A herder is about to take his sheep to graze early in the morning in Mauritania, the West Sahel. Peacebuilding and stability in the region is dependent on solving the challenge of food and security, says the African Development Bank. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Nov 3 2020 (IPS)

In 2013, when Jamila Ben Baba started her company, the first privately owned slaughterhouse in Mali, she did so in the midst of a civil war as Tuareg rebels grouped together in an attempt to administer a new northern state called Azawad.

Ben Baba, who is originally from Timbuktu, in northern Mali — where much of the civil war conflict took place — based the business in the country’s western region of Kayes and grew it into what is considered the largest private slaughter house in the West African nation.

She started her business with a deep desire to develop one of the country’s first rural, raw resources — livestock.  Her aim was to promote Malian meat and to “make it known both in the sub-region and internationally”.

She said that while her business created 100 jobs, the company was evolving in a very difficult political and social context.

“War and Jihadists are rampant in the centre and north of Mali, which penalises us greatly in our livestock supply. Livestock farmers are forced to move constantly for their safety and that of their animals,” she said on Monday Nov. 2.

Ben Baba was speaking at the annual meeting of the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, during which various stakeholders met to call on member states to increase funding to the commission’s Peacebuilding Fund. The Peacebuilding Fund is used as an instrument of first resort to respond to and prevent conflict.

But the impact of an Aug. 18 coup and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have placed the country in an unprecedented economic crisis, she said.

“Closed borders have slowed down our exports. Several purchase orders in Ghana and Guinea have been cancelled.”

Hotels that were closed during the pandemic restrictions caused her company’s turnover to drop by more than half, she said.

Ben Baba’s business success, and the success of other businesses and industries in the country and on the continent, is directly linked to peace.

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has “definitely already derailed Africa’s positive growth projectory and hit the poorest and most vulnerable particularly hard, especially in fragile states,” according to Khaled Sherif, the Vice-President, Regional Development, Integration and Business Delivery at the African Development Bank (AfDB), there remains “a direct link between poverty, and extreme poverty specifically, and terrorism, as is currently being witnessed in the Sahel”.

A report released by Amnesty International earlier this year noted that rife insecurity, food insecurity and more than 7.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance had left the region in crisis. In addition, the global coronavirus pandemic was expected to worsen the situation.

“The rise in violent extremism in the Sahel is linked to the conditions that the populations face in their daily lives. Many parts of the Sahel have never seen electricity, they have no access to potable water, education is at a premium, so these connects obviously lead to a deterioration of the security situation,” Sherif said during the same meeting.

He said that it was no surprising that in regions with chronic food insecurity, especially in Africa, “become unstable sooner or later”.

“We are all aware of the devastating consequences this means for peace, stability and social cohesion,” Sherif said.

But Ben Baba is convinced that her business could impact various factors of development within the country at different levels.

“From the bridges in our countryside, to the improvement of Mali’s balance of trade, with the creation of added value of course the creation of jobs in the Kayes region, which is usually the first region of emigration, especially for young people,” Ben Baba said.

A 2018 World Bank report showed that Mali needed to diversify its exports as “gold and cotton account for over 80 percent of total exports”. The report further suggested, “ an agriculture-based light manufacturing diversification strategy can deliver structural change by creating abundant and better paying jobs for low skilled Malians”.

Sherif called on the Peacebuilding Commission to address basic needs at a community level and to prioritise this accordingly.

“If generations of farmers are unable to get out of substance agriculture, there will always be a risk of conflict,” Sherif said. He said while there were many initiatives by development partners in this area, they all failed to reach the required scale.

“The Peacebuilding Commission should therefore focus on scaling up these interventions to avoid community pockets of fragility that lead to insecurity,” Sherif said.

He said that in Africa, where more than half the population of 1.3 billion live below the poverty line of less than $2 a day, “our priority has to be to create wealth and this takes us back to the reality of how we develop value chains,” Sherif said.

He added that the AfDB looked at the African Continental Free Trade Area as an opportunity to create a level of resilience.

But Sherif pointed out that on a continent of 54 countries, 26 countries had a GDP growth of 5 percent or more but in those same countries the GDP per capita was reducing, creating inequality.

“So how are African countries getting richer but the citizens of Africa are actually getting poorer? If we don’t address this issue, we are not addressing the basic reality of stability that is going to be a persistent problem, a perennial problem, that will affect Africa, especially fragile states, for many years to come,” Sherif said.

While there were many ways to address the issues, Sherif said he felt it was important “to start with the people and the communities that the live in, as this is where conflict ultimately manifests itself”.

He said that villages, towns, communities, local governments, municipalities could undertake certain measures to mobilise the needed investment to tackle the issues at the roots. 

“Our experience shows that food security can be enhanced locally by groups of producers getting together pooling cash resources and utilising local technologies to help with basic food processes. These are investments that can be done locally to create jobs and profit-sharing opportunities that enhance income.”

Ben Baba, however, pointed to the obstacles that women faced when accessing investment in her country.

“As a woman it’s very difficult to be involved in this very masculine world where the cultural barrier is very pronounced with prejudices against the female gender.

“Obtaining financing in a high-risk country remains complex,” she said. And if financing was given, the rates were too high that it would affect the company’s results, she explained.

“Indeed women know that the cultural problem in raising funds because of a lack of confidence in the female gender,” Ben Baba said.

She said that in order to convince one bank she had to invest almost 80 percent of a project’s equity, and despite this “we were very poorly supported by the banking network”.

“Malian industries are not very developed and those invested in by women are non-existent,” she said. “Attracting and convincing investors is almost impossible,” Ben Baba added.

But Sherif stressed that it was important to “find a model that is specific to regional development, that is specific to community development, that is specific to wealth creation, so we can begin to create a level of consumption based on increasing disposable income so we can begin to break this chain of lack of availability of growth of incomes, desperation and then lack of security.”

In a recorded message U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said he saw great value in enriching the U.N.’s partnership with international monetary funds.

“Sustained support for peacebuilding cannot be delivered by any single actor. It requires a multi-layered strategy with several layers of financing; bi-lateral, multi-lateral and international financial insinuations working in concert,” he said.

Guterres urged donors to reverse a worrying trend and commit to spend at least 20 percent of official development assistance on peacebuilding priorities in conflict settings. 

“As the world seeks to recover from COVID-19, countries will require carefully designed and conflict-sensitive support to get back onto a sustainable micro-economic footing,” Guterres said.

But he said that the demands for the fund were far outpacing the resources.

“We’ve already had to scale back our target for 2020 by $30 billion,” Guterres said. Already some member states had responded to his call for unspent committed peacekeeping budget and he called on others to do so.

Guterres welcomed the work of both the World Bank and African Development Bank.

“It is important that these funds help tackle conflict drivers, reach marginalised areas and support key governance needs, especially those that create the conditions for private sector investment.”

Guterres said more could be done to advance innovate financing solutions for peacebuilding, including partnerships with the private sector.

But Sherif pointed out: “So long as we don’t solve the challenge of food and security, we haven’t solved the problem of fragility and we will continue to see one crisis after the other.”

