Aid groups fiddle while desert burns

Press, 10 February 1983, Page 16

Aid groups fiddle while desert burns

From ‘The Economist,’ London

A decade has passed since the southern Sahara's tragic drought of 1968-73. In the last three bitter years of that period 200.000 people and three million animals died in the sub-Saharan countries. Since then. $BOOO million of aid has been poured in to relieve suffering and to try to stop the same thing happening again.

Yet an alarming — but not alarmist — report from the International Institute for Environment and Development, published last month, says that the Sahel may be on the brink of another crisis.

Can another disaster be prevented? If the last one was simply the result of successive years of low rainfall, the answer must be no. But most scientists reckon that weather was only a trigger — that the real cause lay in changes in the way people lived and used the land.

There have been four long droughts this century in Sahel.

yet the human- suffering has never been as great as during 1968-73. Analyse why and you should be able to make the land less vulnerable again. In theory. Until relatively recently the Sahel belonged 'effectively to the nomads. A nomadic way of life is well suited to sparse vegetation: because herds move continually, no one area is quite stripped of vegetation. But West African Governments have been persuading — or coercing — nomads to settle down. That has meant that the richest areas, where they settle. tend to get overgrazed. Communal ownership of land, widely imposed after decolonisation. led villagers to cease to look after the surrounding areas which had previously belonged to them. Why bother, when somebody else can always graze there? Trees were cut down as firewood to fuel the growing towns. That led to erosion,

which lowered the productivity of land. Well-meant, but poorlyengineered irrigation systems waterlogged fields and made them useless. Veterinary services increased animal populations: when hard times came, there were too many mouths feeding off dried-out land. The growing human population increased the pressures on an already fragile environment.

After the 1968-73 drought, a United Nations conference on "desertification" — the creation of deserts — produced an admirable set of principles aimed at preventing the environment from crumbling altogether. Sadly, according to the recent report, despite those plans, and the vast sums of money spent, little has actually changed. Where has the money gone? Some of it is unaccounted for. As for the rest, the 1.1.E.D. argues that it has been spent in ways that do not attack the root of the problem. One fifth .of the aid has gone to building roads. Nobody doubts the roads are a good

thing, but the report reckons that they were not a priority when the main need for the rural population was growing enough food for themselves. One tenth of the aid has gone to irrigation projects. Irrigation can mean highly productive land. It can be a wasteful way to use water in areas where there is barely enough for people and cattle. And it can be overdone — imposing a constant risk of waterlogging and salination, which make productive fields barren.

Another tenth of the aid has gone on other water development projects, principally wells. But new wells can be dangerous. Land can get overgrazed because herdsmen hang around the wells longer than is good for the vegetation.

Nomads are often not keen on wells anyway. The report cites instances of the Bororo and Tuareg herdsmen in Niger petitioning the Government to turn off pumps and not build any more wells. Why? The wells encourage other tribes to move on to their traditional pastures, which were then

overgrazed. A vast — uncalculated - chunk of money has been spent on food aid. That was essential during the drought itself. But the area has become dependent. as it was not before, on around 100.060 tonnes of foodaid a year. Less than one tenth of aid has gone directly into agricultural projects other than irrigation. and less than 1 per cent on forestry. A shame. Considerable land-productivity dividends could have been reaped by programmes emphasising improved seed and livestock, tree planting, simple automation. and fertilisers. The 1.1.E.D. reckons that there were, among other things, too many cooks. There were two international organisations. three United Nations offices, as well as all the Governments in the Sahel region. involved in distributing aid. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of their time was spent squabbling. The United

Nations did try to organise the whole effort, but nobody wanted to know. For example, it set up a special account for the Sahel and asked all concerned to pool their contributions through it; only Mexico responded, with $5OOO. While the aid organisations fiddle, the southern Sahara burns. Pressure on the rural areas to produce more is increasing with the population, which stood at 25 million in 1975. and will probably reach 42 million by the end of the century. More people mean more animals. There are already nearly as many animals as there were in 1968. Workers in the Sahel watch the land being overgrazed with a sense of deja vu. A few years of drought may be all that are needed to trigger another disaster. They may have begun. In the past five years rainfall levels have been low. Indeed. 1982 s rainy season was as dry as any during the 1968-73 drought. Its effects will be felt this northern summer.