New study warns that climate change could create agricultural winners and losers in East Africa

Posted on November 4, 2009 by ILRIComms

While predicting highly variable impacts on agriculture by 2050, experts show that with adequate investment the region can still achieve food security for all

As African leaders prepare to present an ambitious proposal to industrialized countries for coping with climate change in the part of the world that is most vulnerable to its impacts, a new study points to where and how some of this money should be spent. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Agricultural Systems, the study projects that climate change will have highly variable impacts on East Africa’s vital maize and bean harvests over the next two to four decades, presenting growers and livestock keepers with both threats and opportunities.

Previous estimates by the study’s authors projected moderate declines in the production of staple foods by 2050 for the region as a whole but also suggested that the overall picture disguises large differences within and between countries. The new findings provide a more detailed picture than before of variable climate change impacts in East Africa, assessing them according to broadly defined agricultural areas.

‘Even though these types of projections involve much uncertainty, they leave no room for complacency about East Africa’s food security in the coming decades,’ said the lead author of the new study, Philip Thornton of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which is supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). ‘Countries need to act boldly if they’re to seize opportunities for intensified farming in favored locations, while cushioning the blow that will fall on rural people in more vulnerable areas.’

The researchers simulated likely shifts in cropping, using a combination of two climate change models and two scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, together with state-of-the-art models for maize and beans, two of the region’s primary staple foods.

In the mixed crop-livestock systems of the tropical highlands, the study shows that rising temperatures may actually favor food crops, helping boost output of maize by about half in highland ‘breadbasket’ areas of Kenya and beans to much the same degree in similar parts of Tanzania. Meanwhile, harvests of maize and beans could decrease in some of the more humid areas, under the climate scenarios used in the study. Across the entire region, production of both crops is projected to decline significantly in drylands, particularly in Tanzania.

‘The emerging scenario of climate-change winners and losers is not inevitable,’ said ILRI director general Carlos Seré. ‘Despite an expected three-fold increase in food demand by 2050, East Africa can still deliver food security for all through a smart approach that carefully matches policies and technologies to the needs and opportunities of particular farming areas.’

At the Seventh World Forum on Sustainable Development, held recently in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, African leaders announced a plan to ask the industrialized world to pay developing countries USD67 billion a year as part of the continent’s common negotiating position for December’s climate talks in Copenhagen.

The ILRI study analyzes various means by which governments and rural households can respond to climate change impacts at different locations. In Kenya, for example, the authors suggest that shifting bean production more to the cooler highland areas might offset some of the losses expected in other systems.

Similarly, Tanzania and Uganda could compensate for projected deficits in both maize and beans through increased regional trade. In the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), maize trade is already worth more than USD1 billion, but only 10 percent of it occurs within the region. As grain prices continue to rise in global markets, several East African countries will be well positioned to expand output of maize and beans for regional markets, thus reducing reliance on imports and boosting rural incomes.

Where crop yields are expected to decline only moderately because of climate change, past experience suggests that rural households can respond effectively by adopting new technologies to intensify crop and livestock production, many of which are being developed by various CGIAR-supported centres and their national partners.

Drought-tolerant maize varieties, for example, have the potential to generate benefits for farmers estimated at USD863 million or more in 13 African countries over the next 6 years, according to a new study carried out by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). Meanwhile, new heat-tolerant varieties of productive climbing beans, which are traditionally grown in highlands, are permitting their adoption at lower elevations, where they yield more than twice as much grain as the bush-type beans grown currently, according to Robin Buruchara of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

In areas that face drastic reductions in maize and bean yields, farmers may need to resort to more radical options, such as changing the types of crops they grow (replacing maize, for example, with sorghum or millet), keeping more livestock or abandoning crops altogether to embrace new alternatives, such as the provision of environmental services, including carbon sequestration.

This latter option could become a reality under COMESA’s Africa Biocarbon Initiative, which is designed to tap the huge potential of the region’s diverse farmlands and other rural landscapes, ranging from dry grasslands to humid tropical forests, for storing millions of tons of carbon. The initiative offers African negotiators an appealing option in their efforts to influence a future climate change agreement.

‘If included in emissions payment schemes, this initiative could create new sources of income for African farmers and enhance their resilience to climate change,’ said Peter Akong Minang, global coordinator of the Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn (ASB) Programme at the World Agroforestry Centre. ‘Its broad landscape approach would open the door for many African countries to actively participate in, and benefit from, global carbon markets.’