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

The crisis in the Sahel has been further exacerbated by both climate change, as well as the current coronavirus pandemic. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 22 2020 (IPS)

The European Commission this week pledged $27.8 million in humanitarian support to the Sahel region as floods and the coronavirus pandemic exacerbate the stability in a region deeply in conflict.

While the figure is less than 2 percent of the $2.4 billion that the United Nations has appealed for, Amnesty International researcher Ousmane Diallo told IPS that despite past donations from international development partners to Sahelian countries, the situation hasn’t improved over the years.

Diallo, a Sahel specialist at the human rights organisation, spoke to IPS a day after European leaders gathered to discuss the fast deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Central Sahel.

In June, Amnesty International released a report that pointed out a range of concerns in the region that have been exacerbated by the pandemic: human rights violations, food insecurity, and enforced disappearances among other concerns.

At the meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 20, the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres appealed for $2.4 billion for the remaining months of 2020 and for providing emergency assistance in the region throughout next year.

“The Sahel is a microcosm of cascading global risks converging in one region. It is a warning sign for us all requiring urgent attention and resolution,” the Secretary-General said.

To highlight the extent of the crisis, he shared that in the less than two years, internal displacement in the region has increased 20 times.

Diallo of Amnesty International echoed similar concerns and added that a “a plethora of armed groups acting in the Sahel have increased over the years.”

“This is because the structural issues have not been challenged,” Diallo told IPS. “Because there have been a lot of donations given to Sahelian countries, many activities done by international development partners, but the situations on the ground haven’t improved. There are more internally displaced persons (IDPs) on the ground, and more refugees.”

“This is a crisis on multiple fronts, [and] next to its growing complexity, it’s also a crisis which remains seriously underfunded,” Janez Lenarcic, Commissioner for Crisis Management at the European Commission, said while announcing the pledge. “As such, the need to protect the most vulnerable from these pressing plights has never been greater.” 

The crisis in the region has been further exacerbated by both climate change, as well as the current coronavirus pandemic, according to both Diallo and the speakers at the high-level meeting.

Mark Lowcock, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said climate change in the Sahel region is accelerating faster than anywhere else in the world.One key concern, he said, is that the “root causes that drive humanitarian needs” — such as chronic poverty, underdevelopment, impact of dramatic development growth, and climate change among other issues — are not being properly addressed

Diallo told IPS that on top of climate change posing a security and development challenge in the region, another concern is that of resources: despite an increasing population, resources remain limited.

With massive floods leading to thousands of casualties in cities across the Sahel region this year, one must consider issues beyond the scope of human rights and humanitarian [needs], and consider links to governance, urbanisation and city planning, Diallo added.

“Over the last 30 years, we’ve had more cities, more urbanisation, and more people living in the cities in the Sahelian countries than they used to 20-30 years ago, but the adaptability of cities to climatic [changes] is very limited,” Diallo told IPS.   

Speakers at the high-level meeting highlighted the need for a comprehensive and holistic approach to resolving the crisis.

Giovanie Biha, Deputy Special Representative for West Africa and the Sahel, U.N. Office for West Africa and the Sahel, said the August coup in Mali is “testament to the fragility of newly-acquired democratic gains”.

“There is a need for a paradigm shift beyond a largely military approach to the fight against terrorists,” Biha said at the meeting. “Successfully addressing the multi-dimensional challenges facing the Sahel will require a whole-of-society approach.”

“We need to redouble efforts in supporting national governments and recognise that development is never a linear process, especially when faced with interlinked challenges compounded by the pandemic,” she added, further calling for innovating solutions to address the crisis.

Lowcock highlighted the need for a higher investment in concerns such as women’s rights, and safe water, among others.

“It’s important that we have a comprehensive response to this: there needs to be a security response but it has to be done in a way that protects and supports the local communities,” he said.

The Western Sahel has been in the grip of a security crisis since 2012, when Tuareg rebels in Mali grouped together in an attempt to administer a new northern state called Azawad. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 10 2020 (IPS)

The combination of rife insecurity, food insecurity and more than 7.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance has left the Sahel a region in crisis, with the global coronavirus pandemic expected to exacerbate the situation.

In a briefing released today, Jun. 10, Amnesty International painted a picture of rife insecurity in the Sahel, with a civilian population “trapped between attacks by armed groups and ongoing military operations”.

The briefing, titled ‘They Executed Some and Brought the Rest with Them: Civilian Lives at risk in the Sahel’, details the grave reality in the region, especially across Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, including “at least 57 cases of extrajudicial executions or unlawful killings, and at least 142 cases of enforced disappearances” that have allegedly been committed by soldiers between February and April.

The organisation stated that in Mali and Burkina Faso the deliberate killing of unarmed citizens by security forces could be counted as war crimes.

• The Western Sahel has been in the grip of a security crisis since 2012, when Tuareg rebels in Mali grouped together in an attempt to administer a new northern state called Azawad. 
• The attempt failed, after intervention from French troops in 2013. However, local groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State continue to spread violence across the region.
• A multinational military force from the G5 Sahel countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger has attempted to control the violence since 2017.
• France has retained a military presence in the region.

A range of concerns

The briefing comes on the back of a recent United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) high-level talk about the region where Ramesh Rajasingham, Acting Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said the current situation in the Sahel region was “in every sense of the word a crisis”.

Rajasingham noted that between 2019 and now, the region experienced an exponential rise in its need for humanitarian assistance: with 7.5 million people in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali requiring assistance — up from 6.1 million just a year ago. 

He added that issues such as food insecurity and displacement of people were adding to this need, and that 5.5 million out of 12 million people in the larger Sahel are “just a step away” from “emergency levels of food insecurity”. 

“These are the highest levels of food insecurity we have witnessed in this region in a decade,” he said. “The socio-economic fallout from COVID-19 is likely to double these numbers.”

According to Ousmane Diallo, a Sahel researcher at Amnesty International, the COVID-19 pandemic “is not the defining feature in the region due to its emergence but it constitutes another challenge that different governments must contend with”.

“Some of the measures that were taken such as restrictions to freedom of assembly or to the continuation of the lockdown measures and curfew generated a lot of tensions – political, economical, but also on human rights issues,” Diallo told IPS. 

“Some of those actors who were critical of how the government handled the pandemic,  especially some of the emergency funds that were set up in order to meet the socio-economic effect of the pandemic, were sometimes arrested or even charged with causing public disorder,” he said. 

Achim Steiner, Administrator, U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and Vice Chair of U.N. Sustainable Development Group said; “Before the onset of COVID-19, the central Sahel region was trapped by protracted conflict, violent extremism, competition over accessible lands and water and the [dangers of] climate change with temperatures rising at one and a half times faster than the global average.”

According to the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, violent activity involving militant Islamist groups in the Sahel has doubled every year since 2015. 

The academic institution noted that since 2013, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have doubled their military budgets, amounting to a total of some $600 million.

“The governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have mobilised their security structures in an effort to respond to the rise in militant Islamist group violence,” the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies said.

