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Drought and Livestock in Semi-Arid Africa and Southwest Asia

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Drought and Livestock in Semi-Arid Africa and Southwest Asia Working Paper 117 DROUGHT AND LIVESTOCK IN SEMI-ARID AFRICA AND SOUTHWEST ASIA Roger Blench Zoë Marriage March 1999 Overseas Development Institute Portland House Stag Place London SW1E 5DP Acknowledgements The first version of this paper and the annotated bibliography was prepared as a keynote document for the FAO-sponsored Electronic Conference ‘Drought and livestock in semi-arid Africa and the Near East’, which took place between July and September 1998. The papers from the conference can be accessed at http://www.fao.org/ag/aga/agap/lps/drought1.htm. The authors are grateful to all those who took part in the conference, and the revision of this document reflects both specific comments on the text and some of the general discussion that formed part of the conference. We would like to thank Andy Catley, Maryam Fuller and Simon Mack for their observations and additional references; we hope their concerns are reflected in this revised text. This working paper is distributed by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), an independent, non-profit policy research institute, with financial support from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) under funding from the Department for International Development. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of ODI, FAO, NRI or the Department for International Development. Roger Blench ([email protected]) is a Research Fellow, and Zoë Marriage (z.marriage@ odi.org.uk) is a Research Assistant, at the Overseas Development Institute. Editing, index and layout by Paul Mundy, Weizenfeld 4, 51467 Bergisch Gladbach, Germany; [email protected], http://www.netcologne.de/~nc-mundypa ISBN 0 85003 416 7 © Overseas Development Institute 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publishers. 2 Contents Acknowledgements.............................................................................................................................. 2 Contents ............................................................................................................................................... 3 Summary.............................................................................................................................................. 4 1. Setting the Scene: Why Is Drought Important?.............................................................................. 7 1. 1 Semi-arid regions and the role of the traditional sector................................................... 7 1. 2 Drought: Climatic anomaly or social construct? ............................................................. 9 1. 3 Humanitarian crises versus long-term structural damage.............................................. 10 2. ‘Water, Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink’.................................................................. 12 2. 1 Rainfall patterns............................................................................................................. 12 2. 2 Water development........................................................................................................ 12 2. 3 Drought and land degradation ....................................................................................... 13 2. 4 Livestock ....................................................................................................................... 13 2. 5 Impact of changing veterinary practice ......................................................................... 15 3. Who Responds to Drought?.......................................................................................................... 17 3. 1 The players .................................................................................................................... 17 3. 2 Government ................................................................................................................... 17 3. 3 Multi- and bilateral aid agencies ................................................................................... 18 3. 4 NGOs ............................................................................................................................. 19 4. What Do Pastoralists Do?............................................................................................................. 20 4. 1 Migration ....................................................................................................................... 20 4. 2 Restocking ..................................................................................................................... 20 4. 3 Supplementary feeding .................................................................................................. 21 4. 4 Changing herd composition........................................................................................... 21 5. What Do Agencies Do? ................................................................................................................ 23 5. 1 Restocking ..................................................................................................................... 23 5. 2 Livestock banking.......................................................................................................... 23 5. 3 Early warning systems: Idea and reality........................................................................ 24 5. 4 Sedentarisation............................................................................................................... 25 6. Ethical and Policy Issues ............................................................................................................... 27 6. 1 Rights: Material and cultural ......................................................................................... 27 6. 2 Policy: National and regional ........................................................................................ 27 6. 3 Steps towards rethinking policy .................................................................................... 27 References ......................................................................................................................................... 29 Publications ........................................................................................................................... 29 Electronic resources............................................................................................................... 32 Annotated Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 33 Index to Annotated Bibliography .................................................................................................... 131 3 Summary Recent high-profile media coverage of El Niño and similar climatic anomalies has perhaps tended to obscure the fact that livestock producers in the fragile environments of Africa and the Near East are facing worsening problems of resource degradation that have rendered their existing strategies inadequate. This overview describes the existing situation and the changes in the present century that have led to pastoralists being under unprecedented pressures and thus unable to respond appropriately. Droughts, or periods of unusually low rainfall, are part of the expected pattern of precipitation in semi-arid Africa, and the common strategy of pastoralists in the past was to move to areas with higher rainfall where vegetation persists. A bundle of factors has made this increasingly impractical, including the establishment of national frontiers, the expansion of cultivation even in very dry areas, and a marked increase in total livestock numbers. The consequence is that droughts in Sub-Saharan Africa now cause significant humanitarian problems and localised degradation, since large numbers of animals converge on certain pastures, especially around wells. This in turn causes long-term impoverishment among pastoralists, since they must sell animals cheaply and cannot afford to re- buy them when the drought ends. At the same time it places extra stress on already ineffectual veterinary services, since weakened animals are more susceptible to pathogens. These cycles are increasingly understood by national governments, international agencies and NGOs. One consequence has been that effective mechanisms are generally in place to deliver relief supplies to affected pastoralists. This however, has led to the perception that drought is essentially a humanitarian problem. As a result, policies to deal with the long-term consequences of drought and to try to prevent the cycle from simply repeating itself are best described as inadequate. Indeed there is considerable historical evidence that pastoralists who could not succeed in difficult climatic conditions or who lost their herds through disease simply left the agro-ecological zone. However, food aid has the effect of keeping in place populations who would otherwise move and initiate a new subsistence strategy. The present strategies and policies of governments, agencies and NGOs cluster around restocking and sedentarisation. Restocking can work on a local scale, although it is expensive in terms of management and seems to provide no evident insurance against another drought, which on average can be expected every 10 years. Although
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