‘Rural people manage their livelihoods and land in an integrated way that encompasses many activities,’ said Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR’s Challenge Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security. ‘That’s why they need integrated options to cope with climate change, consisting of diverse innovations, such as drought-tolerant crops, better management of livestock, provision of environmental services and so forth.’

How rapidly and successfully East African nations and rural households can take advantage of such measures will depend on aggressive new investments in agriculture, CGIAR researchers argue. According to a recent study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), it will take about USD7 billion annually, invested mainly in rural roads, better water management and increased agricultural research, to avert the dire implications of climate change for child nutrition worldwide.

About 40 per cent of that investment would address the needs of sub-Saharan Africa, where modest reductions projected for maize yields in the region as a whole are expected to translate into a dramatic rise in the number of malnourished children by 2050. Thornton’s projections probably underestimate the impacts on crop production, because they reflect increasing temperatures and rainfall changes only and not greater variability in the weather and growing pressure from stresses like drought and insect pests.

‘Farmers and pastoralists in East Africa have a long history of dealing with the vagaries of the weather,’ said Seré. ‘But climate change will stretch their adaptive capacity beyond its limits, as recent severe drought in the region has made abundantly clear. Let’s not leave rural people to fend for themselves but rather invest significantly in helping them build a more viable future.’

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About ILRI:
The Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) works at the crossroads of livestock and poverty, bringing high-quality science and capacity-building to bear on poverty reduction and sustainable development. ILRI is one of 15 centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). It has its headquarters in Kenya and a principal campus in Ethiopia. It also has teams working out of offices in Nigeria, Mali, Mozambique, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam and China. www.ilri.org.

About the CGIAR: The CGIAR, established in 1971, is a strategic partnership of countries, international and regional organizations and private foundations supporting the work of 15 international Centers. In collaboration with national agricultural research systems, civil society and the private sector, the CGIAR fosters sustainable agricultural growth through high-quality science aimed at benefiting the poor through stronger food security, better human nutrition and health, higher incomes and improved management of natural resources. www.cgiar.org

Drought hits Kenya’s livestock herders hard

Posted on October 5, 2009 by ILRIComms

Drought hits Kenya’s livestock herders hard, forcing some communities out of self-reliant pastoral ways of life (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

Stories of the two-year drought biting deep in pastoral lands in the Horn of Africa are heartbreaking. Kenya’s livestock herders are being hit particularly hard. More than three-quarters of Kenya comprises arid and semi-arid lands too dry for growing crops of any kind. Only pastoral tribes, able to eke out a living by raising livestock on common grasslands, can make a living for themselves and their families here, where rainfall is destiny. With changes in the climate bringing droughts every few years in this region of eastern Africa, some doubt that traditional pastoral ways of life, evolved in this region over some 12,000 years, can long survive. Climate change here is not an academic discussion but rather a matter of life and death. But pastoral knowledge of how to survive harsh climates—largely by moving animals to take advantage of common lands where the grass is growing—is needed now more than ever.

This is especially true in Africa, whose many vast drylands are expected to suffer greater extremes in climate in future. Two of the recent reports are from America’s Public Radio International (‘Drought in East Africa’: <http://www.pri.org/business/nonprofits/drought-east-africa1629.html>) and the UK’s Guardian newspaper (‘The last nomads: Drought drives Kenya’s herders to the brink’: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/13/drought-kenya-nomads>). The Guardian article tells a heart-breaking story about “pastoral dropouts”, a story that may mark “not simply the end . . . of generations of nomadic existence in the isolated lands where Kenya meets Somalia and Ethiopia, but the imminent collapse of a whole way of life that has been destroyed by an unprecedented decade of successive droughts”.

The article says this region has experienced three serious droughts in the last decade, when formerly a drought occurred every 9 to 12 years. This change in global weather patterns ‘has been whittling away at the nomads’ capacity to restock with animals—to replenish and survive—normally a period of about three years”. The Economist in its 19 September 2009 edition says global warming is creating a ‘bad climate for development’ (<http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14447171>). The article says that poor countries’ economic development will contribute to climate change—but they are already its victims. ‘Most people in the West know that the poor world contributes to climate change, though the scale of its contribution still comes as a surprise. Poor and middle-income countries already account for just over half of total carbon emissions (see chart 1); Brazil produces more CO2 per head than Germany. The lifetime emissions from these countries’ planned power stations would match the world’s entire industrial pollution since 1850.

