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Kenya's Maasai Drive Starving Herds into Nairobi    [

    Africa Grapples with Multiple Food Crises
    By Ed Stoddard and David Mageria
    Reuters

    Tuesday 17 January 2006

    Johannesburg/Nairobi - East Africa is gripped in drought while the south is blessed with rain.

    But as aid agencies scramble to feed millions across the world's poorest continent it is by no means clear what the 2006 harvests will bring, even in areas that have been wet.

    Good rains have been reported so far this season over much of Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

    But with around 12 million people in the region in need of food aid until the April harvest, aid workers warily recall that drought only started searing the region at this time last year.

    "It's too early to tell if there will be any impact from these rains on the 2006 crop in southern Africa," said Mike Huggins, a spokesman for the World Food Programme.

    "Last year in countries like Malawi the drought struck in the later half of January and February so everything that had grown up to that point shriveled," he said.

    Other sources report that pests such as army worms are devouring crops in Zimbabwe and Malawi, though the problem does not appear widespread at this stage.

    "Of an estimated 1 million hectares of maize planted in Malawi it looks like army worms have affected about 20,000 hectares," said one aid worker.

    Regional breadbasket South Africa has seen good rain over much of its maize belt this month though for some farmers they may be too late after a relatively dry start to the season.

    WFP has indicated that it plans to source about $80 million in food supplies, mostly maize, from South Africa this year.

    Farmers are expected to have planted 1.61 million hectares of maize when the Crop Estimates Committee releases its preliminary estimate on Thursday, according to a Reuters consensus forecast of eight banks and trading houses.

    This is far less than the 2.93 million hectares sown last year but more than enough for local needs if last year's carryover of an estimated 2.6 million tonnes of white maize is factored in.

    ... While East Bakes

    Southern Africa can be grateful for its rainfall as crops and grazing lands elsewhere wilt under a harsh sun.

    The east African countries of Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tanzania and Burundi face a worsening drought in what aid agencies say could be "a humanitarian catastrophe." The WFP says 5.4 million people need food aid there.

    Analysts said the drought had not badly affected cash crops in the region but warned that if rains continue to fail, production for coffee and tea could be hurt.

    Worryingly, droughts could become more common because of climate change linked to global warming.

    "Temperatures globally are rising and drought cycles are more frequent," Prof Levi Akundabweni, dean of the faculty of agriculture at the University of Nairobi, told Reuters.

    "The environment is challenging us to devise coping mechanisms, to learn more so as to be able to understand the enormity of the problem."

    The impact has been worst in Kenya, east Africa's biggest economy, where dozens of people and livestock have died while malnutrition has worsened among pastoral communities.

    "The emergency we face in the Horn of Africa today is the result of successive seasons of failed rains," said Holdbrook Arthur, WFP Regional Director for Eastern and Central Africa.

    "Consequently, pastoralists living in these arid, remote lands have very few survival strategies left and desperately require our assistance until the next rains," he said.

    Anarchic Somalia is headed for the worst cereal harvest in a decade, according to the WFP.

    Ethiopia, which pulled the world's heart strings during an appalling famine two decades ago, has 1.75 million people in need of emergency food aid, adding to 5.5 million already getting food shipments.

    And in West Africa, WFP said on Monday it needed $240 million to feed at least 10 million people this year.

    Several countries in West Africa suffered shortages last year after crops were ravaged by drought and locusts. In Niger, the worst affected, aid groups scrambled to tackle a food crisis affecting more than 3 million people.

    But Mother Nature is not the only source of Africa's woes.

    A raging AIDS pandemic, soil erosion from poor farming practices and conflict have all conspired to create hunger on a continent which is covered in many areas with a rich soil.

    Africa has also missed out on much of the "Green Revolution", a global effort to boost staple crop yields which has focused on wheat, rice and maize. Only the latter is widely grown in Africa but it is not very resistant to drought.

    And American economist Jeffrey Sachs pointed out that while Africa has its fertile regions, much of the continent has erratic rainfall and few large rivers for irrigation.

 

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    Kenya's Maasai Drive Starving Herds into Nairobi
    By Andrew Cawthorne
    Reuters

    Monday 16 January 2006

    Nairobi - Desperate Maasai herdsmen are driving starving cattle into Nairobi to escape drought and feed off the better-watered pastures and leafy neighbourhoods of the Kenyan capital.

    Illustrating the extreme measures being taken across Kenya - where several dozen people and thousands of livestock have died from hunger and thirst - the red-robed, stick-wielding Maasai are walking huge distances to Nairobi with their cattle.

    Once there, they take the emaciated animals wherever they see grass: including roadsides, roundabouts, a racecourse and even the lawns of the presidential mansion.

    "At home, we have no pasture, no water. Here we have grass, our cows can live," Maasai herdsman Simon Mateu, 21, said as he tended to his 69 cattle in the upmarket suburb of Karen, home to many in Kenya's rich white settler community.

    Mateu said he spent three days and nights walking into Nairobi from the town of Kiserian, to the south, after he lost 17 cattle to the drought. Now he lives in a makeshift tent next to his animals on the edge of Nairobi Racecourse.

    "There are about 600 of us here in a similar situation. What else can we do?" he said in Swahili.

    Kenya's best-known tribe believes its god gave them all the cattle on earth and they can graze anywhere: a recipe for conflict with former British colonialists and subsequent generations of Kenyan landowners.

    Dependent on cattle alone for centuries, the roaming Maasai people - the poster boys of Kenya's tourism authorities - often live on just milk and fresh blood.

    No Access: President's Lawn

    Sympathetic Kenyan authorities are taking a lenient attitude to the Maasai coming to Nairobi as the east African nation suffers from its worst drought in years. But they are drawing the line at certain hallowed turfs.

    Herders from the bone-dry plains of Kajiado, south of Nairobi towards the border with Tanzania, were turned away from President Mwai Kibaki's lawns on New Year's Day.

    The livestock chewed instead on the grass, flowers and hedges of the nearby leafy neighbourhoods of Kileleshwa and Kilimani, the Maasai said.

    Guards at the racecourse were seen moving the Maasai beyond their perimeter fences at the weekend, but in a friendly way.

    "We understand their problems. It's terrible for them and there is a lot of grass here," said guard Patrick Mudanya, supervising the exit of one herd. "But this is a jockey club run by a private company. They have to leave these premises."

    The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) is worried the Maasai may encroach on the vast Nairobi National Park as has been happening during the drought with other wildlife parks.

    "They are just looking for anything green. It's understandable," KWS spokeswoman Connie Maina said.

    "But we do patrols, so it would be hard for them to get into the park unless they go into areas where we can't see them."

    Another herdsman, David Masiaini, 40, said he had lost 100 cows at home in Kajiado so had brought the remaining 100 to Nairobi, where he was sleeping by night with them under trees.

    Masiaini, who is trying to support three wives and eight children, said cattle that fetched 20,000 Kenya shillings ($280) normally were now being sold for less than a quarter of that.

    "They're in poor health and everybody's selling, so the price is cheap. Of course it hurts me," he said, rounding up his cattle in a thicket in the Karen neighbourhood of Nairobi.