The Evolution of Kenya’s Drought Management System - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 203

The events which lead from a shortage of rain to a famine are to a large degree predictable.
As a result, early warning of famine is feasible, allowing the administration to step in and
prevent the worst effects from materialising.
Key advances in the theory of famine which appeared in the early 1980s allowed
a more precise understanding of what happens and what could be done. In this
respect, Amartya Sen's Poverty and Famines , published in 1981 , was particularly
important. Sen drew attention to the fact that famines were often the result not so
much of an absence of food in itself, but an absence among certain, mainly poor,
people of the purchasing power to buy food that was available. In the cases analysed
by Sen, the vulnerable were mainly poor wage labourers whose ability to acquire
food depended on the availability of employment at reasonable wages. The same
argument can be made for pastoralists: their security against famine depends on the
relationship between the prices at which they can sell livestock and buy staple food
grains. Classically, a pastoral famine is the consequence of a collapse in livestock
prices coinciding with a peak in staple cereal prices.
Early observation in Turkana suggested another reversal of popular understand-
ing of famine. Health care professionals were unanimous that the main cause of
death during the 1980 famine was not starvation but epidemics of communicable
diseases, especially cholera and measles. Starvation made people more susceptible,
but it was not the main killer. This observation was confi rmed several years later by
Alex de Waal's important study of famine in Darfur, Sudan (de Waal 1989 ).
These observations suggested the elements of a district policy to control drought
and famine in Turkana. They included: encourage an orderly destocking of the
range in a drought to preserve herders' purchasing power and reduce livestock mor-
tality, maintain adequate cereal availability throughout the district, maintain a dis-
persed pattern of population distribution in order to avoid the public health dangers
of large relief camps, provide employment on public works in order to maintain
purchasing power, guarantee emergency care where necessary, build a physical and
administrative capacity to manage an early warning and rapid reaction system and
at the end of the crisis turn relief into rehabilitation as soon as possible.
An important component of the district plan was to create standby provisions to
manage the district plan when needed: these included a district drought manage-
ment committee, a drought contingency offi cer to run the system, preparation of a
drought manual to embody the accumulated experience of managing drought and a
drought contingency fund to be used at the District Commissioner's discretion to
activate the drought plan.
The early warning system (EWS) was designed to produce a set of interrelated
indicators of an impending crisis. The indicators were either those already gathered,
like rainfall, or those which could be reported on by district technical staff or by
herders themselves. The EWS was scored to designate a particular warning stage:
'normal', 'alert', 'alarm' and 'emergency'. Corresponding to each warning stage
was a set of pre-planned responses to prevent the expected drought-famine sequence
from developing or to mitigate its effects. It was intended that the responses should
be semi-automatic reactions to a particular warning stage, without waiting for fur-
ther authorisation. In this way it was hoped that bureaucratic inertia would work in
favour of rapid reaction.