‘Less often realised, though, is that global warming does far more damage to poor countries than they do to the climate. In a report in 2006 Nicholas (now Lord) Stern calculated that a 2°C rise in global temperature cost about 1% of world GDP. But the World Bank, in its new World Development Report <http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14447171#footnote1> , now says the cost to Africa will be more like 4% of GDP and to India, 5%. Even if environmental costs were distributed equally to every person on earth, developing countries would still bear 80% of the burden (because they account for 80% of world population). As it is, they bear an even greater share, though their citizens’ carbon footprints are much smaller . . . . ‘The poor are more vulnerable than the rich for several reasons. Flimsy housing, poor health and inadequate health care mean that natural disasters of all kinds hurt them more. ‘The biggest vulnerability is that the weather gravely affects developing countries’ main economic activities—such as farming and tourism. Global warming dries out farmland. Since two-thirds of Africa is desert or arid, the continent is heavily exposed. One study predicts that by 2080 as much as a fifth of Africa’s farmland will be severely stressed.’

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its local and international partners are working to help pastoral communities in this region increase their resilience in the face of the current drought, as well as population growth, climate change, and other big changes affecting pastoral ways of life.

Scientists are helping Maasai communities in the Kitengela rangelands of Kenya (outside Nairobi) obtain and use evidence that new schemes to pay herders small sums of money per hectare to keep their lands unfenced are working for the benefit of livestock and wildlife movements alike.
Scientists are helping Maasai communities in the rangelands surrounding Kenya’s famous Masai Mara National Reserve to obtain and use evidence that public-private partnerships now building new wildlife conservancies that pay pastoralists to leave some of their lands for wildlife rather than livestock grazing are win-win options for conservationists and pastoral communities alike.
Scientists have refined and mass produced a vaccine against the lethal cattle disease East Coast fever—and are helping public-private partnerships to regulate and distribute the vaccine in 11 countries of eastern, central and southern Africa where the disease is endemic—so that pastoral herders can save some of their famished livestock in this drought from attack by disease, and use those animals to rebuild their herds when the drought is over.
Scientists are characterizing and helping to conserve the indigenous livestock breeds that Africa’s pastoralists have kept for millennia—breeds that have evolved special hardiness to cope with harsh conditions such as droughts and diseases—so that these genetic traits can be more widely used to cope with the changing climate.

But much more needs to be done. And it needs to be done much more closely with the livestock herding communities that have so much to teach us about how to cope with a changing and variable climate.

When charity is not enough

Posted on October 7, 2008 by ILRIComms

Support for Ethiopia’s 85 million smallholder farmers.

Across much of Ethiopia today, the grass and crop fields are green, the oxen and chickens fat and sleek, and the goats and cows roaming outside the traditional round mud huts, called ‘tukuls’, where smoke rises from cooking fires inside, healthy.

The first of the year’s crop harvests are just now coming in—too late to save the most vulnerable. Livelihoods have been seriously effected in parts of Ethiopia’s Afar, Amhara, Oromiya, SNNP (Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples), Somali and Tigray regions with the failure of seasonal crops, large losses of livestock and skyrocketing market prices.

The situation is beginning to improve in some areas where rainfall has been received. However, the full recovery of lost assets and future agricultural productivity will require sustained support from government and humanitarian partners in the areas of seed support, supply of veterinary drugs and training of veterinary staff. The rate of livestock sickness in Somali Region has reached critical levels in pastoral communities. NGOs in the region are carrying out small-scale slaughter destocking exercises to improve access to water and pasture for core breeding stock.

Ethiopia’s State Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr Abera Deresa, says drought emergencies like this one, which the Ethiopian Government and United Nations agencies agree are affecting pockets of Ethiopia’s most vulnerable peoples and marginal farming areas, are a common, recurrent phenomenon in Ethiopia.

‘What is being under-reported’, says the minister, ‘is that Ethiopia’s farm production has recently been increasing by a healthy 10% every year. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily mean that demand and supply are compatible. Thus we have the current food crisis in Ethiopia, which is caused (as in the rest of the world) by climate change (drought), the international shift of food crops to biofuel, and incompatibility of demand and supply.’

The Ethiopian government has been working closely with humanitarian organizations to mobilize timely humanitarian support for the worst-affected regions and peoples. In this work, Abera said, Ethiopia relied on an Early Warning System set up within the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Hunger is hitting other countries here in the Horn of Africa, which are reeling from the triple blows of drought and soaring food and fuel prices. The United Nations estimates that more than 14 million people urgently need food aid, including 2.6 million in Somalia, more than 1 million in Kenya, and 6.4 million in Ethiopia (the latter up from 4.6 million estimated earlier).

