Monitoring Agricultural Drought in the Near East - Monitoring and Predicting Agricultural Drought: A Global Study - page 219

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which has a legal status, a mandate, and its own core staff. Given the
multi-institutional and multidisciplinary nature of drought management,
the free flow of information is of critical importance. For this reason the
CDMU would be most effective if housed in a coordinating ministry, such
as a prime minister's or president's office, or a planning ministry, rather
than a line ministry. This way it would have access to the multidisciplinary
manpower and information sources in other ministries.
The international experience also indicates that countries can have ex-
cellent policies that are not implemented because there is no strategy or
government mechanism to translate them into concrete action plans. Ma-
jor responsibilities of the CDMU would be to develop or update policy to
facilitate drought mitigation and ensure a linkage between drought policy
and drought management strategies.
Under the general supervision of the CDMU, but not necessarily in the
same ministry, a drought early warning unit needs to be established with
a more technical character. This unit would compile and interpret all data
required to monitor drought extent and impact and report through regular
or special bulletins to the CDMU. The experience of international food
security information systems, such as the Global Information and Early
Warning System (GIEWS) or the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS;
chapter 19), although not fully transferable in a drought and different
economic context, may be useful to develop the specifications for national
drought early warning systems in North Africa and West Asia.

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Drought Research Needs

Fe asibility of Drought Prediction

Weather patterns in many parts of the world appear to be related to dif-
ferent phases of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO; chapter 3) cy-
cle. The existence of such linkages is now being used in operational early
warning systems, such as FEWS, to forecast rainfall patterns for the com-
ing cropping season. The basis for forecasting is that a particularly strong
linkage exists between the warm-ocean phase of the ENSO and drought
in southern Africa. Such correlations have proved useful in tropical areas,
and it may soon be possible to predict, for Southern and Eastern Africa,
certain climatic conditions associated with ENSO events more than a year
in advance.
In the North Africa and West Asia, no significant relationships have been
confirmed between droughts and ENSO events. This is probably because
the effect of this global ocean-weather linkage is substantially modified by
more localized weather phenomena, such as the NAO, but also by very
site-specific factors, in particular the topography and the nearness of large
desert landmasses in the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula. Nevertheless,
according to Ward et al. (1999), sufficient evidence exists to suggest an