Not the first human rights violations

But Diallo told IPS that this is not the first time Amnesty International has documented human rights violations committed by security forces, and that international actors must be swift in taking action. 

“There’s been announcements about investigations that [have] never been conclusive or led to sanctions,” he said. 

One such incident was the Apr. 9 arrest and execution of civilians in Burkina Faso’s Soum province when soldiers arrived in the town of Djibo in a long convoy of pick-ups and motorbikes.

“They arrested several youths who were around a well, watering animals,” an eye witness is reported by Amnesty International as saying.

Though the soldiers later released a number of the youths, including those under-age, three individuals had been retained in custody.

“Hours later, we heard gunfire but dared not go and inquire until the military had left. I lost a paternal cousin and two maternal uncles that day,” the eye witness said.

The arrests had led to the execution of 31 residents by the GFAT (Groupement des forces anti-terroristes).

While on Apr. 20 the Burkinabè government acknowledge these extrajudicial killings, stating that the Direction de la Justice Militaire had been mandated to investigate it, there have been no further updates on the investigations.

Better solutions 

Meanwhile, Rajasingham from OCHA shared possible solutions for addressing the current crisis. 

“Sustained development investment is key to strengthening basic services: food security and nutrition displacement demand our full attention support,” he said, adding that women and children must be kept as the highest priority in any approach. 

Cessouma Minata Samate, Commissioner for Political Affairs at the African Union Commission highlighted the need for cooperation from all levels of society.  

“We need to [be] including local communities,” she said, adding that the approach should be inclusive.

** Additional reporting by Nalisha Adams in Bonn.

Toby Lanzer, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sahel speaks at the International Peace Institute. Credit: L Rowlands / IPS.

By Lyndal Rowlands
Jan 30 2017 (IPS)

Children under five years of age are not surviving due to severe food shortages in some parts of the Lake Chad region, says Toby Lanzer, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sahel.

“I saw adults sapped of energy who couldn’t stand up, I saw an entire town devoid of two-year olds, three-year olds, four-year olds, and when we asked where are the children – and I get upset when I say this – we were told that they had died, they had starved.”

This was the situation Lanzer saw on a visit to the town of Bama in Northern Nigeria in 2016. He described the visit at a discussion with policy makers, diplomats and journalists at the International Peace Institute – a New York think tank – on Wednesday 25 January.

The crisis has left millions of people living on the edge in the Lake Chad basin, due to a combination of abject poverty, climate change and violent extremism, said Lanzer. Four countries – Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria – border Lake Chad, which has shrunk dramatically since the 1960s.

“Around Lake Chad there are now well over 10 million people who I could categorise as desperately in need of … life-saving aid,” he said, including 7.1 million people categorised as “severely food insecure.”

In response to a question from IPS, Lanzer described how ongoing violence in the region has contributed to the food shortages:

“About 85 percent of people across this part of the world depend on the weather and agriculture livestock – it’s an agro-pastoralist community.”

“If your movement is confined you may not plant and communities across the Lake Chad basin have lost the last three planting seasons if you don’t plant than you don’t harvest and if you don’t harvest than you don’t have food,” he said.

“If your cattle or your goats or your livestock isn’t moving cows that don’t walk get sick and they die and then you’ve lost your livelihood,” he added.

Lanzer, whose humanitarian career has seen him work in Sudan, South Sudan, Timor-Leste, and the Central African Republic said that the poverty in the Lake Chad region is some of the worst he has witnessed.

“I don’t think I’ve been to villages before where people don’t have flip-flops, where people don’t have plastic,” he said.

However Lanzer noted that ongoing violence in the region – including due to extremist group Boko Haram – was one of the biggest factors disrupting the lives of people in the region.

Els Debuf, Senior Adviser and Head of Humanitarian Affairs at the International Peace Institute said that although the crisis in the Lake Chad region is one of the most severe it is also one of the most under-reported.

She noted that despite the region’s extreme poverty, communities were also sheltering refugees and internally displaced persons:

“Close to two and half million refugees and internally displaced people – the vast majority of whom are children – are sheltered throughout the region by communities who are themselves among the poorest and most vulnerable in the world,” she said.

The governments of Norway, Nigeria and Germany are planning a pledging conference to raise funds for the crisis in Nigeria and the Lake Chad region on 24 February in Oslo, Norway.

By Frederic Mousseau
OAKLAND, California, Jan 11 2016 (IPS)

Millions of African farmers don’t need to adapt to climate change. They have done that already.

Frederic Mousseau

Like many others across the continent, indigenous communities in Ethiopia’s Gamo Highlands are well prepared against climate variations. The high biodiversity, which forms the basis of their traditional enset-based agricultural systems, allows them to easily adjust their farming practices, including the crops they grow, to climate variations.

People in Gamo are also used to managing their environment and natural resources in sound and sustainable ways, rooted in ancestral knowledge and customs, which makes them resilient to floods or droughts. Although African indigenous systems are often perceived as backward by central governments, they have a lot of learning to offer to the rest of the world when contemplating the challenges of climate change and food insecurity.

Often building on such indigenous knowledge, farmers all over the African continent have assembled a tremendous mass of successful experiences and innovations in agriculture. These efforts have steadily been developed over the past few decades following the droughts that impacted many countries in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Kenya, the system of biointensive agriculture has been designed over the past thirty years to help smallholders grow the most food on the least land and with the least water. 200,000 Kenyan farmers, feeding over one million people, have now switched to biointensive agriculture, which allows them to use up to 90 per cent less water than in conventional agriculture and 50 to 100 per cent fewer purchased fertilizers, thanks to a set of agroecological practices that provide higher soil organic matter levels, near continuous crop soil coverage, and adequate fertility for root and plant health.

The Sahel region, bordering the Sahara Desert, is renowned for its harsh environment and the threat of desertification. What is less known is the tremendous success of the actions undertaken to curb desert encroachment, restore lands, and farmers’ livelihoods.

Started in the 1980s, the Keita Rural Development Project in Niger took some twenty years to restore ecological balance and drastically improve the agrarian economy of the area. During the period, 18 million trees were planted, the surface under woodlands increased by 300 per cent, whereas shrubby steppes and sand dunes decreased by 30 per cent. In the meantime, agricultural land was expanded by about 80 per cent.

All over the region, a multitude of projects have used agroecological solutions to restore degraded land and spare scarce water resources while at the same time increasing food production, and improving farmers’ livelihoods and resilience. In Timbuktu, Mali, the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has reached impressive results, with yields of 9 tons of rice per hectare, more than double of conventional methods, while saving water and other inputs. In Burkina Faso, soil and water conservation techniques, including a modernized version of traditional planting pits­zai­ have been highly successful to rehabilitate degraded soils and boost food production and incomes.

