Commentary [Volume 7 No. 1 (2007)]

Todd Benson
Todd Benson

Heidi Fritschel
Heidi Fritschel

COPING WITH DROUGHT AND ITS AFTERMATH IN EAST AFRICA
By
Todd Benson and Heidi Fritschel

Todd Benson is a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Heidi Fritschel is a writer and editor.

In late 2005 and early 2006, seasonal rains failed or were delayed in broad sections of East Africa . The cumulative effects of three to six failed rainy seasons have left millions of poor people in the region destitute, and in some cases in crisis.

The Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET) has declared food security emergencies in Djibouti , Ethiopia , Kenya , and Somalia and issued a food security warning for southern Sudan . In early 2006 almost 8 million people were in need of emergency assistance in drought-affected areas of Ethiopia , Kenya , and Somalia . The pastoral populations of the region have been the most severely affected.

Large areas of East Africa are characterized by an erratic environment. The people living in these areas historically have developed distinctive resource management strategies to enable them to assure their own well-being in the face of climatic and agricultural variability. Livestock generally is the principal production activity, although cropping can also be important. For several reasons, many of these livelihood strategies are now proving to be inadequate.

Given that East Africa will remain subject to climate shocks like drought, is periodic famine in the region inevitable? Research from IFPRI suggests that it is possible to increase people's resilience and reduce their vulnerability to such shocks, so that not every failure of seasonal rains results in mass casualties. A number of steps can put the countries of East Africa on a path to better management and preparedness.

Drought Strikes Again

Drought is no stranger to East Africa . Severe droughts occurred in the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s. Yet since the early 1990s, the rains have appeared to fail more often, drying up sources of drinking water, killing crops, degrading pastures, decimating the livestock herds on which pastoralists in the region depend for milk, meat, and income, and affecting more and more people.

The region normally experiences two rainy seasons each year—the short rains that come in October through December and the longer period of rains from March to May. A lack of rain in late 2005, following several poor rainy seasons, led to poor harvests and insufficient pasture in early 2006. Although the rains returned to the region in April 2006, the arrival of precipitation does not immediately solve the region's problems. Pockets of heavy rain have caused flooding in Kenya , and the growth of desperately needed crops will take several months, while the full restoration of pastures will take several repeated good seasons of rainfall—time that many poor pastoralists, already on the brink of starvation, can ill afford.

In March 2006, humanitarian agencies reported that 2.1 million people in Somalia faced starvation or other humanitarian emergencies. Assessments from northeastern Kenya showed that malnutrition among pastoralists is alarmingly high, with more than 20 percent of children suffering from acute malnutrition (wasting) in several districts . In pastoral areas of Ethiopia , more than one third of the population is in need of emergency assistance. According to FEWSNET, at least 2 million people in Ethiopia will continue to need assistance through 2006. In January it was reported that pastoral areas of Djibouti faced food deficits ranging from 20 to 70 percent of minimum requirements. These areas were exhibiting pre-famine conditions, including the death of livestock, distress migration, and malnutrition and diarrheal disease. In southern Sudan , pastoralists facing shortages of water, pasture, and food were forced to travel farther than usual to graze their animals. As a result, they are farther from markets where they could sell livestock and from food aid distribution points.

How Drought Leads to Crisis in East Africa

The areas of East Africa currently affected by food insecurity are the less-favored lands of the region. Many of the livelihood strategies employed in these areas are land-extensive, make considerable use of common property resources such as rangelands, and are strongly oriented toward production for consumption within the household. In part because of the low production potential of these areas, they are not well integrated into national and regional transport and market networks. Owing to their isolation, the provision of social services and other public goods in these areas is often limited and erratic. Moreover, the areas have a legacy of conflict and war that extends over several decades, with ongoing violence and instability. Somalia is most notable in this regard, but some level of conflict is present in the dryland areas of all countries of the region.

