As climate cooks Kenya, camels are the new cows
As persistent drought shatters livelihoods of many people, funding from government helping to drive shift in traditional agriculture
The camels had thump-thumped for seven days across northern Kenya, ushered by police reservists, winding at last toward their destination: less a village than a dusty clearing in the scrub, a place where something big was happening. People had walked for miles to be there. Soon the governor pulled up in his SUV. Women danced, and an emcee raised his hands to the sky. When the crowd gathered around an enclosure holding the camels, one man said he was looking at “the future.”
The camels had arrived to replace the cows. Samburu County’s governor says the climate patterns have become “abnormal.” The reduction in rainfall is so obvious, he said, that anybody can see it. “You don’t need science machines here to measure that.”
Cows, here and across much of Africa, have been the most important animal for eons — the foundation of economies, diets, traditions.
But now grazing land is shrinking. Water sources are drying up. A three-year drought in the Horn of Africa that ended last year killed 80% of the cows in this part of Kenya and shattered the livelihoods of so many people.
In this region with the thinnest of margins, millions are being forced to adapt to climate change — including those who were now drawing numbers from a hat, each corresponding to one of the 77 camels that had just arrived in Samburu County.
“Your number?” a village chief, James Lelemusi, asked the first person to draw.
The regional government had purchased the camels from traders near the border with Somalia, at $600 per head. So far, 4,000 camels have been distributed across the lowlands of the county as part of that program, speeding up a shift that had already been happening for decades across several other cattle-dependent parts of Africa. A handful of communities, particularly in Kenya and Ethiopia, are in various stages of the transition, according to academic studies.
The global camel population has doubled over the last 20 years, something the U.N. agency for agriculture and investment attributes partly to the animal’s suitability amid climate change. In times of hardship, camels produce more milk than cows. Many cite an adage: The cow is the first animal to die in a drought; the camel is the last. “If there was no climate change, we would not even bother to buy these camels,” said Jonathan Lati Lelelit, the governor of Samburu, a county about 240 miles north of Nairobi. “We have so many other things to do with the little money we have. But we have no option.”
Authorities had selected the recipients, those crowding around the camels, on the condition that they use the animal for milk, not meat. They were also those judged by local officials to be the most in need. They had stories of near-total cattle losses, of walking miles to find water, of violent run-ins with a neighboring tribe as they strayed farther from their territory in search of grazing space for their faltering livestock.
Still, many said the plight of one person stood out: Dishon Leleina.
Leleina, 42, had been wealthy by the standards of this region before the drought. He had two wives and 10 kids, and had been surrounded by an abundance of cows for nearly as long as he could remember. He even sacrificed bulls — with a stab to the back of the head — on each of his wedding days.
But when one rainy season failed, then another, then another, his stock of 150 cows plummeted over several years as never before. A few dozen were raided by the bordering Pokot tribe. And more than a hundred withered away — going skinny in the midsection, swelling in other areas. Some would go to sleep at night and never wake up. Some would arrive at last at a water source, drink lustily and collapse to their death. Several times, including after losing his best milking cow, Leleina roared at the sky in fury. By the time the rains resumed last year, he had seven cows left.
“I had one status” before the drought, he said. “And now I have another.”