Food Aid Seen Contributing to African Famine : Ecologists Say Piecemeal Assistance Has Led to Overpopulation, Overgrazing

The famine in Africa was caused by human activity, not by lack of rain, and emergency food aid is making the situation worse, two Canadian ecologists have concluded.

Piecemeal aid from developed countries has changed life in sub-Saharan Africa so dramatically that the land can no longer support the population, the researchers say.

The changes may even be altering the weather itself.

The core of the problem, according to Anthony Sinclair and John Fryxell of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, is that too many people and too many cattle are living on land that can no longer support them, because it has been overgrazed and stripped of vegetation.

‘Won’t Address Problem’

“If you feed the people and leave them where they are, it won’t address that problem,” Sinclair said recently in a telephone interview. “It will make it worse, because these people will move into new areas and alter the vegetation again, so the famine will spread.”

Sinclair is quick to say that on humanitarian grounds there is no immediate alternative to sending food to the millions of starving African families, but warns that more must be done.

“The very first thing we have to address is to repair the vegetation,” he said. “We’ve got to get the grasslands growing again. We’ve got to take the people off the land, take the pressure off the land.”

Moving large numbers of people is a difficult political problem in the best of circumstances, and may be impossible given the political unrest in some of the drought-stricken countries of Africa, in the broad belt known as the Sahel that stretches across the continent just south of the Sahara.

“We’re not the right people to say how this should be done,” Sinclair said. “We’re not in the aid business. But that shouldn’t stop us from mentioning problems.”

Sinclair and Fryxell are specialists in the migration of wild animals in the Sahel.

Migration Described

In a recent paper titled “The Sahel of Africa: Ecology of a disaster,” Sinclair and Fryxell described how the wildebeest and the white-eared kob, two African antelopes, survive in large numbers by migrating during the rainy season to areas where short-lived, high-protein grasses briefly appear, and then returning in the dry season to areas where lower-quality vegetation grows year-round.

The migration strategy allows more animals to survive than would be possible if they were confined to a single area year-round, and it also allows grasslands to recover during periods when the animals are away.

Many people living in the Sahel have traditionally followed a similar strategy, moving their cattle herds to different areas at different seasons, and thus avoiding overgrazing and permanent loss of grasslands.

A Disappearing Pattern

That pattern began to disappear several decades ago, however, as western countries began to send aid to Africa.

Wells were drilled in areas that were green with vegetation year-round. Communities developed around the wells, and medical and veterinary care became available. Much of this change was the result of aid from developed countries.

People who had migrated soon settled near the wells, and it wasn’t long before difficulties arose, according to Sinclair and Fryxell.

Grazing animals no longer had access to high-protein grass during the rainy season. The land around the wells became overgrazed and ultimately stripped of vegetation, now that animals were feeding there constantly.

The improved medical care increased the population of humans and animals.

Declining Rainfall

As the process accelerated, each periodic episode of less-than-average rainfall had more severe consequences. The famines of 1973 and 1984 were both preceded by reduced rainfall, but resulted in far more deaths than previous droughts, the researchers said.

While the lower rainfall might have been the trigger for the famine, the ultimate cause was settlement and overgrazing, prompted in part by aid from developed countries.

“That’s the most crucial point in understanding the problem,” Sinclair said.

Beyond this relatively rapid deterioration of grasslands there may, however, be an even more ominous long-term problem, Sinclair said.

The overgrazing may be directly changing weather patterns, causing a decline in rainfall that could last for decades.

Compelling Contention

That contention comes from the work of other researchers, but Sinclair finds it increasingly compelling.

This is the argument: Denuded, sandy-colored soils reflect more sunlight than do darker grassy plains, thus denuded soils are cooler. Fewer warm air currents rise from the cooler ground to carry moisture up into the atmosphere, where it can condense into rain. With less rainfall, vegetation is even less likely to reappear.

In green areas, in contrast, warmer soils provide thermal currents that carry moisture released by plants skyward, thus producing rain.

“Although more evidence is needed for these climatic feedback processes, their consequences, if true, are profound,” the scientists wrote.

First, agencies providing short-term relief until the next rains arrive may find that the rainfall never comes. Second, emergency food aid will maintain ever larger populations that will spill over into neighboring areas, thus spreading the area of overgrazing and drawing residents of those neighboring areas into the problem.

20 Year Rain Decline

The process may have already begun. Observations of rainfall in the Sahel show a steady decline over the past 20 years.

Not all researchers agree with this hypothesis. Sharon Nicholson, a meteorologist at Florida State University, is one of the leading experts on climate in the Sahel, and she doesn’t believe a long-term change is occurring.

Reasoning from very different observations, she suggests that the current drought is similar to a drought that occurred in the region between 1820 and 1840.

Thus such droughts can occur in the absence of the kind of human activity that Sinclair and Fryxell describe. “The potential for a human effect is there, but it probably hasn’t happened,” she said recently at a meeting of the University Seminar on Global Habitability at Columbia University.

That gives her a somewhat more optimistic outlook. “I don’t think we have any signal that the drought is going to continue,” she said.

Sinclair readily admits that the climate hypothesis is tentative. “It takes longer to establish the facts of the matter,” he said. “But if it’s true, then we’re locked into a more serious problem--a long-term drought.”