British Prime Minister Tony Blair has declared that the two issues at the centre of the G8 Summit this July will be African poverty and global climate change. These may seem to be distinct issues. In fact, they are linked. A trip I took to a village in the Tigre region in northern Ethiopia shows why.
One morning I was taken to a dry riverbed at the village edge. Farmers were digging a pit, down to the water table about 2m below ground level. They explained that until recently this was a perennial river — one that flows throughout the year — but now it stops flowing during the dry season. Only when the annual rains begin in the summer does water reappear. Until then, communities dig for water.
In northern Ethiopia, as in much of Africa, the rain cycle has changed markedly in recent years. Ethiopian village life has long depended on two crops — one during a short rain in March and April, and another during the long rain in the summer months. In recent years the short rains have failed entirely, and the long rains have been erratic. Hunger is omnipresent. Perhaps half the children are severely underweight.
Much of arid sub-Saharan Africa, notably in the Sahel (just south of the Sahara desert), has experienced a pronounced drop in rainfall over the past 25 years. This decline coincided with a rise in the surface temperature of the neighbouring Indian Ocean, a hint that it is part of the longer-term process of man-made global warming.
Failures of rainfall contribute not only to famines and chronic hunger, but also to the onset of violence when people clash over scarce food and water. When violence erupts in water-starved regions such as Darfur, Sudan, leaders tend to view the problems in narrow political terms. If they act at all, they mobilise peacekeepers, international sanctions and humanitarian aid. But Darfur, like Tigre, needs a development strategy to fight hunger and drought even more than it needs peacekeepers. Soldiers cannot keep peace among hungry people.
One course of action must be to help impoverished African regions “adapt” to climate change and escape the poverty trap. Water-stressed regions such as Ethiopia and Sudan can adapt through improved technologies such as “drip irrigation”, rainwater harvesting, improved water-storage facilities, deep wells and agro-forestry techniques that make best use of scarce rainfall. Better land-management practices (the replanting of degraded forests, for example) can recharge underground water aquifers.
The world must also reduce future risks to the planet by cutting back on emissions of greenhouse gases. If it fails to mitigate future climate change, the effects of rising temperatures, increasing droughts, more numerous and severe tropical storms, rising sea levels and a spread of tropical diseases will pose huge threats to the planet. The famine in Ethiopia and the violence in Darfur suggest what can lie ahead.
The effort to reduce greenhouse gases will require decades of action, but we must start now. Rich countries need to lead the way. It is ironic that of these countries the United States, which portrays itself as a friend of democracy and impoverished countries, gives the smallest share of its gross national product in aid, and refuses to participate in global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Countries such as Ethiopia are making valiant efforts to overcome their problems, despite the lack of adequate help from the world’s richest countries.
Africans suffering from hunger and drought, and poor people everywhere, have a right to ask much more of the US and other rich countries. Blair is right to call on his rich-country colleagues to follow through on their promises. — Planet Syndicate
Jeffrey Sachs is professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University