Aid programs are responding to this and other crises. The United States, for example, will this year give Ethiopia more than US$800 million—$460 million for food, $350 million for HIV/AIDS treatment, and just $7 million for agricultural development. No one wants a repeat of the great Ethiopian famine of 1984/5, which killed a million people.

‘We need to help countries like Ethiopia to create and sustain livelihoods as well as to save lives, says Carlos Seré, director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which has a principal campus in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. ‘That requires something longer term than food aid. It requires helping the country build skills, infrastructure and policy instruments that support equitable development of smallholder agriculture, the backbone of the Ethiopia’s economy. Pastoralists and small-scale farmers should to be able to feed their families while building assets for the future.’

The Ethiopian Government agrees. Realizing that humanitarian support is not a long-term solution to the country’s food security problems, it is working to help its farmers improve and sustain their food production by, for example, improved ways of managing the country’s heavy clay Vertisol soils and controlling invasive weeds and termites in crop fields. The Government is also supporting market-oriented development of smallholder farmers at all levels, in recent years training some 60,000 extension workers who work directly with farmers.

‘The Government works closely with a wide variety of partners,’ says the minister. ‘One good example is the IPMS Project.’

Improving productivity and market success

Seré and Abera agree that development work should be homegrown wherever possible. That’s why in 2005 ILRI teamed up with the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Ethiopian Agricultural Research System and other centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to implement an action-oriented research project to “Improving the Productivity and Market Success” (IPMS) of Ethiopian Farmers. This 5-year project, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), works on market-led agricultural development in ten pilot learning districts as well as at regional and federal levels.

(http://www.ipms-ethiopia.org/)

This initiative works to help smallholder farmers transform their subsistence-based farming
practices into market-oriented agricultural systems. The IPMS project works with farmers, cooperatives, private-sector market agents, credit agencies and public-sector service providers to develop such a new system through a process of testing and learning.

Knowledge management, innovation capacity development and participatory commodity development approaches are cornerstones of the strategy. Both crop and livestock commodities are considered in the project’s 10 pilot learning districts,

The rising price of food
While the food price index of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which captures trends in major food commodities, rose by 56 per cent between March 2007 and March 2008, it increased only 39% in Ethiopia, 20% in Burundi and Kenya, and just 11% in Tanzania. In several other countries in the region, including Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia, the increase was less than 10%. Experts consider that this is because of the varied “food baskets” in the region, with teff being a staple in Ethiopia, local maize in Kenya, plantain in Uganda and beans in Rwanda. Even so, the UN World Food Programme estimates that in some places in Ethiopia, the price of maize increased 83 per cent, sorghum 89 per cent and wheat 54 per cent between September 2007 and February 2008.

Livestock owners these days are getting higher prices for their livestock commodities. That would appear to be a good thing for the poor, because the higher prices for livestock commodities should be benefiting households that are net sellers rather than buyers of food. But contrary to conventional wisdom, most poor households in this region, including those in rural areas, are net buyers rather than net sellers of food, and thus are, at least initially, hurt rather than helped by rising livestock and other food price rises.

Can poor farmers benefit from rising prices?
In many circumstances, higher livestock prices should, over the longer term, help more than hurt poor livestock producers, and that is why ILRI is encouraging subsistence farmers in Ethiopia and its neighbouring countries to take a more market-oriented approach to their production systems.

Even so, ILRI and its Ethiopian partners are well aware that not all small farmers will benefit from the rising prices of livestock commodities, that not all small farmers will enter the market economy—or should try, and that provision in policies should be made for those farmers who for various reasons will continue their subsistence production methods and those who will drop out of farming altogether.

The IPMS project is testing different ways of providing market information on the price and quality of livestock products, introducing small-scale processing of dairy and other livestock products, and new ways to link livestock producers and sellers. Use is made of a credit innovation fund to encourage existing credit institutions to develop new financial products, such as lending/repayment procedures that include collateral requirements to support the introduction of these interventions. ILRI and other research institutions supply the project with knowledge, help it build indigenous capacity in agricultural development, and provide technical advice and documentation of lessons learned. The livelihoods of many of Ethiopia’s small farmers have already been greatly enhanced by their adopting the practice of short-term fattening of large and small ruminants.

Earlier this year, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister H.E. Meles Zenawi presented the IPMS project with a Development Hero Certificate from the government of the Regional State of Tigray.

The livestock development efforts of IPMS focus on sales of meat or live animals and milk and other dairy products.

