State and Famine in the Sahel Region in the 20th century
Physical Setting
Sahel Africa is a wide stretch of semiarid region south of the Sahara Desert running from the Atlantic ocean in the west to the Horn of in the east. The name Sahel accurately describes where this area is located because it is an Arabic word for "border" or "margin". The term Sahel is derived from the Arabic term sahil, which means shore, border or coast of the Sahara desert) About 12,500 years ago, the Sahel was a part of the Saharan desert, and was covered in sand dunes which have shaped the landscape that we see today. The Sahel receives 150-500 mm (6-20 in) of rainfall a year, primarily in the monsoon season. The rainfall is characterized by year to year and decadal variability.
The Sahel therefore is the the semiarid region of Africa forming the boundary/transition zone between the Sahara to the north and the more fertile, wetter, more tropical,savanna region to the south, known as the Sudan (not to be confused with the country of the same name). Countries that comprise Sahel Africa extend from Senegal, on the west, through Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, N Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, to Ethiopia Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia on the east.
The climate of the Sahel area is typically an arid and unstable environment. This is a most problematic environmental zone because it is hard to operate agriculture with very little precipitation. The Sahel area is a predominately sparse savanna vegetation of grasses and shrubs. It only receives between four and eight inches of rainfall a year, which is slowly decreasing. The rainfall that it does receive falls mostly between the months of June and September. This dry savanna environment is particularly prone to devastating drought years. Typically, several years of abnormally low rainfall alternate with several successive years of average or higher-than-average rainfall. But since the late 1960s, the Sahel has endured an extensive and severe drought.
Life on the Sahel is difficult and precarious. A majority of the people in the Sahel area are involved in nomadic herding. The people and their livestock move in herds according to the rain, a practice that is known as transhumance. Traditionally, most of the people in the Sahel have been semi-nomads, farming and raising cattle in a system of transhumance, which is probably the most sustainable way of utilizing the Sahel. The difference between the dry north with higher levels of soil-nutrients and the wetter south is utilized so that the herds graze on high quality feed in the North during the wet season, and trek several hundred kilometers down to the south, to graze on more abundant, but less nutritious feed during the dry period. Unfortunately, the large number of livestock have overgrazed during the rainy season causing excessive desertification of the Sahel. There are, however, a minority of people involved in limited peanut and millet farming.
The countries in the area are large and durable countries, yet the vast desert of the Sarah and unstable climate of the Sahel make it difficult for them to support larger populations. Ethiopia has the largest population with 57.2 million and is the largest in population by far. The next highest population is the country of Sudan with only 28.9 million people. After these two countries, the populations of the Somalia, Mail, and Niger are all nine and a half million, with Chad at the bottom with only 6.5 million. Populations in this area are growing rapidly though, with some of the highest rates of natural increase in the world, many of them above the 3.0 mark.
Countries (by population size)
Ethiopia: Ethiopia is part of the "Horn" of Africa and is centered on the high plateau capital of Addis Ababa. The capital has 3.2 million of the countries total population of 57.2 million. It has long been ruled by the Christian minority of the Amhara. The Sahel becomes spatially narrow along Ethiopia, however it is a deep cultural chasm. Two major events happened in the 1980's: 1) it became the "Balkans" of Africa and; 2) a drought hit. The first event created more than two million refugees in a struggle that put Muslim Eritreans against non-Muslim Ethiopians. The second event was a devastating drought which caused a countless number of deaths but also helped collapse the regime in Addis Ababa. Finally in 1991 the dictatorship collapsed. Then in 1993 the country became landlocked due to Eritrea's granted independence. At this point Ethiopia's future in the 21st century is questionable.
Sudan: Sudan has a total population of 28.9 million people, and 70% of that population is Muslim. In 1956 the country was granted independence and almost immediately war broke out due to a constant strife between the Muslim North and non- Muslim South. The first war was from 1956 to 1972 and cost over half a million lives. After a brief period of peace the war renewed in 1983 and cost more lives than the first.
Somalia: Somalia had rapidly disintegrated in a civil war which was not between cultures, but between Muslim clan and Muslim clan. It has a population of only 9.5 million. About 90% of the population in the country of Somalia is Islamic.
