Refugees and Asylum 31100

We are in the district of Kajiado in the south of Kenya, near the border with Tanzania, in the region called the Horn of Africa. The sky is clear blue with tones of azure that seem to enhance the cracked and barren ochre of the desolate and empty land between the villages. Here live almost half a million people, almost all of them Masai, almost all of them dependent on livestock. They are in the grip of drought - the worst Kenya has known in over forty years; it has not rained here for more than a year and a half, that is for two successive seasons. It is very, very dry.

Where these Masai normally expect to harvest 70,000 bags of maize to feed themselves and their cattle, this year's harvest was a mere 1,400 - just 2% of what is required. All the rivers in the region have dried up, as have most of the boreholes. Even deep underground streams are rapidly becoming exhausted. In this situation many of the animals have simply died, their skeletons picked clean by vultures until all that remains are a few bones bleached white by the sun.

Now the population themselves are suffering. The World Food Programme (WFP) reports that local families no longer have access to milk; meat and beans are also in short supply. As Masai farmers migrate away from their traditional homes and grazing areas to towns and cities in search of work so they may afford to feed their families, their centuries-old pastoral lifestyle, the fabric of Masai culture, becomes ever harder to maintain. And with the influx of Masai into towns, health workers fear that AIDS will spread ever deeper into these already enfeebled communities.

The effects of migration are visible at the local Elengata Waas primary school where, at the beginning of the year, 425 pupils were enrolled. That figure has now dropped to 301, of which only 72 are girls. The headmaster says that academic performances have deteriorated, as children are not eating enough at home. Many are only turning up at school because the WFP is running a free school meals programme there.

Although drought is no stranger to the Horn of Africa, the geographical extent and severity of the current drought is unprecedented in recent years. Altogether, 15 million people in 5 countries are in the ever-tightening grip of famine - a situation with which international agencies and humanitarian organisations are struggling to cope. Already poor and in dire need of development and with limited health and education facilities, these countries are the least able to cope with such natural disasters; moreover, the consequences are far-reaching. As famine enfeebles, the population has less resistance to disease. Famine disrupts education and economic activity as people put their primary energies into the struggle to stay alive. Investment is killed as families are forced to sell even their tools to buy food. The grip of poverty is reinforced.

For example, in 1989, the semi-arid rural development programme (SADREP) came up with a novel project to improve the hardiness and milk-yields of local goats. The traditional Masai goat was bred with a stronger, drought resistant, Galla variety. The new breed was sold to the Masai community at a subsidised rate. But, since the current drought began, Masai herdsman can no longer afford the new goat and SADREP has been forced to halt its breeding programme.

But, the Horn of Africa is by no means the only region suffering from drought and incipient famine. Across a wide expanse of south-eastern Asia from Armenia in the west to Pakistan in the east, the rains have failed to deliver their usual abundance.

After suffering through one of the hottest and driest summers in decades, Armenia faces the prospect of a bleak winter. A recent mission by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation and the WFP described the overall food supply situation as grim. This summer, rainfall has been some 70 percent below normal in Armenia's principal agricultural areas. As a result the potato harvest, the country's staple crop, is expected to be 40 percent less than last year while a 27 percent reduction is forecast in the cereal crop. This in a country without any natural surplus.

Agriculture employs 42 percent of the Armenian population. Arable land is very limited and many farmers cultivate areas on steep slopes that have become highly eroded. As it is, Armenians suffer from widespread poverty where living conditions are already precarious. Now life, particularly for rural farmers, has become exceedingly difficult. Much of their produce has been lost to drought, and they have little to sell or barter.

Armenia will need over half a million tonnes of imported wheat and barley in the coming year if famine is to be averted; a mere 70,000 tonnes has been pledged by the international community. The WFP mission concluded that, as in Kenya, the drought would face livestock producers with tremendous hardships. Indeed it seems that the sale and slaughtering of livestock has already begun.

Further to the east, beyond Pakistan, the enemy is not drought but flood. Large areas of India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam have had to endure a surfeit of rainfall as unwelcome as its diversion to other parts would be life-saving. Crops have been devastated, homes and infrastructure destroyed, disease spread, and the very earth itself washed into the sea leaving behind nothing but an infertile barrenness. This year's floods are thought to have destroyed a million tonnes of rice in Bangladesh alone.

As the world this week marked 'World Food Day,' many millions must have reflected how far from that goal we really are. World Drought Day seems, hideously, more appropriate.

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