The project tests market-oriented production interventions:

• improved housing for farm animals
• (supplementary) feeding systems
• Improved use of crop residues
• planted forage species
• community-based grazing and control of ‘sleeping sickness’ (trypanosomosis)
• community-based breeding and insurance schemes for short-term fattening
• input supply/service interventions
• private bull stations
• decentralized artificial insemination service
• use of synchronization to improve the efficiency of artificial insemination
• private-sector involvement in feed and forage seed supply
• development of a ‘paravet’ animal health system

Related Information:
Cattle have been getting some bad press lately. Western editorials report the consumption of
too much fatty red meat leading to increased heart disease, the inefficient use of grain as feed
for livestock and the production of methane gases by cattle, a factor in global warming.
Elsewhere in the world, cattle receive songs of praise.

Drought continues to hit East Africa hard

Posted on February 20, 2006 by ILRIComms

Marc Lacey of The New York Times reports on the drought and bad planning that are hurting East Africa's drylands.

‘Animals are dying in huge numbers, their rotting carcasses littering the landscape and devastating the local economy. Aid workers estimate that 70 percent of the 260,000 cows in Kenya's Wajir district, near the border with Somalia, have died. Goats and sheep also are dying. Even camels, known for their ability to endure the most rugged of conditions, are dropping in the sand.’

People and livestock continue to die of thirst in the drought ravaged northern part of Kenya, despite having water delivered to them twice a week. This is because the water is barely enough to cater for all the individual members of the communities living here. At 20 litres of water a week, this averages to about three glasses of water per person, per day, for drinking and all other household purposes.

Click here to read the full article.

Click here for more from ILRI on the drought in Africa.

Healing wounds: Sick birds and starving cattle

Posted on February 8, 2006 by ILRIComms

Highly valued livestock waste away in the drought-hammered Horn of Africa.

Livestock in the thousands are dying daily in a drought ravaging Kenya and its neighbours in the Horn of Africa.Animals are in the news everywhere these days in the Horn of Africa. While disease control agents are on the look-out for sick or dead chickens, to spot what could be bird flu and prevent its spread, everyone else is fixed on a more daily sight: that of starving cattle wandering city streets in desperate search of grass. When too feeble to walk, the animals lay down to die.

Just five years ago, Kenyans were appalled by images from the UK of mass slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of cattle to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth, a disease endemic in Kenya and much of the developing world, where its appearance hardly raises a stir. Maasai pastoralists in particular thought the British crazy as well as cruel to kill so many and such valuable animals and offered to buy them from the ‘mad Englishmen’.

But the daily spectacle of cattle, sheep and goats dying across the parched countryside and in the city centres and leafy suburbs of towns and cities in the drought-hammered Horn may be even harder to bear. Livestock are valued highly here; they are the basis of livelihoods of most poor rural people, who, in the annual dry seasons, lose weight along with their farm animals. But these countries are too poor to deploy bullets for mercy killings. So animals die here like the poorest people do, slowly, painfully and in full view of everyone.

Debate on Africa's food crisis
Click here to read a debate 'Head-to-head: Africa's food crisis', from BBC News between Nicholas Crawford, an official from the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) and Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, a pan-Africanist and Director of Justice Africa, on what is causing Africa's deepening food crisis and what the solutions might be.

For more, please go to:
Bird flu threatens countries already in crisis
Avian flu and the developing world
Killing drought hits the Horn of Africa
Climate change threatens tropical maize production
Serious rain: Feature story
‘Healing Wounds’ in the Horn of Africa
Innovative livestock-water project launched

Killing drought hits the Horn of Africa

Posted on February 1, 2006 by ILRIComms

The worst drought in 22 years is ravaging Kenya and its neighbours, killing livestock and livestock livelihoods.

In what some are calling Kenya’s worst drought in 22 years, nomads are herding their livestock into areas normally off limits to cattle, sheep and goats, despite their great popularity in this country, where landless urban farmers, rural smallholders, and ministers of parliament alike keep ruminant animals. Desperate to save their animals and with no money to buy feed, pastoralists are illegally grazing their animals on the grasslands of some national parks and in the forests around Mt. Kenya, popular tourist destinations that generally deny access to livestock herders and their stock. At the same time, there are reports of elephants leaving their game sanctuaries to search for water and food near human settlements, destroying crops and killing at least two people.