Southern African countries have been struggling with recurrent droughts resulting in major failures in corn crops, the main staple cereal in the region. Over the years, farmers and governments have developed a wide variety of agroecological solutions to prevent food crises and foster their resilience to climatic shocks. The common approach in all these responses has been to depart from the conventional monocropping of corn, which is highly vulnerable to climate shocks while it is also very costly and demanding in purchased inputs such as hybrid seeds and fertilizers. Successful sustainable and affordable solutions include managing and harvesting rain water, expanding conservation and regenerative farming, promoting the production and consumption of cassava and other tuber crops, diversifying production, and integrating crops with fertilizer trees and nitrogen fixating leguminous plants.

The enumeration could go on. The few examples cited above all come from a series of 33 case studies released recently by the Oakland Institute. The series sheds light on the tremendous success of agroecological agriculture across the African continent in the face of climate change, hunger, and poverty.

These success stories are just a sample of what Africans are already doing to adapt to climate variations while preserving their natural resources, improving their livelihoods and their food supply. One thing they have in common is that they have farmers, including many women farmers, in the driver’s seat of their own development. Millions of farmers who practice agroecology across the continent are local innovators who experiment to find the best solutions in relation to water availability, soil characteristics, landscapes, cultures, food habits, and biodiversity.

Another common feature is that they depart from the reliance on external agricultural inputs such as commercial seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and chemical pesticides, on which is based the so-called conventional agriculture. The main inputs required for agroecology are people’s own energy and common sense, shared knowledge, and of course respect for and a sound use of natural resources.

Why are these success stories mostly untold, is a fair question to ask. They are largely buried under the rhetoric of a development discourse based on a destructive cocktail of ignorance, greed, and neocolonialism. Since the 2008 food price crisis, we have been told over and over that Africa needs foreign investors in agriculture to ‘develop’ the continent; that Africa needs a Green Revolution, more synthetic fertilizers, and genetically modified crops in order to meet the challenges of hunger and poverty. The agroecology case studies debunk these myths.

Evidence is there, with irrefutable facts and figures, that millions of Africans have already designed their own solutions, for their own benefits. They have successfully adapted to both the unsustainable agricultural systems inherited from the colonial times, and to the present challenges of climate change and environmental degradation. Unfortunately, a majority of African governments, with encouragement from donor countries, focus most of their efforts and resources to subsidize and encourage a model of agriculture, largely reliant on the expensive commercial agricultural inputs, in particular synthetic fertilizers mainly sold by a handful of Western corporations.

The good news is that an agroecological transition is affordable for African governments. They spend billions of dollars every year to subsidize fertilizers and pesticides for their farmers. In Malawi, the government’s subsidies to agricultural inputs, mostly fertilizers, amount to close to 10 percent of the national budget every year. The evidence that exists, based on the experience of millions of farmers, should prompt African governments to make the only reasonable choice: to give the continent a leading role in the way out of world hunger and corporate exploitation and move to a sustainable and climate-friendly way to produce food or all.

(End)

Excerpt:

When a natural disaster strikes, people are sometimes left with no choice but to leave the areas affected. Yet, for some, even this option might not exist. Cyclone survivors in Myanmar shelter in the ruins of their destroyed home. Credit: UNHCR/Taw Naw Htoo

By Ido Liven
LONDON, Nov 10 2014 (IPS)

Climate change is projected by many scientists to bring with it a range of calamities – from widespread floods, to prolonged heatwaves and slowly but relentlessly rising seas – taking the heaviest toll on those already most vulnerable.

When a natural disaster strikes, people are sometimes left with no choice but to leave the areas affected. Yet, for some, even this option might not exist.

While many could be uprooted in search of a safer place to live, either temporarily or permanently, some may become “climate hostages”, unable to escape.

“People around the world are more or less mobile, depending on a range of factors,” argues Prof Richard Black from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, “but they can become trapped in circumstances where they want or need [to move] but cannot.”When a natural disaster strikes, people are sometimes left with no choice but to leave the areas affected. Yet, for some, even this option might not exist … they may become “climate hostages”, unable to escape

According to Black, “it is most likely to be because they cannot afford it, or because there is no [social] network for them to follow or job for them to do … or because there is some kind of policy barrier to movement such as a requirement for a visa that is unobtainable, in some countries even the requirement for an exit visa that is unobtainable.”

For the most vulnerable, climate change could mean double jeopardy – first, from worsening environmental conditions threatening their livelihood, and second, from the diminished financial, social and even physical assets required for moving away provoked by this situation.

A project on migration and global environmental change led by Black was one of the first to draw attention to the notion of “trapped populations”.

In its report, published in 2011 by the Foresight think tank at the U.K. Government Office for Science, the authors warned that “in the decades ahead, millions of people will be unable to move away from locations in which they are extremely vulnerable to environmental change.”

An example the Foresight report mentions is that of inhabitants of small island states living in flood-prone areas or near exposed coasts. People in these areas might not have the means to address these hazards and also lack the resources to migrate out of the islands.

The report warned that such situations could escalate to risky displacement and humanitarian emergencies.

In fact, past cases offer some evidence of groups of people who have become immobile as a result of either extreme weather events or even slow onset crises.

One such example, says Black, is the drought in the 1980s in Africa’s Sahel region, when there was a decrease in the numbers of adult men who chose to migrate – the same people who would otherwise leave the area.

“Under drought conditions they were less able to do so because that involves drawing on your assets – in the Sahel often assets would be livestock – and the drought kills livestock, which means you can’t convert livestock into cash, and then you can’t pay the smuggler or afford the cost of the journey that would take you out of that area.”

Nevertheless, Black argues that in many cases it would be especially difficult to distinguish people who remain because they can and wish to, from those who are really unable to leave. In addition, environmental change could also drive people to migrate towards areas where they are even more at risk than those they have left.

In the Mekong delta in southern Vietnam, researchers foresee climate change contributing to floods, loss of land and increased soil salinity. Facing these hazards, local residents in an already impoverished region could find themselves unable to cope, and also unable to move away.

“It would generally be income and assets that will determine whether people can stay where they are or need to relocate,” says Dr Christopher Smith from the University of Sussex, who is currently conducting a European Community-funded project assessing the risk of trapped populations in the Mekong delta.

“Within the short term, it would mostly be temporary movement, but in the future … there could be more permanent migration.”

According to Smith, “the Mekong, being such a long river that flows through so many different countries, will make [this case] quite unique in terms of changes to the water budget in the delta and, of course, factors like cultures and populations in the delta will play a part.”

Conclusions from the study are likely to be relevant to other cases around the world, and specifically to other low lying mega-deltas with similar characteristics, Smith adds.

In Guatemala, researchers found that relatively isolated mountain communities could also be facing the risk of becoming stranded by climate change.

According to a study published earlier this year, irregular rainfall could be posing a serious threat for the food security and sources of income of communities in the municipality of Cabricán who rely on subsistence rain-fed agriculture.

Yet, the risks associated with climate change are not confined to developing countries. Hurricane Katrina, which hit the south-east of the United States in 2005, offered a vivid example when the New Orleans’ Superdome housed more than 20,000 people over several days.

“That was to do with the fact that an evacuation plan had been designed with the idea that everybody would leave by car, but essentially there were sections of the population that didn’t have a car and were not going to leave by car, and also some people who didn’t believe the messages around evacuation,” says Black.