Niger: Niger was originally an administrative division of the French colonial empire that achieved independence with little economic opportunities. It contains too much of the Sarah and Sahel to sustain a population like Nigeria, Ghana, or the Ivory Coast. The population is slightly smaller than Somalia at just 9.5 million.
Chad: Chad has the smallest population of this region at only 6.5 million. Conflicts that occur often in this area are because of the ethnic break-up of the population and Sahel area. The country is 45% Muslim in the North, 35% Christian, and 20% Animist South.
Droughts
There was a major drought in the Sahel in 1914, caused by annual rains far below average, that caused a large-scale famine In the early 1960s an increase in rainfall in the region, made the Northern drier region more accessible and there was a push, supported by governments, for people to move northwards. However, beginning in the late 1960s the region was once again afflicted by prolonged periods of extensive drought. Beginning in the late 1960s the Sahel was afflicted by a prolonged and devastating drought that further reduced the region's normally meager water supplies, shattered its agricultural economy, contributed to the starvation of an estimated 100,000 people, and forced the mass migration southward of many people. During the 1970's there was a multi-year drought that contributed to the death of over 300,000 people and five million livestock.
During this long drought-period that lasted from 1968-1974, the grazing quickly became unsustainable, and large-spread denuding of the terrain followed. Like the drought in 1914, this led to a large-scale famine, but this time it was somewhat tempered by international visibility and an outpouring of aid. This catastrophe lead to the founding of the International Fund for Agricultural Development
Although rainfall and international relief efforts helped, drought and famine affected the Sahel again in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. The Sahel drought in 1970s and 1980s created a famine that killed a million people and afflicted more than 50 million. The starvation brought on by the 1970-85 drought that stretched from Senegal to Ethiopia captured the world's attention with searing images: skeletal mothers staring vacantly, children with bloated bellies lying in the sand, vultures lurking nearby. Before rains finally returned, 1.2 million people had died.
Many questions have been asked about the desertification of the area, and many people have tried to answer, but it still remains a mystery why the rainfall in the region is slowly decreasing. There were broadly two hypotheses to explain what happened in this semiarid region of Africa.
One blamed the drought on changes brought about by human land use. Originally it was believed that the drought in the region was caused by humans over-using natural resources in the region through overgrazing, deforestation and poor land management. The expansion of farming and herding into marginal areas was said to have produced a spiral of changes, in which reduced vegetation led to reduced rainfall, producing further decreases in vegetation and still less rainfall. Desertification in the Sahel was largely be attributed to greatly increased numbers of humans and their grazing cattle. It was argued that human activities, including overgrazing, deforestation, surface land mining, and poor irrigation techniques, during a natural time of drought transformed the land surfaces leading to desertification.
The other hypothesis focused on temperature changes in the global oceans as the main culprit behind the drought. In late 1990s the climate models suggested that the drought was not caused by humans, but by natural large scale climate changes It was posited that there was a strong correlation between rainfall in the Sahel and intense hurricane activity in the Atlantic
However, in 2000s, after the phenomenon of global dimming was discovered, new models speculatively suggested that the drought was likely caused by air pollution generated in Europe and North America. The pollution changed the properties of clouds over the Atlantic ocean, disturbing the monsoons and shifting the tropical rains south. This caused a stop of summer rains in sub-saharan Africa for two decades and took a huge toll in human lives. Now, nearly two decades after one of the world's most devastating famines in Africa (1970-1985), scientists are pointing a finger at pollution from industrial nations as one of the possible causes.A group of scientists in Australia and Canada say that drought may have been triggered by tiny particles of sulfur dioxide spewed by factories and power plants thousands of miles away in North America, Europe and Asia. The short-lived pollution particles, known as aerosols, didn't have to travel to Africa to do their dirty work. Instead, they were able to alter the physics of cloud formation miles away and reduce rainfall in Africa as much as 50 percent, say the researchers, who used a computer to simulate the atmospheric conditions.