In the cities, herdsmen are sleeping at night under trees with their animals. In the mornings, they lead their emaciated animals to wherever there is a bit of green: along roadsides, in the middle of roundabouts, at the entrance to the city’s racecourse, and even to the lawns of the presidential mansion, where herdsman appeared with about 60 cows on New Year’s Day. While presidential guards rebuffed the interlopers (who then walked their cattle further, to a park in the city centre), President Mwai Kibaki declared the crisis a national disaster, saying that food shortages would affect some 2.5 million Kenyans. Three weeks later, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IRCS) reported that the countries of the Horn were in the grip of a famine, with 11 million people facing serious food shortages due to drought and conflicts. Food shortages are particularly severe in Somalia, Djibouti, southeastern Ethiopia and eastern Kenya. Livestock deaths and crop failures, says the IRCS report, have led to famine, with about 40 human deaths reported.

The drought is the result of successive seasons of failed rains. These several seasonal failures have left pastoralists living in northern Kenya and other remote areas with few survival strategies left to cope with the crisis. It is imperative that they are supported in keeping their core livestock assets alive through the drought. (Selling the starving animals is not an option: cattle that fetched 20,000 Kenya shillings [US$280] normally are now being sold for less than a quarter of that.)

Drought is just one cause of Africa’s current food crisis. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations cites drought as the main problem in just 12 of the 27 African countries needing urgent food assistance today. A new report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which, like the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), is a Future Harvest Centre of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), outlines the other critical issues behind Africa’s current hunger. These include rural underinvestment, conflicts, AIDs, population growth and poor soils.

Click here to read the 31 January BBC article: Africa's hunger: A systemic crisis. For a copy of the report, visit IFPRI’s website: www.ifpri.org.

‘Healing wounds’ in the Horn of Africa

Posted on February 1, 2006 by ILRIComms

Two livestock projects show how research can help emergency agencies deliver more relief per dollar.

A cow killed by starvation in Ethiopia, a vast and poor cattle-keeping country in the drought-hammered Horn of AfricaResearch can benefit vulnerable communities facing natural disasters such as the current drought in Africa’s Horn. Research-based interventions like those provided by ILRI and other CGIAR Future Harvest Centres and partners help NGO, aid and emergency agencies deliver more relief per dollar.

Mitigating the effect of drought on livestock and their keepers in northern Kenya

The Horn of Africa is one of the poorest, driest, most conflict- and disaster-prone regions in the world. Livestock provide 25 percent of the region’s gross domestic product and up to 70 percent of household income. As drought intervals shorten and crop farmers plough up more and more former relatively wet rangelands, which were crucial dry-season grazing grounds for nomadic herders, the pastoralists are squeezed ever tighter. They lose their primes assets as animals die and every time they begin to recover it seems another drought or war strikes, knocking them another step down the poverty ladder.

In 2005, livestock scientists got together with a group of NGOs involved in emergency aid in northern Kenya to do something to keep those ‘living assets’ alive and productive.

ILRI scientists teamed up with two Italian NGOs—Cooperazione Internazionale, or COOPI, and Terra Nuova—as well as Vétérinaires Sans Frontières(VSF)-Belgium and VSF-Switzerland to run a Drought Response Program delivering essential animal health services to vulnerable pastoral communities across nine of Kenya’s most arid districts in the north. With the Department of Veterinary Services of the Government of Kenya, this Program in 2005 vaccinated over 2 million head of livestock (20 percent of the livestock population of the area), treated over 1 million animals and rehabilitated or constructed more than 35 water sources along livestock routes. The Program focused on sheep and goats, since small ruminants provide most of the cash and high-quality foods available to poor pastoralists.

‘We are targeting animal health because animals are the backbone of the pastoral economy,’ says COOPI’s Andrea Berloffa. ‘We want to do more than to intervene in a drought with food relief. We want to help people help themselves by supporting their traditional systems for overcoming drought and related emergencies.’ By reducing death and disease among their ruminant animals, the Program is helping pastoralists raise the productivity of their animal husbandry, and thus improve their livelihoods and nutritional status at the same time. The objective of the COOPI-VSF-ILRI Drought Response Program in northern Kenya is to keep the occurrence of infectious diseases among small ruminants under 20 percent.

This Program is funded by ECHO, the European Commission Directorate for Humanitarian Aid, the world’s largest source of humanitarian aid. ECHO has funded relief to millions of victims of natural and man-made disasters outside the European Union.

Belgian scientist Bruno Minjauw, who is the ILRI collaborator in this Program, strongly believes that researchers need to join hands with emergency as well as development workers if they want their products to speed benefits to people facing disasters. ‘We researchers want to be relevant!’ he says. ‘Too often research is totally separate from development and emergency work. Researchers have analytical tools that can improve drought relief’, he says. ‘ILRI, for example, has models for monitoring and evaluating emergency programs—and for reliably assessing their impacts. We have tools that are allowing COOPI to obtain the data they need quickly. For example, we provided high-resolution maps that this Program used to target its immunization campaign in northern Kenya.’