“And those people who were trapped in the eye of the storm were then more likely to be displaced later – so they were more likely to end up in one of the trailer parks, the temporary accommodation put on by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

Scientists are wary of linking Hurricane Katrina, or any single extreme weather event, to climate change. Yet, studies show that a warmer world might not necessarily mean more hurricanes, but such storms could be fiercer than those that these areas are used to.

Beyond science, says Black, international organisations are aware of the issue. “I’ve had quite extensive discussions with UNHCR [the U.N. refugee agency], the International Organization for Migration, the European Commission and a number of other bodies on these matters. There is a degree of interest in this idea that people can be trapped.”

A paper on Populations ‘trapped’ at times of crisis written by Black with Michael Collyer of the University of Sussex and published in February, notes that while it might still be early to suggest specific policy measures to address this predicament, there are several steps decision makers can take, and not only on the national level.

“As long as we have limited information on trapped populations,” say the authors, “the policy goal should be to avoid situations in which people are unable to move when they want to, not to promote policy that encourages them to move when they may not want to, and up-to-date information allowing them to make an informed choice.”

Intergovernmental fora – and among them the loss and damage stream in international climate negotiations – are yet to address specifically the challenge of trapped populations, but Europe might already be showing the way.

A European Commission working paper on climate change, environmental degradation and migration that accompanies the European Union’s strategy on adaptation to climate change adopted in April 2013 mentions the risk of trapped populations, albeit implicitly only outside the region, and recommends steps to address the issue.

Reviewing existing research on the links between climate change, environmental degradation and migration, the authors note that relocation, while questionably effective, “may nevertheless become a necessity in certain scenarios” such as the case of trapped communities.

“The EU should therefore consider supporting countries severely exposed to environmental stressors to assess the path of degradation and design specific preventive internal, or where necessary, international relocation measures when adaptation strategies can no longer be implemented,” states the working paper.

Ultimately, the situation where individuals, families, and indeed entire communities, find themselves unable to move out of harm’s way is not unique to the effects of climate change – it can be other natural hazards such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions or human-induced crises like armed conflict.

The international community’s response to people moving in the face of such crises is most often based on giving them a status, such as “internally displaced persons”, “asylum seekers” or “refugees”.

But this would not be the appropriate response when people remain, argues Black.

For them, “the issue is not a lack of legal status – it’s a lack of options … Public policy needs to be geared around providing people with options, in my view, both ahead of disasters and in the immediate aftermath of disasters.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

In 2012 recurring droughts destroyed most harvests in the Sahel. This year feeding chronically hungry people in the Sahel has been compromised by regional conflict that has created almost one million refugees. Credit:Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Matthew Newsome
TUNIS, Mar 28 2014 (IPS)

Still not enough is being done to improve the food emergency in Africa’s Sahel Region as conflict and instability continue to exacerbate any response towards aiding a region where one in eight people suffer from food insecurity.

“The main problem we have is that food is not reaching conflict areas such as Central African Republic (CAR) because of insecurity. Until now, there has not been enough of a response from the international community, especially given the proportion of the disaster foreseen,” Jose Graziano da Silva, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), told IPS at the organisation’s regional conference being held in Tunisa from Mar. 24 to 28.

Last month, the U.N. appealed for more than two billion dollars to address the needs of 20 million “food insecure” people across Africa’s Sahel, a semi-arid area beset by persistent drought and chronic food insecurity stretching from the Sahara desert in North Africa and Sudan’s Savannas in the south. It is described by the U.N. as “one of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable regions.”

Countries in the Sahel currently facing food shortages are Mali, Mauritania, the Gambia, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic (CAR), Niger, Chad and Nigeria.

New research by international NGO Action Aid highlights how Nigeria and Senegal are alarmingly unprepared to cope with a worsening food crisis.

John Abuya, head of Action Aid’s international humanitarian action and resilience team, told IPS: “Disaster preparedness structures at regional and community levels are still weak and need to be strengthened so as to provide the necessary response and resilience in case of an emergency.”

“Based on early warning signs, it is likely that the Nigerian and Senegalese governments will be overwhelmed if their food crisis escalates. Although Nigeria has a National Emergency Management Authority, its response at state level has been weak and resources have been allocated inadequately by the central government,” Abuya said.

Food insecurity in the Sahel is set to increase in 2014 by 40 percent compared to 2013 when 11.3 million people had inadequate food and required around 1.7 billion dollars in donor assistance.

Feeding chronically hungry people in the Sahel has been compromised by regional conflict that has created approximately 724,000 refugees and 495,000 internally displaced persons.

According to the latest data from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Chad’s open-door policy has resulted in it receiving 419, 000 refugees (86,000 from CAR, and 333,000 from Darfur, Sudan).

Out of the 103,000 refugees residing in Mauritania, a majority are from Mali and Western Sahara, while Burkina Faso has received 43,000 refugees from Mali since the crisis there began in 2012.

Following Mali’s military coup in March 2012, terrorists and criminal organisations exploited the country’s power vacuum and occupied the northern territory creating a huge displacement of the population. It resulted in a refugee outflow into Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger, and, to a lesser degree, Algeria and other countries.

Mali maintains it has the capacity to feed its people but is restricted by poor infrastructure and instability in the north.

Last year, it produced two million tonnes of cereal in addition to one million tonnes of rice.

“Mali’s problem is not agricultural, it is a logistical problem about transporting the food to people. The crisis and the instability in the north is not permitting us to use the roads safely. Therefore the food that farmers produce is restricted in its movement because of insecurity,” Issa Konda, head of Mali’s agricultural delegation attending the FAO conference, told IPS.

Despite efforts to stabilise Mali, including the deployment of a peacekeeping force and presidential elections in mid-2013, very few Malian refugees want to return due to the fragile humanitarian and security situation.

Niger’s severe food shortages due to recurrent drought have also been compounded by conflict in neighbouring countries. Half of the country’s 17 million people are without adequate food all year round, while one in 10 is unable to feed themselves for three months of the year.

Conflict in northern Mali, southern Libya, northern Nigeria and CAR has put pressure on Niger’s resources to deal with its food crisis as thousands of displaced civilians take refuge in the country due to its porous borders.

Since 2012, Malian refugees have regarded neighbouring Niger as a safe haven. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, over 51,000 refugees (47,000 from Mali and 4,000 from Nigeria) have entered the country as a result of regional conflict.

Last year’s rainy season in Niger, which lasted from July to October, was disappointing says the country’s Minister in the President’s office for the national strategy for food security and agriculture development, Amadou Diallo.

“The situation is dire and has not been improving for several years. We are unable to meet the food demand. The problem is that demand is growing from rising population numbers and incoming refugees, in addition to terrible drought our food supply is being compromised,” he told IPS.

Niger’s refugee crisis escalated last year after neighbouring Nigeria launched a military offensive against Islamist terror group, Boko Haram, causing 10,000 people to flee northern Nigeria into south-eastern Niger and Cameroon.