In spite of these areas' relative isolation, history of conflict, and constraints on production, population pressure continues to increase. This population growth stems principally from generally improved health conditions and from the lack of economic opportunities in better-endowed areas, and thus few incentives for out-migration. With increased population, many of the historical common property management systems are breaking down, leading to overexploitation of pastures and the extension of cropping into even more agroecologically marginal areas. When climatic, economic, or social shocks affect these areas, the resilience of many local households to safeguard their well-being is increasingly limited. The past several years of poor rainfall in many parts of East Africa has led to a situation where a large proportion of households are facing destitution and worse.

The countries most affected by the drought in East Africa are among the poorest in the world. In 2004 gross national per capita income was just US$480 in Kenya and US$110 in Ethiopia . Statistics are not even available for Somalia , which does not currently have a functioning government. Given their chronic poverty, many households in East Africa , especially in pastoral areas, have few resources that would allow them to withstand and recover from a shock like drought. Selling livestock to afford additional food may offer temporary relief but can also leave households more vulnerable by reducing their asset base. IFPRI research in Ethiopia has shown that if a household's assets are reduced below a certain level, the household finds it nearly impossible to ever climb out of poverty. If a household's weak resilience in the face of shocks leads it to sell many of its assets to meet short-term needs, it may subsequently have difficulty rebuilding its assets and livelihoods, and the result is often permanent impoverishment.

Pastoralists rely on livestock precisely because the areas they inhabit have climates too variable for reliable crop production. To manage the risk posed by variable weather, they move their livestock from place to place in search of grazing areas. But when drought becomes too widespread or too frequent, the risk becomes unmanageable. There is insufficient pasture available for sustainable use. Conflict and environmental degradation may result.

In the face of hunger, traders should respond to the rising demand for food. In the areas of East Africa currently in crisis, however, markets operate poorly in this regard, for several reasons. It is often difficult to transmit knowledge about food shortages in the less-populated parts of a country to areas of surplus agricultural production. The general poverty in these areas means that the needs of the poor for food are not effectively expressed through the market—food traders will respond only to the demands of able purchasers. Owing to poor roads and isolated markets, food brought in from elsewhere is frequently priced beyond the ability of local residents to pay.

In the absence of market-based solutions to food insecurity, the public sector will be called upon to respond to the crisis. Yet too often governments are unable to prepare sufficiently for such shocks and to respond effectively to early warnings of famine risk. The absence of sufficient public funds, trained managers, and appropriate institutional structures frequently results in suboptimal responses to drought and other shocks to the welfare of those living in the semi-arid, drought-prone areas of East Africa .

Finally, the poor in these areas of East Africa may be highly vulnerable to shocks like drought because they may still not have recovered from previous droughts in the 1980s and 1990s. Research from Ethiopia and Zimbabwe has shown that the food insecurity resulting from drought can have a lifelong effect, especially for infants and preschoolers. These periods of food shortage at birth and early in life affect the physical stature such individuals will attain, their schooling outcomes, their employment prospects, their productivity, their incomes, and, ultimately, their health and well-being.

What Can Policymakers and Donors Do to Mitigate the Current Crisis?

Although rains are returning to East Africa , it takes months for crops and grazing plants to grow, so the arrival of rain does not solve immediate food needs. To offer immediate relief in a food emergency, it is important to provide food to those who need it as quickly as possible and to distribute it to people where they live. The most severely affected areas, and the neediest people within those areas, should be targeted for assistance first. The most severely malnourished must be reached through programs that provide direct nutritional supplementation to prevent the most nutritionally vulnerable from experiencing permanent damage to their health and to their cognitive and physical potential. In all of these direct actions at the individual and household levels, it is important to use transparent rules for distributing food to avoid discrimination against the disadvantaged or socially excluded. Relief interventions must be built upon the effective targeting of the most poor and vulnerable, such as that provided by national Vulnerability Assessment Committees and FEWSNET. These targeting efforts require continued investments in baseline research on the location of the food-insecure, their resource endowments, and their social characteristics, followed by seasonal assessments of the food security status of the populations that are defined as being at risk.