COOPI’s Berloffa agrees. ‘We need research centres to get reliable information on the impact of our projects. It’s easy to link development and research projects; what’s difficult is to link emergency and research programs because the window for action after an emergency is very short, while research is long-term by its nature.’

ILRI director general Carlos Seré says that the urgency of relief action often prohibits informed intervention. ‘Aid agencies are supposed to know, for example, where the most vulnerable pastoral communities in northern Kenya are located. However, there is no disaster so fortunate as to have at hand lots of pertinent information when it is needed. That’s where research institutions can help.’

For more information, contact ILRI scientist Bruno Minjauw at b.minjauw@cgiar.org or Francesca Tarsia of Cooperazione Internazionale (COOPI) at tarsia@coopi.org.

Building early warning systems to help pastoralists cope with disasters in the Horn of Africa
Another ILRI project is working with partners to develop ‘early warning systems’ to mitigate the effects of drought on pastoralists in northern Kenya and neighbouring countries.

Concerned that its relief aid in the Horn of Africa was fostering a culture of dependency rather than development, the United States Agency for International Development’s Office for Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA) asked researchers to help them find a better way. A network run by the Association for Strengthening Agricul¬tural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA), known as the ASARECA Animal Agriculture Research Network (A-AARNET), has worked with ILRI and staff at Texas A&M University working on a GL-CRSP LEWS project (Global Livestock-Collaborative Research Support Program on Livestock Early Warning Systems) to better understand how pastoralists in the Horn of Africa deal with drought on their own, and how their systems could be reinforced instead of being replaced by handouts.

Project staff first determined what are the traditional coping mechanisms already employed in pastoral systems in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia. Staff also undertook a compre¬hensive resource mapping initiative to develop a GIS-based Crisis Decision Support System. This system will provide timely and accurate information to enable policymakers and affected communities to reduce losses occasioned by drought.

By conducting socio-economic surveys of critical areas along the Ethiopia-Somali border and in Burundi, the team constructed a detailed picture of the situation as pastoralists see it. They learned how sales of livestock forced by drought can erase years of hard work, because large numbers of simultaneous sellers cause livestock prices to plunge. Many animals that had been donated to help rebuild herds were instead sold by herders to meet emergency food and income needs: farmers selling at any price just perpetuated the cycle of their poverty. Aid donors often bought animals for restocking within the same merchant channels, creating an illusion of restocking when actually the same animals were just being recycled, benefiting merchants the most.

Migrating herds and herders are plagued not only by shortages of water, pasture and fodder, but also by livestock diseases, to which exhausted and malnourished livestock easily fall prey. Diseases in a drought from 1995 to 1997 in Africa’s Horn, for example, killed an astonishing one-third to one-half of the all cattle of pastoral communities of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya.

The improved understanding of the nomad’s dilemma obtained in this research revealed a number of opportunities being missed. Early-warning systems could help herders prepare for droughts by enabling them to sell animals in a coordinated fashion rather than in distress sales. Improved health care could save many animals stressed by drought. Working together, pastoralists could manage their herds to avoid over-grazing. This research project uses a biophysical model to predict forage availability; the forage map is updated every 10 days and forage availability is predicted three months down the line. (Visit the Teas A&M website to see these maps.) Using satellite radio, project scientists are able to upload this early warning information onto World Space Radio, which disseminates the information to scientists and animal owners in remote areas. (Mobile phones will be used for the same in the near future.) For more helpful tips and advice, you can visit here at 명품 레플리카.

Click here for the ILRI publication Coping Mechanisms and Their Efficiency in Disaster-Prone Pastoral Systems of the Greater Horn of Africa: Effects of the 1995–97 Drought and the 1997–98 El Niño Rains and the Responses of Pastoralists and Livestock, a project report published in 2000 by ILRI, A-AARNET and GL-CRSP LEWS (Global Livestock-Collaborative Research Support Program Livestock Early Warning System). Or email the ILRI coordinator of A-AARNET, Dr Jean Ndikumana at j.ndikumana@cgiar.org.

The disaster-to-development transition

The two reports above illustrate how livestock research is aligning with emergency and development projects in the Horn of Africa. The reports are encouraging. In agriculture, as in life, prevention is better than cure. Studies show that for every dollar spent on disaster preparedness, between US$100 and $1000 are needed after the event. Part of being prepared for a disaster is the ability to diagnose the problems. ‘Medical doctors don’t operate, even in an emergency, without first diagnosing the problem and applying the best science they can’ says Dr Carlos Seré, director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). ‘Agricultural researchers need to team up with aid agencies to help guide relief aid so it does the most good.’