Of the 25 countries listed by the U.N. as being vulnerable to becoming failed states, 13 are in the Sahel. Breaking the cycle of recurrent food crises in the region is next to impossible while there is limited security says Gerda Verburg, chairperson of the Committee on World Food Security.

“In the Sahel we have the solutions. We have the capacity. We have the willingness.  However, as long there is insecurity then food production and access to food is at risk.  There is not enough reliability and stability for us to adequately address food insecurity in the Sahel,” she told IPS.

In Africa’s Sahel region, agroforestry techniques using traditional plantings known as “fertiliser trees” to increase soil fertility, as well as harvesting and grazing regulations, are offering new solutions to both food and human security.

Such approaches were nearly lost in recent decades following devastating droughts in the Sahel. Now they are making a belated but welcome comeback. According to a 2012 U.S. Geological Survey, “regeneration agroforestry” in the Sahel stands at over 5 million hectares of agricultural fields newly covered by trees – and growing.

Recurring droughts destroyed many harvests in the Sahel. Credit:Kristin Palitza/IPS

“Agroforestry is the future of agriculture in the drylands and sub-humid regions,” Chris Reij, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank, told IPS. “In southern Niger, for instance, farmers have improved millions of hectares of land through regenerating and multiplying valuable trees whose roots already lay beneath their land.”

The effect for local communities over the past 20 years has been immediate and staggering—”more than 500,000 additional tonnes of food per year,” Reij said.

Collectively known as “evergreen agriculture”, these techniques have not only been changing landscapes and breathing new life into soils long depleted of their nutrients and productivity, but also affecting political and social realities.

The ideas behind evergreen agriculture began during the 1980s, in the midst of a severe and prolonged period of drought in the Sahel. This period was disastrous for the region’s inhabitants as crop production plummeted and vast numbers of livestock had to be killed off.

The region’s trees also began to disappear, since local communities were forced to offset their lost assets through practises that slowly destroyed the forests – the only profitable resource left in the Sahel. These communities resorted to cutting and selling wood to buy food and survive, with multiple effects of this deforestation felt in the intervening decades.

For eons, farmers in the Sahel grew trees on their farmlands because they acted as a natural fertiliser. Not only did they improve fertility by adding nitrogen to the soil; they also offered a critical shading effect, which improves moisture conditions in both the local atmosphere and the soil.

Buffering crops of maize sorghum and millet below them, the trees used by farmers in the Sahel are unique and known as Faidherbia albida. According to the World Agroforestry Centre, the tree exhibits the unusual characteristics of becoming dormant and leafless in the wet season – when crops are growing – but leafing out thereafter, when farmers can harvest the trees’ leaves and pods for fodder for their livestock.

When scientists began looking more closely at this phenomenon, they discovered a virtual underground ecosystem in these areas, with root systems and perennials from various species of valuable indigenous trees, which farmers can now cultivate.

These trees grow naturally each year, and with the grazing of livestock managed to give the trees time to grow, the landscape is being transformed, with the implications of this growth possibly extending beyond food security.

Regenerating security

Africa’s “drylands”, the vast swath of the Sahara Desert stretching across North Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, have risen in the past year to the top of the global agenda. The insurgency in Mali and the ensuing French military intervention have received the most attention recently, following kidnappings in Algeria and wars in Mauritania and Niger.

“If you look at the dimensions of where terrorism and political insecurity are most acute, throughout the entire globe, it is a map of the drylands of Africa and West Asia,” Dennis Garrity, U.N. Drylands Ambassador and director-general of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, said at a recent event here in Washington.

“The situation emphasises how fragile the underlying development pathways are under conditions of extremely low literacy, health and other human development indicators in the drylands.”

While the Sahel suffers from both an accelerated degradation of land and low rates of female literacy, these two indicators aren’t generally conflated. Yet according to Garrity, a connection can be found in factors such as high population growth rates.

According to the World Agroforestry Centre, the population in the Sahel doubles every 20 years, a rate that is reflected in the rapidly declining size of farm plots on which rural communities depend for food. Meanwhile, availability of new farmland is rapidly dropping, and studies regularly report a steady decline in soil fertility.

Above all looms the long-term prospect of the region’s vulnerability to climate change, making these agroforestry initiatives all the more urgent. Garrity and other experts warn climate change will play out in terms of more extreme droughts – higher temperatures and low and uncertain rainfall – that will significantly affect crop yields.

“It is not a military or security problem,” said Garrity. “There is a pressing confluence of food insecurity, economic insecurity and a big lag in human development indicators that emphasises that this is a multidimensional problem.”

A nutritionist assesses the health of a child in Mauritania: red indicates severe malnutrition. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 3 2012 (IPS)

Reporting that the worst of the food crisis in the Sahel region of Africa appears to have been averted, the United Nations’ top official on the area, David Gressley, warned on Wednesday that the potential passing of the immediate emergency should not divert international attention from what needs to be done in 2013, which he calls a critical year for building resilience in the region.

The prospect for a breakthrough in 2013 has been brought about by the confluence of significant international focus on the Sahel at the same time as several governments in the region, most notably Niger, have begun serious, proactive work on addressing some of the root causes of the area’s vulnerability.

But Gressley worries that this opportunity could be undone not only by the prospect of a fairly good harvest this year, but also by the chaotic situation in Mali diverting international attention.

“With good news, the danger is that we’ll forget the chronic crisis – there will continue to be food security issues across Sahel, and we know a drought will hit again in the future,” Gressley, the U.N.’s regional humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel, a new and unusually broad position to which he was appointed in April, said here in Washington.

“We have a choice to let chronic problems continue, responding with massive assistance packages, or we can start taking action today to try to reduce the impact – both the human suffering and cost of response. But we need very strong political will among countries and donors to look at how to do that.”

The Sahel region – nearly a dozen countries on the southern border of the Sahara desert – experienced a catastrophic, though not unique, drought last year, which destroyed harvests and livestock. Due to the drought, there are still an estimated 18 million households in the Sahel experiencing food insecurity, as well as around a million children with acute malnutrition.

There have been mounting concerns that a second poor harvest was in the works this year, and the World Bank warned in late August that prices for maize and sorghum in parts of the Sahel were again at near-record highs. But the arrival of relatively strong rains, coupled with a massive international effort, has lessened such anxieties for the time being.

Looking to the long term

Nonetheless, the donor commitments for the international effort towards the Sahel topped 1.6 billion dollars, around 350 million dollars of which came from the United States and more from the European Union. (Around 1.3 billion dollars of that went to efforts at mitigating the food crisis, while the rest went to a still underfunded effort at dealing with the refugees that have been forced to flee.)

And while that effort so far appears to have been able to avert a crisis this year, Gressley says the money expended has done little to help affected communities prepare for such inevitable situations down the road.

“It’s good to know that early action can have a positive impact,” Gressley says. “But crises generate support for only a certain amount of time and that then quickly dissipates; with the good rains, people are already talking about other things. In fact, a humanitarian response of this kind is usually required only in the case of political and development failures – and across the Sahel, there is certainly a failure of development.”