The process, known as teleconnection, continues in the atmosphere today. Some scientists suspect it might help explain the drought gripping parts of the United States, although that question has not been specifically examined. Scientists are blaming the industries’ effluent for the famine and starvation that wracked the region of Africa called the Sahel. Over the years, the disastrous lack of rainfall over the Sahel has been blamed on everything from overgrazing to El Nino. Many scientists still argue those are chief culprits. However one interesting clue that seems to put the blame squarely on pollution is the fact that, in the 1990s when rain returned to the Sahel, during the same period, emissions laws in the industrialized West had reduced aerosol pollution. A coincidence? Scientists don't think so.
In 2003 a group of scientists at Columbia University led by Dr. Giannini also linked oceans to the Sahel drought. Their study suggested that sea-surface temperature rises may have been to blame for the Sahel droughts that devastated West Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. The droughts, in which over a million people are thought to have died, were initially blamed on human degradation of the local environment. But a large climate model at Columbia University in the US has seemingly found that ocean factors were more crucial.
Development
With the Sahel region becoming slowly more arid, the chronic instability of the environment, and livestock populations rising, it is difficult to develop the area, and a traditional way of living prevails.
Between the end of Sahel's 1968-73 drought and the early 1980s, the production of the drought-resistant sorghum and millet was increasing at about 1% a year, but simultaneously the population was growing by about 2.5% a year. A 1982 UN study of the developing world's carrying capacity found that given the current low levels of agricultural technology used, about half the Sahelian countries could not be expected to feed themselves. The Sahel's demographic picture is complicated by the way different populations fill the various rainfall zones. The Sahelo-Saharan zone, the land of the nomad herders, can support a human density of only 0.3 people per square kilometer, but the density is actually 2 per square kilometer. The zone to the south, where herders and settled farmers mix, can support 15 people per square kilometer, yet it actually supports 20. the Sudano-Guinean zone at the far south may be able to support a larger population, but it has not been settled in part becuase it has spawned the tsetse fly and black fly. The region's rapidly growing population requires increased food production, yet the Sahelian countries have opted to encourage the cultivation of cash crops, especially cotton and peanuts, at the expense of food crops. Governments now are caught in the trap of depending on commodities, which are delcining in price, to pay rising debts. Extension advice, fertilizer, equipment, and marketing services are in short supply. In response to urban population pressure, Sahelian governments have kept food prices artificially low. With cities growing at an average annual rate of between 4-9%, national leaders fear social disruption and political instability if basic food needs at low prices are not met in the large cities. This policy inadvertently discourages food production. Meanwhile, the food situation for the region as a whole deteriorates to a calamity situation. The pressures of population growth and the emphasis on cash crops have forced families to try to expand grain production by cultivating marginal lands. They also have begun to ignore the fallowing technique, which should be used to allow land time to recover between crops. The need to expand land under cultivation has led to the rapid cutting of trees, trees which once acted to hold soil together and coax rainfall into the ground to raise the water table. Most of the Sahelian nations are now among the worst disaster-afflicted nations in the world. In addition to desertification, the Sahel's climate may be getting drier. Governments may have to take radical steps to change their cropping strategies and to move large numbers of people.
The 2005 Food Crisis
It was recently estimated that this year (2005) starvation threatens 3 million people in Niger and millions more in this semi-desert region known as the Sahel that straddles the southern edge of the Sahara. At least five countries now face hunger emergencies, and others are on the brink. More than 3 million of Niger's 12 million people are facing starvation today. But it's not only Niger that's struggling with famine. An entire swath of land in Africa, stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, is in trouble. Famine is no stranger to many of these countries. Ethiopia captured the world's attention in the mid-1980s when as many as 1 million people starved to death. But now, a "perfect storm" of interlocking problems has created the most wide-ranging food shortages in decades. Among the most recent disasters to strike these already impoverished countries: A prolonged drought and, last year, an invasion of locusts. A lackluster international response has failed to provide the needed emergency relief.
Millions of dollars of emergency aid, through the U.N. and other donors, is now being used to maintain feeding centers in several of these countries, trying to tide their people over until the harvests expected in October. A severe problem now prevails in a number of countries in that area just south of the Sahara. Ethiopia, of course, is again in the news with possibly 10 million people in various stages of food crisis. We've got Somalia with perhaps a million people; Niger, of course, over three million people; Mali, about a million people. Mauritania maybe 800,000 are at risk. And Burkina Faso probably 500,000 are in immediate need. So it's quite a large number.