Around the world, from New Orleans to Mogadishu, the poor are the most vulnerable to disasters, whether natural or human-made. The poor in East Africa, for example, have no access to insurance to help them withstand otherwise catastrophic livestock losses in severe and long-lasting droughts. The rural poor are the most vulnerable, being located furthest from public services. ‘Reducing the vulnerability of the poor to disasters and conflicts should be approached through agriculture, because most of the poor are farmers’, says Dr Dennis Garrity, who directs ILRI’s sister centre in Nairobi, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF).

The ‘Healing Wounds’ initiative of the CGIAR
The statements above were made by a panel of experts that met in Nairobi last October to discuss whether and how to pair emergency aid with research. The experts were brought together by the Alliance of Future Harvest Centres, 15 non-profit institutions, including ILRI and ICRAF, supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The panelists focused on a report called Healing Wounds published earlier in 2005. This book analyses the impacts of twenty years of CGIAR and partner research to bridge relief and development work in 47 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

This Healing Wounds panel discussion, facilitated by popular Kenyan news moderator Wahome Muchiri, was convened by ILRI on behalf of the CGIAR on 13 October 2005. Initial presentations provided case studies of the role research has played in helping countries of the Horn of Africa rebuild their agricultural sectors after natural disasters and human conflicts. The discussion helped raise awareness among aid agencies, research and development organizations, the relief aid community and the general public about the ways in which research can contribute to disaster relief. Nairobi was chosen for this event because, as ILRI’s director general pointed out, Kenya is a ‘hot spot’ for CGIAR activities, with 13 of the 15 centres belonging to the CGIAR conducting work in the country and the East Africa region as a whole.

The panelists, in addition to the director generals of the two CGIAR centres ILRI and ICRAF, included Glenn Denning, Director of the Nairobi-based Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Centre of the UN Millennium Project, and Mark Winslow, an international development consultant and co-author of the Healing Wounds study.

Scientific experts gave evidence from the following research projects supporting the argument that research can magnify the benefits of emergency aid investments.

Building early warning systems to help pastoralists cope with disasters in the Horn of Africa. For further information, contact Nairobi-based ILRI coordinator of A-AARNET, Dr Jean Ndikumana: j.ndikumana@cgiar.org.
Mitigating drought effects on livestock in the nine most drought-afflicted districts of northern Kenya. For further information, contact in Nairobi ILRI’s Dr Bruno Minjauw: b.minjauw@cgiar.org or COOPI’s Francesca Tarsia: tarsia@coopi.org.
Enhancing pastoralism in Africa’s arid and drought-prone Horn, home to 25 million nomadic herders. To buy a copy of the following book published in late 2005, Where There Is No Development Agency: A Manual for Pastoralists and Their Promoters, contact the book’s author, Dr Chris Field: camellot@wananchi.com.
Alleviating hunger through vitamin A-enhanced sweet potato in conflict-ridden northern Uganda. For further information, contact Dr Regina Kapinga, a scientist from the International Potato Center (CIP), based in Uganda: r.kaping@cgiar.org.
Optimizing seed aid interventions to rebuild agriculture after disasters in Sudan, Uganda and Somalia. For further information, contact Dr Richard Jones, a scientist from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), based in Nairobi: r.jones@cgiar.org.

Livestock aid urgently needed for Niger families

Posted on August 2, 2005 by ILRIComms

Without livestock aid the crisis in Niger will worsen and more food and other aid will be needed. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) issued an urgent appeal today for livestock aid for more than 10,000 Niger families who have lost their animals. It is estimated that 3.5 million – more than a third of Niger’s population – are experiencing chronic food shortages. Food crops have been decimated by drought and locusts, and millions of livestock have perished. Many of the poorest and most vulnerable families are dependent on livestock for food and income. Milk is particularly important for children’s nutrition. Now the rains have come, pasture is available, but many of the animals have died and any remaining livestock are in very poor condition, with little milk being produced. FAO is appealing for livestock, livestock feed and veterinary services to help Niger people rebuild their lives and livelihoods. UN News Centre news article, 2 August 2005 - UN appeals for agricultural aid to prevent food crisis from worsening ILRI Photo Essay, 10 August 2005 - Niger: Behind the famine footage ILRI Top Story, 8 August 2005 'Niger: Emergency Assistance Is Not Enough'

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