Even in a year with a good harvest – as this year’s could prove to be – a quarter-million children are still expected to die across the countries of the Sahel. That long-term structural problem, experts say, is a vulnerability that can quickly turn into a full-blown crisis at any time.

In order to go forward with the resilience programme that the United Nations and others are now embarking on, Gressley says international donors will need to offer solid commitments for five- or even 10-year initiatives.

That is a tall order, particularly as donors around the world are scaling back their projects amidst the imposition of austerity measures. Further, the United States, for one, has a policy of not allocating funding beyond a three-year horizon.

Still, there is currently general agreement among the major funders that resilience projects in the Sahel are required. The most potentially far-reaching new initiative is being spearheaded by the European Commission, a partnership unveiled in June called AGIR Sahel.

While the partnership’s initial focus was specifically on the acute crisis that was then unfolding, its initial declaration was notably forward-looking. “Participants agreed that a concerted effort by governments and organisations of the region and humanitarian and development partners is needed,” the declaration states, “both to address the current crisis and to minimize the scale of similar crises in the future.”

While Gressley lauds the AGIR Sahel partnership, he says that the current combination of international focus and progressive attitudes within several Sahel governments “may not be repeated if we don’t take it” within the next year.

The security lens

The larger obstacle to allowing for a 2013 push by the international community for resilience within the Sahel could be the still unfolding situation in Mali, where since March a political and security vacuum has resulted in multiple armed groups taking control of the country’s massive north.

“The kind of security issues we see in Mali are the biggest threat to our resilience approach,” Gressley warns. “The danger is in getting fully absorbed by political issues – humanitarian access, etc. – and forgetting about the longer-term problems. If that happens, we will lose the opportunity to address both the food security issue and also the marginalisation that has built up across the Sahel.”

Still, as a political solution remains unclear, there is a clear and urgent need for humanitarian as well as technical assistance in Mali. Meanwhile, the situation in Mali is receiving increasing counter-terrorism attention, as Western powers, particularly the United States, have in recent weeks strongly suggested that terror groups, such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, are making inroads in the Malian chaos.

“I don’t agree that Mali is going to detract attention from the Sahel,” Joel Charny, vice-president for humanitarian policy and practice with InterAction, a network of U.S. civil-society organisations, told IPS.

“Rather, over the next year there’s a real concern as to whether we’re going to approach Mali as a security versus humanitarian problem. Are we going to start seeing U.S. drone attacks in Mali? If so, that will make it much harder to do humanitarian work there.”

Last week, InterAction announced that its members were pledging more than a billion dollars towards food security and nutrition, including in the Sahel.

“We know that in a situation like the Sahel you have to do both – there has to be an ability to respond to save lives, but you can try to respond in ways that enable communities to be stronger and able to resist shock in the medium term,” Charny says.

“But will 2013 be that much different from, say, five years ago – will next year be especially critical? Maybe and maybe not. The point is we need to redouble our efforts to work in the Sahel in a way that allows people to care for themselves.”

Fatoumata Yire Soro’s two-year-old daughter received treatment for malnourishment over the last two months. Credit: Robbie Corey-Boulet/IPS

By Robbie Corey-Boulet
KORHOGO, Cote d’Ivoire, Aug 14 2012 (IPS)

Salimata Coulibaly, director of a medical centre in the town of Korhogo in the northern Cote d’Ivoire region of Savanes, stood before a chart displaying before-and-after photos of local children – one taken when each child arrived at the centre, and one after he or she responded to treatment for malnutrition.

In recent weeks she has had no shortage of photos to take. The number of children brought to the centre for weighing is on the rise, having ballooned from 162 in April to 674 in July.

“A crisis has begun. We’re in the lean season,” Coulibaly told IPS, referring to the period from June to August when food stocks in the part of this West African nation typically run low ahead of the next harvest.

Christina de Bruin, deputy representative for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Cote d’Ivoire, told IPS that her agency had noted a similar increase of malnourished children in feeding centres throughout the north.

Seasonal hunger is nothing new in northern Cote d’Ivoire, a region where families cope with high levels of poverty and poor soil. But this year new challenges have arisen that could compound the problem.

The region was hit hard by Cote d’Ivoire’s post-election crisis, a six-month civil conflict that claimed at least 3,000 lives, which erupted when former President Laurent Gbagbo refused to cede office after losing the November 2010 election.

Hundreds of thousands of Ivoirians were displaced, with tens of thousands ending up in the northern Savanes region, where they were largely taken in by host families, according to the U.N. Although the crisis ended more than a year ago, allowing some displaced to return, the strain put on host families’ food stocks is still being felt.

The political unrest has since been replaced by the regional food crisis in the Sahel region of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad brought on by erratic rains and the resulting poor harvests and water shortages. Oxfam International says 18 million people are facing a food crisis this year in West and Central Africa, including in Burkina Faso and Mali, which border Cote d’Ivoire.

De Bruin said that the regional food shortage had, in effect, “drained a part of the local harvest” in Cote d’Ivoire by sharply increasing the cost of staple foods.

Lastly, erratic rains in Cote d’Ivoire last year made the harvest especially poor, meaning that the lean season has been tougher than usual for many families.

All of this has the potential to undo recent nutritional gains in the region. According to data cited by the U.N., global acute malnutrition had fallen from 17.5 percent in 2008 to 5.8 percent earlier this year.

However, a survey conducted in April by the U.N. World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the Ministry of Agriculture estimated that some 110,000 people in the Savanes region could be at risk of food insecurity, and that “the most likely scenario in 2012 could be compared to the situation in 2008,” when the region was under rebel control and reeling from a decline in basic social services.

At the Korhogo medical centre, Coulibaly said she watched conditions gradually grow more dire. Not only are many families eating just one meal per day, she said, they are often so hard-pressed to work for that meal that they delay seeking medical care when the first signs of malnutrition appear.

“They only come to nutrition centres when it’s really becoming serious,” she said. “They tend to wait until it’s too late because they don’t want to waste time getting treatment.”

At a nutrition centre in a village outside of Korhogo called M’Benguebougou, Fatoumata Yire Soro, 22, described the pressure she faced before deciding to bring her two-year-old daughter in for treatment about two months ago.

“I was very concerned about the health of my child, who I could see was malnourished,” said Soro, who sells charcoal. “But at the same time, I have to deal with the pressure from home because I am not in the field (earning a living). In the end, the health of my child was the most important thing.”

Delaying medical treatment for children is just one adverse coping mechanism adopted by families struggling to feed themselves. Parents are also more likely to take their children out of school – something De Bruin said had been seen throughout the region in response to the Sahel food crisis.

“A lot of children have left the education system, unfortunately,” she said. “We are seeing that due to the Sahel crisis children are leaving school earlier.”

An entrenched problem

Thomas Bassett, professor of geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-author of the 2010 book The Atlas of World Hunger, told IPS that it is important to be mindful of the structural factors contributing to hunger in Cote d’Ivoire.

More than 40 percent of children under the age of five here experience stunting, meaning they are not getting sufficient food for normal growth.

