. After drought, torrential rains. The weather phenomenon El Nino, according to the Kenyan Meteorological Services should start in October and be accompanied by rainfall can devastate infrastructure. “We have made contingency plans for more than 100 000 people, storing food for example,” said Patrick Lavand’homme, Office of Humanitarian Coordination (OCHA). The High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides food stocks near the refugee camps in Kenya, some of which will be displaced due to floods.

“Above all, said Patrick Lavand’homme, the rains will arrive in finding people who have just suffered their third or fourth consecutive year of drought, and are in distress.”

Because of global warming? 

 

    It is comfortable for the mind to wander its lens on the globe and climate change attributed to weather disasters in series: devastating drought in East Africa, floods in the Sahel … What do the rainfall records performed in these regions for a little over fifty years?

    The answer may surprise. “In West Africa, for example, the rainfall was high in the 1960s, then was known sequences in very dry years 1970 and 1980, says climatologist Serge Janicot. Since the 1980s, we witnessed a surge while remaining below the average secular. But it perceives the signal a return to conditions more favorable rainfall in this region. “

    This oscillation between dry spells and wet sequences is not to be attributed to climate change. “Presumably it is the result of natural variability in the system,” said Mr. Janicot. Work published this summer suggest that precipitation of this region are influenced by the oscillations of the North Atlantic.

    It fluctuates slowly, with a period of fifty or sixty years ago, between periods of warm and cold phases. So, the question for this region is not so much whether this happens is related to climate change, but rather to what extent it will affect the great natural cycles uncovered by researchers. That question is open.

    The various models used in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not agree. Some of these simulations predict that climate change will lead to a drying of sub-Saharan Africa, others predict it the other way around.

 Read More on  :  Combating Desertification in Africa – UNCCD – United Nations …