Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
difficulty in coping with drought conditions. Some
countries - such as Ethiopia in the 1980s - even go so
far as to ignore the plight of victims and deny to the
outside world that they are undergoing a major
calamity. The western world should not sit smug just
because our societies are developed to a higher techni-
cal level. Often, by delving into history, it becomes
evident that western countries have responded to
drought in exactly the same manner that some Third
World countries do today.
The national response to drought is well-documented
in the United States. In Chapter 2, it was pointed
out that there was a well-defined cyclicity to drought
occurrence on the Great Plains, synchronous with
the 18.6-year lunar cycle. Major droughts have
occurred in the 1890s, 1910s, 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s.
Most people have a vivid picture of the 1930s drought
with mass outward migration of destitute farmers from
a barren, windswept landscape. However, the 1930s
drought was not the worst to occur. Before the 1890s,
the Great Plains were opened up to cultivation on a
large scale. Settlement was encouraged via massive
advertising campaigns sponsored by governments
and private railway companies in the eastern cities
and abroad. During the 1890s drought, widespread
starvation and malnutrition occurred in the central and
southern High Plains. Similar conditions accompanied
the drought in the 1910s in the Dakotas and eastern
Montana. There was no disaster relief in the form of
food or money from the federal government. During
the 1890s drought, many state governments refused to
acknowledge either the drought, or the settlers' plight,
because government was trying to foster an image of
prosperity to attract more migrants. In both the 1890s
and 1910s, mass outward migration took place with
settlers simply abandoning their farms. In some
counties, the migration was total. Those that stayed
behind had to shoulder the burden individually or with
modest support from their own or neighboring states.
The similarity between responses to these two
droughts and to the 1980s Ethiopian one is striking.
The 1930s drought on the Great Plains is notable
simply because the government began to respond to
drought conditions. Outward migration was not so
massive as some people think, but merely followed a
pattern that had been established in the preceding
years. Many over-capitalized farmers, as their finances
collapsed, simply liquidated or signed over their farms
to creditors. At a national level, the 1930s drought had
little impact. It received massive federal aid but this
was minor in comparison to the money being injected
into the depressed American economy. There were no
food shortages (in fact, there was a surplus of food
production), no rising costs and few cases of starvation
or malnutrition. For the first time, the government
assisted farmers so that by 1936, 89 per cent of farmers
in some counties were receiving federal funds. The aid
was not in the form of food, but cash. The government
undertook a number of programs to aid farmers'
staying on the land. Irrigation projects were financed,
government-sponsored crop insurance initiated, and a
Soil Conservation Service established. Programs were
designed to rescue farmers, re-establish agricultural
land, and mitigate the effect of future droughts.
The 1950s drought was very different. The
programs begun in the 1930s were accelerated. There
was a six-fold increase in irrigated land between the
1930s and the 1980s. The amount of land under crop
insurance increased, while marginal land was tucked
away under the Soil Bank program. In the 1950s, few
farms were abandoned: they were sold off to neighbors
to form larger economies of scale. People selling their
properties retired into adjacent towns. Government
aid poured into the region, but at a lesser scale than
in the previous drought. Again, there was little
effect upon the national economy. The government
responded by initiating more technical programs.
Irrigation and river basin projects were started, and
weather prediction, control and modification programs
researched and carried out. The Great Plains
Conservation Program established mechanisms for
recharging groundwater, increasing runoff, minimizing
evaporation, desalinizing soil, and minimizing leakage
from irrigation canals. Since the 1950s, these programs
have increased in complexity, to the point that drought
now has little impact on the regional or national
economies.
It would appear that, in the United States, the effect
of drought on the Great Plains has been dramatically
reduced to a level unachievable at present in most
African countries. The evolution of drought-reduction
strategies indicates an increasing commitment to
greater social organization and technological sophisti-
cation. Hence, the local and regional impacts of
recurrent droughts have diminished over time;
however, the potential for catastrophe from rarer
events may have increased. The latter effect is due to
the reliance placed on technology to mitigate the