Responding to such emergencies also involves addressing nonfood needs. Malnutrition results not only from lack of food, but also from poor health. The deaths that occur during famines typically strike poorly nourished individuals unable to fight disease, so investments in health services are crucial. Clean water and proper sanitation services should be provided. For infants and young children—nutritionally the most vulnerable—special efforts should be made to ensure that their caregivers are able to continue providing proper care, including breastfeeding of infants and proper complementary feeding of young children, in spite of the dislocations and challenges posed by the crisis.

What Can Policymakers and Donors Do to Prevent Future Such Crises?

To begin with, policymakers and donors can improve preparedness for possible future food emergencies. Many of the Sahelian countries have successfully managed food security shocks, so successful models for the African context are available. Early warning systems have been developed, but responses to warnings need to be established and communicated ahead of time. Monitoring and analysis of the food situation need to be connected to policymaking. The warnings issued by experts are often not transmitted to local authorities and farmers, and, in turn, local authorities and farmers in many cases have no channels for communicating their perspectives on changing food situations to higher-level policymakers.

Among the tools needed to improve preparedness and responses are better regional and international grain trade and the use of strategic grain reserves. If local, regional, and international markets function well, they can help to make up local shortfalls in food production, stabilize local supplies, and mitigate the potential shock of soaring food prices on the welfare of local households. Governments should establish policies that encourage private sector operators to invest in and expand food-marketing services both internally and across borders. Regional trade will require harmonizing trade policies to facilitate the unimpeded movement of food from areas of surplus to areas of need.

The proper management of strategic grain reserves demands considerably more attention from governments. The public sector management of large physical stocks of grain, particularly through years when there is adequate domestic production, has proven technically, financially, and politically challenging. Ideally, adequate food stocks should be maintained within the private sector through effectively functioning markets in which investment in food storage provides sufficient returns. Certainly, governments need to put in place the proper incentives for the private sector in this regard. One such mechanism that IFPRI is investigating jointly with the government of Ethiopia is the development of warehouse receipt systems for managing and trading physical stocks of food staples within an open market. Such systems should lead to greater investment in storage by the private sector, while at the same time facilitating the secure and timely trading of food stocks and providing producers and traders with a flexible instrument for use in commercial investment and risk management.

To manage the severe and widespread food insecurity the region is now experiencing, additional instruments should be explored. Two such instruments are currently being tested in Southern Africa .

  1. Crop insurance: Drawing on lessons learned from IFPRI research on drought management, governments purchase a form of weather-linked crop insurance from international insurance providers. A test case on this is currently going on in Malawi . When a country or area within a country experiences catastrophic agro-meteorological conditions, these conditions trigger an insurance payout that can be used to support efforts to mitigate and respond to any resultant food insecurity.
  2. Crop futures options: The government of Malawi has purchased futures options for maize from the regional agricultural commodity exchange in South Africa . Where climatic risks to agricultural production are typically experienced over a wide area, the volatility of food prices in regional markets can be quite high. By purchasing these options for the supply of maize in advance of need, the Malawian government is able to better and more predictably manage the cost of responding to a food insecurity crisis.

If these mechanisms are found to be successful, they should be considered in East Africa as well. Of course, to work effectively, these mechanisms should be accompanied by complementary investments in famine early warning information systems and in the logistics of delivering the supplementary food stocks acquired--ideally using the private sector. Moreover, care must be taken to insure that such mechanisms do not provide perverse incentives to farmers and herders to pursue risky and unsustainable production practices in drought-prone areas.

Although preparedness for possible future food emergencies is critical, it is more important for policymakers and donors to allocate the necessary resources to prevent such food emergencies from developing. Households with substantially higher crop yields or livestock productivity have been shown to be more resilient in the face of drought and other welfare shocks than households that are unable to attain higher levels of production. Therefore, a key element is to ensure that farming and herding households in the less-favored areas of East Africa have access to improved and adapted agricultural technologies: better seeds, improved livestock breeds, knowledge of proper soil and pasture management techniques, and veterinary services. Sustainable agricultural intensification in pockets of reasonably productive lands in semi-arid areas can have multiplier effects through the region. Investments in irrigation and soil moisture conservation are important elements in raising yields in such areas. In the food-deficit areas of East Africa, IFPRI research shows that investments in productivity growth in livestock (meat and milk) leads to sharp reduction in poverty among populations living in such areas.

More productive farming can also strengthen the economic interactions of herders and farmers, permitting the provision of a broader range of resources to sustain the livelihoods of both. Similarly, IFPRI research has shown that the increased agricultural productivity, with proper complementary investments in marketing and transport infrastructure and institutions, will foster more investment in the local nonfarm sector and greater interaction with the wider national and regional economies. With access to an effective market, farmers and herders should increasingly be able to specialize in those economic activities that are most profitable for them, rather than maintaining a diverse, but inefficient portfolio of household economic activities in order to assure their own subsistence. Of course, given the variability in the environment in which they pursue their livelihoods, it should be expected that even with effective market systems households will maintain considerable diversity in their livelihoods to ensure their welfare under a range of agroclimatic conditions.

Providing households in these areas with assured long-term access to land will give them a necessary incentive for pursuing sustainable farming and animal husbandry practices and investing in improving and conserving local resources. Governments should ensure that farmers and herders have secure property rights and should remove restrictions that inhibit the most efficient and environmentally sustainable use of private, public, and common property. In most cases, indigenous cooperative common property management institutions provide such security. Governments should support, rather than supplant, these institutions, helping them adapt to changing circumstances and respond to new opportunities in a sustainable manner.

Reversing land degradation could also play an important role in preventing future famines. A recent report from the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development said that 75 percent of African farmland is severely degraded. One option is food-for-work projects aimed at improving land conservation; such programs could both help meet food needs of the poor and contribute to more sustainable land management.

Another key factor in preventing future famines is improved governance. IFPRI research shows that some dimensions of governance—voice and accountability, government effectiveness, control of corruption, and political stability—can help promote greater food security and social and economic resilience in the face of drought. Certainly, an investigative free media can make an important contribution by informing the public about food insecurity and generating pressure for needed action, particularly when coupled with an effective political opposition that holds government accountable. The relations between different dimensions of governance and food security are complex, however, and the empirical evidence examined by IFPRI on how they are linked is mixed. Although it would be easy on normative grounds to devise a "wish list" of governance reforms to bring about improved food security in East Africa , such reforms are politically demanding to implement. Consequently, governance reform priorities must be country-specific, reflecting both the nature of the food insecurity issues the state is confronting and the political feasibility of putting such reforms into practice.

Experiences in parts of Africa, as well as in China and India , have shown that it is possible to move beyond famine, creating a food system that is resilient enough to absorb drought and other shocks without resulting in massive loss of life and destitution. This is the task for East Africa .

Sources

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Dercon, S., and J. Hoddinott. 2003. Health, shocks, and poverty persistence . Discussion Paper 2003/08. Helsinki : World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER).

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). 2000. The elimination of food insecurity in the Horn of Africa: A strategy for concerted government and UN agency action . FAO Investment Centre Studies and Reports. Rome .

FEWSNET (Famine Early Warning Systems Network). 2006. www.fews.net .

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Hazell, P. P. Oram, and N. Chaherli. 2001. Managing drought in the low-rainfall areas of the Middle East and North Africa . EPTD Discussion Paper No. 78. IFPRI, Washington , DC .

Holden, S., B. Shiferaw, and J. Pender. 2005. Policy analysis for sustainable land management and food security in Ethiopia : A bioeconomic model with market imperfections. Abstract 140. Washington , DC : IFPRI.

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