Drought in Central Africa 2002-2009
Source: NASA Earth Observatory
A posting or two back I made some comments about a fantasy of economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa delivered by a speaker from the Mercatus Centre at George Mason University. In her presentation she utterly ignored the immense environmental issues which must be faced if the region is to enjoy even modest rates of economic growth over more than a year or two. Those environmental challenges combine with demographic problems and political instability to make extremely modest projections of future economic expansion for many of the countries in the region little more than wishful thinking. While there are several environmental issues of concern, and all of them are immense impediments to economic growth, at the moment, and likely for the foreseeable future, drought, the absence of adequate water to support rain fed agriculture, is the most significant one.
Drought in central Africa, during the period shown on the map above extending even into normally very humid areas, is the key problem for agriculture on the continent. Raising the currently abysmally low levels of food and fiber output per unit of land (or of labor) requires reliable water sources. In most areas that means adequate rainfall given the absence of irrigation infrastructure. Recent climatic data, reflecting ongoing climate change, raise substantial doubt that adequate water will be reliably available even in some areas where adequate precipitation was once taken for granted. Shy of huge investments in irrigation facilities farmers will either have to shift to drought resistant crops and new cultivation techniques, usually lowering output per hectare, or face catastrophic decline in output using current crops and techniques.
Drought is also important for burgeoning urban populations. Not a few of those people driven into cities, thereby generating breathtaking rates of urban population growth in some Sub-Saharan countries, have left impoverished agricultural zones where drought has made crop and animal production and therefore subsistence rural living impossible. A number of African cities do not have reliable water supplies adequate even for their present populations, and any population growth means even less water available per capita without large investments to increase urban water supplies. If there is no reliable source of water near a city, then it is nearly impossible to bring adequate quantities of water into it at a feasible investment of resources.
I do not have the time between now and the end of the term further to investigate the dimensions of the problems of drought in Africa, so the topic will be mentioned but not discussed in detail in our course. Anyone who has a serious interest in the continent and its prospects for the future must invest time assessing the impact of drought. That assessment needs to include the immediate term future, for drought in Kenya and adjacent areas has been linked by some observers to the political problems currently brewing there and may also have links to political unrest elsewhere. Anyone who fails to make such an assessment is thoroughly unqualified to consider him or herself an "expert" on Sub-Saharan Africa or its prospects for the future. Hungry people are not easy to govern, and the food scarcity implicit in droughts is hardly conducive to economic growth!
