KENYA-FOOD: Drought Takes Its Toll On People And Cattle

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Nov 13 1996 (IPS) - Perennial drought, leading to a decline in farming and livestock activities in Kenya’s north-eastern province, has begun to take a toll on the local population.

In Mandera district, at least five people are starving to death every day, said Aden Mohamed Noor, an assistant minister of planning and national development.

“The worst-hit area is Elwak Division where at least a person dies every day,” Noor was quoted as saying by Kenya’s leading independent newspaper the ‘Sunday Nation’ recently.

More than 40 people have starved to death in the neighbouring southern Wajir, Lagdera and Fafi in Garissa district, according to Farah Maalim, a member of parliament from the north-eastern district.

Kenya’s assistant minister of transport and communications, Arale Hassan Ahmed, recently launched an appeal for assistance to the area. Relief food, he said, was needed for thousands of residents of Wajir district who face starvation.

“There are also fears that more than 5,000 head of cattle will die if no remedial measures are taken urgently,” Ahmed said.

The government has sent some 6,500 bags of maize to be freely distributed to the famine-hit families in the district and has promised to send more. But a parliamentairan for an area in the province has pointed out that the people need more assistance than just one-off food relief.

“Currently, only famine relief in the form of maize is provided by the government in an irregular manner…If the government is indeed serious about assisting its people it must maintain regular supplies of relief and also make provisions for other necessities like cooking oil, beans, rice, etc.,” he told IPS Monday.

The situation in the region is a result of poor rains for the past two seasons and the pull out of major international relief and humanitarian agencies which operated in the region at the height of the civil war in Somalia and the 1992/1993 drought.

The relief agencies assisted the tide of refugees that flowed in from Somalia to escape the conflict there. But their recipients soon included the local population too.

The local people abandoned the rural areas due to insecurity and to take advantage of the relief food in towns, explained Abdullahi Abdi of the Nairobi-based Northern Aid non-governmental organisation.

Many of these people are still in the towns, and farming and livestock production have declined dramatically.

A town like Mandera, for example, with an original population of around 30,000 in 1992, jumped to about 100,000. Even after the departure of the Somali refugees, numbers still hover around 50,000 because of the influx of nomads from the rural areas who are now camped on the town’s outskirts.

Local and international relief agencies which had moved into the area in 1992/93, left or cut back their operations in 1994.

The ongoing conflict in Somalia also has crippled cross-border trade, which was another avenue of survival for the local populations. “… The border trade between Mandera and Somalia has declined considerably since Somalia was ravaged by civil war.

“In better times, the bustling cross-border trade ensured that residents had the capacity to purchase food and other essentials…,” said a spokesman of Northern Aid.

Adequate food supply, especially in the pastoral areas, is one of the major development issues facing this East African nation.

“Even in years of good rainfall, the arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs), which account for three-quarters of Kenya’s land and support one-quarter of Kenya’s population (of 28 million), do not produce sufficient cereals to meet local needs,” according to a recent World Food Programme (WFP) report.

“These areas rely on cereals imported either from the high agricultural potential areas of Kenya or from external sources,” the report added.

“Although pastoralism has traditionally been the main economic activity in the ASALs, the output from this activity is barely able to support current population levels. Increasingly, the population in the semi-arid regions has been turning to subsistence agriculture, but with low production rates,” the WFP report said.