“We know that about 45 percent of the population lives on two dollars per day. So that’s almost half the population (of nearly 20 million people) which is vulnerable to falling into hunger,” said Bassett.

“If you’re living on two dollars per day, any kind of extreme event – it could be a drought, it could be political instability, it could be low prices for your cash crops – would put people over the edge.” Bassett has been conducting fieldwork in Korhogo and its surroundings for more than 30 years.

One of the main reasons for this poverty, he said, is that farmers are not receiving enough money for cash crops, namely cotton and cashews.

The prices for both are set by private umbrella organisations composed of producers and purchasers based in Abidjan. He said this problem could in part be addressed by greater mobilisation by farmers to demand the highest possible prices for their product. A secondary intervention, Bassett said, would be to increase access to agricultural inputs such as fertiliser.

Bassett added, however, that the government of Alassane Ouattara was not likely to take on the problem of hunger in the north with great energy, especially if the administration felt secure in retaining strong voter support from the region.

Following a coup attempt targeting former president Gbagbo in 2002, the north was partitioned off from the south and was administered by the rebel Forces Nouvelles (New Forces) until the 2010 election. Northerners voted overwhelmingly for Ouattara, who hails from the region.

“My view is that because there’s no famine, the government will tolerate chronic hunger,” Bassett said. “I don’t think this is an issue that the government will necessarily feel compelled to address, nor do I think the Ouattara government will necessarily lose any support in the area because of this issue.”

De Bruin said that the government was working with NGOs to provide some assistance, notably in helping to educate communities about the dangers of malnourishment for children, which are not fully appreciated.

“People are not aware of the risk of having severely malnourished children,” she said. “If you have a severely malnourished child who gets diarrhoea, their chances for survival become very, very low.”

But she said that people in the region were expecting significant gains under Ouattara, especially following the decade-long crisis, during which basic social services such as education and health care were dismantled.

“Definitely people are expecting improvement from Ouattara,” she said. “Ensuring children grow up healthy and that they have education – I think only that can break the cycle of poverty and the cycle of violence.”

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, May 30 2012 (IPS)

As Africa’s Sahel region faces a new food crisis, smallholder famers hold the key to making future development policies sustainable.

That is why it “is just impossible to speak about sustainability” at the Rio+20 conference next month without listening to what smallholder farmers have to say, says Mohamed Beavogui, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development‘s Partnership and Resource Mobilisation Office.

Courtesy of Mohamed Beavogui

Some 18 million people in the Sahel region are at risk of food insecurity and malnutrition, warns the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Recurring droughts, environmental degradation and high grain prices accompanied by decreasing migrant remittances, as well as displacement and chronic poverty are creating a situation that has resulted among others things in a 26-percent decline in cereal production compared to 2011. Finding long-lasting solutions is pivotal in this context, said Beavogui.

And these solutions are already there, developed by smallholder farmers over centuries.

Promises were made by the G8 group of wealthy donor nations to scale up international agriculture-related foreign aid, especially in Africa, but they remain unfulfilled.

Speaking with U.N. Correspondent Rousbeh Legatis, Beavogui laid out what the world can learn from smallholder farmers to promote sustainable agriculture as a key element of future sustainable development.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Regions like the Sahel seem to be hit by famine every few years, often for predictable reasons. What structural changes can be made to break this cycle?

A: Firstly, we should invest in providing targeted communities with greater capacity to implement self-help activities in response to production shortfalls, as well as more effectively coordinate and implement governmental and international relief activities.

Secondly, we have been learning that in areas where attempts were made to build long-lasting sustainable approaches like re-greening of land, solving the issues of water availability, drip irrigation, bounds, the adverse effects of droughts have been less than in areas where this kind of work has not been undertaken.

But this means what? It means that we should work all together. Governments should encourage the right policies that allow to have the right inputs, particularly drought-resistant seeds, as well as policies that allow good extension services to be adopted and easy access – particularly for women and young people.

We should furthermore invest in better roads to allow the transportation of food from the high production zones to the deficit zones.

Q: IFAD has supported organic farming pilot projects, such as among cocoa producers in Sao Tome, as a way to leverage higher-paying markets. Are these kinds of markets – organic, fair trade – expanding, and do they offer an opportunity for public-private partnerships that really benefit small farmers?

A: Yes, it is a very good way to contribute to the creation of wealth for the rural smallholder farmers.

We have had very successful experiences in Sao-Tomé, Sierra Leone, Uganda and in many other places in Latin America and so on.

But what have we learned? What are the success factors in order to get there? When I say “there” I mean the situation whereby the farmer is getting the fair price on its product, increasing his or her income in a very respectable manner and the partner, the private company, is also satisfied that it is making money. Because that is the reality: it is about making money, but in a fair manner.

So the first success factor is that we should think long-term. We should work with real private sector professionals, partners, committed also to development, to just human beings. Besides business and trade, fundamental to this is that we need some kind of ethical approach to the work. So in short, we need genuine commitment from everyone.

The second success factor is that we need to work through organised producers to ensure a critical mass. Allowing to have, firstly, the size for delivery and, secondly, minimised processing and marketing costs.

Thirdly, we need to ensure quality to have good access to markets and good prices and we need to optimise logistics to reduce cost again, as well as an easy transfer of knowhow and good practices.

Q: Gender equality is a priority for IFAD. Are governments giving women, especially young and rural women, the attention and support they deserve?

A: I think we have a long way to go in that area for the time being. Policies are changing. If you look at what is happening now in Africa, the new constitutions are giving more and more space to women. You look at the governments, you are having more and more women getting to high-level positions, women are getting also better positions in different corporations.

The issue where I think there is a lot of work to do yet and which need a bigger push is really women in the rural areas.

In the documentation, there is a lot of talk about how do we help women, but when you go into actual activities, you will see that the extension service for agriculture is geared very frequently towards men. That issues like land are first devoted to men. So, that is where we have to work and to continue supporting.

Women in Africa particularly are the ones who produce food, who process and market food. Commodities are dealt with by men, but food is the responsibility of women. So, in IFAD we have been investing a lot in this area. The major partners in our programmes are women first and young women also.

Q: There is a growing recognition that sustainable agriculture is central to sustainable human development. What do you hope could be accomplished at the Rio+20 summit in this regard?

A: What we as IFAD are pushing is that you cannot build sustainability without involving the main actors. We have about two billion smallholder farmers around the world. These people are working on the lands we have every day, they are dealing with our waters, with our forests, with our livestock, they are in fact dealing with our nature.

So it is just impossible to speak about sustainability of our environment without really involving these people.

They can help us to have a sustainable agriculture; an agriculture that allows us to produce enough food and in the same time to preserve our environment, our nature.

Smallholder farmers are dealing with our local knowledge. They are good managers of risks, have a very good experiences and solutions in terms of alternative responses to droughts, floods etc.

Sometimes, if you look at these farms you will see that he or she plants different types of species to manage the risk. One (plant) will respond to droughts, in case there are droughts, and you have others who would respond to floods, and if there is a flood, that production will survive. So they have this type of responses that are extremely efficient. So we have a lot to learn from them.

Excerpt: