Assessing Human Vulnerability to Climate Change from an Evolutionary Perspective - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 67

Box 4.1 Structure at the Root of Famine in the Sahel
A series of publications that examined the drought-induced famines of the
early 1970s in the Sahel, the semi-arid region along the southern border of the
Sahara desert, were at the centre of a shift in the way social scientists concep-
tualized natural disasters and vulnerability. A variety of social scientists -
including the historians Paul Lovejoy and Stephen Baier ( 1975 ), the political
scientist Michael Glantz ( 1977 ), the anthropologist and sociologist Jean
Copans ( 1979 ), the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen ( 1983 ) and the
geographers Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfi eld ( 1987 ) - began to question
the dominant view that the famines could be attributed to the so-called advance
of the Sahara syndrome in which irrational economic behaviour of the local
population led to overgrazing, deforestation and soil erosion.
These scholars painted a picture of a highly specialized traditional society
that, through co-evolution with the local ecosystem, had adapted extremely
rational behaviour to cope with the challenges posed by the local climate. A
symbiotic relationship existed between pastoralists and subsistence farmers.
Livestock would graze on the post-harvest remains of crops, and in turn fertil-
ize the fi elds. In the event of drought, which sometimes lasted several years,
nomadic pastoralists would migrate in search of greener pastures, and farmers
would secure food through a highly developed regional trade network between
the desert-edge and the savannah.
However, this system had been disrupted in recent years by structural
changes. Borders established during colonization, such as those between
northern Nigeria and Niger, combined with globalization and the introduction
of cash crops, had the effect of redirecting trade towards the coast and over-
seas. Global demand for cash crops drove up food prices, thereby depriving
drought-affl icted populations on the desert-edge from food surpluses that
existed elsewhere in the region. The political division of the region restricted
the movements of nomadic pastoralists, and the introduction of inorganic fer-
tilizer for commercial farming undermined the service that they had formerly
provided to the local agriculturalists.
In response to the drought, numerous development agencies supported
programmes to drill boreholes. While this technical solution increased water
availability for human and livestock consumption, the increased amount of
time that pastoralists spent near waterholes resulted in severe overgrazing
which destroyed the local rainfall-dependent vegetation and led to further
desertifi cation.
burning, erosion, overgrazing, overstocking, population growth, water resource
management, and the like must be looked at systemically” (Glantz 1977 ). In other
words, addressing vulnerability to natural hazards requires a holistic understanding
of the structural root causes.