Lake Chad Basin ecological crisis fuels famine
CRITICAL investments in agriculture and climate change relief are needed to address the crisis in Africa’s strife-torn Lake Chad Basin, where hunger, poverty and a lack of rural development prevail, the UN food security agency says.
“This is not only a humanitarian crisis, but it is also an ecological one,” said José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, on Tuesday.
He underscored that the crisis was rooted in decades of neglect, lack of rural development and the impact of climate change, and the only way to ensure a lasting solution was to address these including through investments in sustainable agriculture.
“This conflict cannot be solved only with arms.
“This is a war against hunger and poverty in the rural areas of the Lake Chad Basin,” stressed the FAO director-general.
The crisis is part of an arc of hunger and violence threatening 20 million people as it stretches across Africa into the Middle East.
It extends from Nigeria in the west, where Boko Haram’s six-year jihadist insurgency has forced two million people to flee their homes, to Yemen in the east, where warring factions block aid while children starve.
Between them lie Somalia’s parched sands and the swamps of oil-rich South Sudan, where starving families fleeing three years of civil war survive on water-lily roots.
Parts of South Sudan are already suffering famine, the first in six years.
Peace was a prerequisite to resolve the crisis in the region, but it was not enough, Graziano da Silva said.
“Agriculture, including livestock and fisheries, can no longer be an afterthought. It is what produces food and what sustains the livelihoods of about 90% of the region’s population.”
About seven million people risk suffering from severe hunger in the Lake Chad Basin, which incorporates parts of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and north-eastern Nigeria. In the latter, about 50 000 people are facing famine.
While fighting and violence had caused much of the suffering, the impact of environmental degradation and climate change – including repeated droughts – was exacerbating the situation, said the FAO director-general.
He noted that since 1963, Lake Chad had lost about 90% of its water mass with devastating consequences on food security and the livelihoods of people depending on fishing and irrigation-based agricultural activities.
Furthermore, while Lake Chad had been shrinking, the population had been growing.
FAO and its partners, including other UN agencies, are calling on the international community for urgent support – a combination of immediate food assistance and food production support – to assuage hunger in the region.
Graziano da Silva reiterated that should farmers miss the coming May/June planting season, no substantial harvests would be seen until 2018, leading to more widespread, severe hunger and prolonged dependency on external assistance.