By BBC News

An Ethiopian minister has denied reports that millions of people need urgent food aid after failed rains.

Disaster Prevention Minister Mikitu Kassa told the BBC that the government was helping those hit by the drought.

He was speaking after the US-funded Famine Early Warning System warned of increased hunger in parts of the country in the coming months.

Ethiopia has been extremely sensitive to images showing its people as starving since the famine of 1984-5.

Mr Mikitu said the report was "not evidence-based".

"It is baseless, it is contrary to the situation on the ground," he told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.

He admitted that 5.7 million people were currently getting food aid but argued that "in the Ethiopian context, there is no hunger, no famine" and that the situation was not as bad as in recent years.
"The government is taking action to mitigate the problems," he said.

The latest Famine Early Warning System (Fewsnet) projections show parts of the country in the extreme east, north-east and south-west as "extremely food insecure" - one level below that for a famine - in the period January-March 2010.

The worst affected areas are in the Somali, Gambella and Afar regions.

It says high food prices, poor livestock production and low agricultural wages will lead to increased hunger.

Its report comes after the failure of both rainy seasons in 2009.

Aid agency Oxfam recently warned that drought had hit parts of East Africa for the sixth year in a row.

Oxfam said Somalia's drought was the worst for 20 years, and November rainfall was less than 5% of normal in parts of Kenya and Ethiopia.

The UN has already said it is aiming to feed 20 million people in East Africa over the next six months.
Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/8436534.stm

2009/12/31

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Ethiopian Farms Lure Investor Funds as Workers Live in Poverty

By Jason McLure

Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Until last year, people in the Ethiopian settlement of Elliah earned a living by farming their land and fishing. Now, they are employees.

Dozens of women and children pack dirt into bags for palm seedlings along the banks of the Baro River, seedlings whose oil will be exported to India and China. They work for Bangalore- based Karuturi Global Ltd., which is leasing 300,000 hectares (741,000 acres) of local land, an area larger than Luxembourg.
The jobs pay less than the World Bank’s $1.25-per-day poverty threshold, even as the project has the potential to enrich international investors with annual earnings that the company expects to exceed $100 million by 2013.

“My business is the third wave of outsourcing,” Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, the 44-year-old managing director of Karuturi Global, said at the company’s dusty office in the western town of Gambella. “Everyone is investing in China for manufacturing; everyone is investing in India for services. Everybody needs to invest in Africa for food.”

Companies and governments are buying or leasing African land after cereals prices almost tripled in the three years ended April 2008. Ghana, Madagascar, Mali and Ethiopia alone have approved 1.4 million hectares of land allocations to foreign investors since 2004, according to the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.

Emergent Asset Management Ltd.’s African Agricultural Land Fund opened last year. On Nov. 23, Moscow-based Pharos Financial Advisors Ltd. and Dubai-based Miro Asset Management Ltd. announced the creation of a $350 million private equity fund to invest in agriculture in developing countries.
‘Last Frontier’

“African agricultural land is cheap relative to similar land elsewhere; it is probably the last frontier,” said Paul Christie, marketing director at Emergent Asset Management in London. The hedge fund manager has farm holdings in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

“I am amazed it has taken this long for people to realize the opportunities of investing in African agriculture,” Christie said.

Monsoon Capital of Bethesda, Maryland, and Boston-based Sandstone Capital are among the shareholders of Karuturi Global, Karuturi said. The company is also the world’s largest producer of roses, with flower farms in India, Kenya and Ethiopia.

One advantage to starting a plantation 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the border with war-torn Southern Sudan and a four- day drive to the nearest port: The land is free. Under the agreement with Ethiopia’s government, Karuturi pays no rent for the land for the first six years. After that, it will pay 15 birr (U.S. $1.18) per hectare per year for the next 84 years.

More Elsewhere

Land of similar quality in Malaysia and Indonesia would cost about $350 per hectare per year, and tracts of that size aren’t available in Karuturi Global’s native India, Karuturi said.

Labor costs of less than $50 a month per worker and duty- free treaties with China and India also attracted Karuturi Global, he said. The $100 million projected annual profit will come from the export of food crops, including corn, rice and palm oil, he said. The company also is plowing land on a 10,900- hectare spread near the central Ethiopian town of Bako.

The project will give the government revenue from corporate income taxes and from future leases, as well as from job creation, said Omod Obang Olom, president of Ethiopia’s Gambella region and an ally of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling party.

“This strategy will build up capitalism,” he said in an interview in Gambella. “The message I want to convey is there is room for any investor. We have very fertile land, there is good labor here, we can support them.” The government plans to allot 3 million hectares, or about 4 percent of its arable land, to foreign investors over the next three years.

Surprised Workers

Workers in Elliah say they weren’t consulted on the deal to lease land around the village, and that not much of the money is trickling down.

At a Karuturi site 20 kilometers from Elliah, more than a dozen tractors clear newly burned savannah for a corn crop to be planted in June. Omeud Obank, 50, guards the site 24 hours a day, six days a week. The job helps support his family of 10 on a salary of 600 birr per month, more than the 450 birr he earned monthly as a soldier in the Ethiopian army.

Obank said it isn’t enough to adequately feed and clothe his family.

“These Indians do not have any humanity,” he said, speaking of his employers. “Just because we are poor it doesn’t make us less human.”

One Meal

Obang Moe, a 13-year-old who earns 10 birr per day working part-time in a nursery with 105,000 palm seedlings, calls her work “a tough job.” While the cash income supplements her family’s income from their corn plot, she said that many days they still only have enough food for one meal.

The fact that the project is based on a wage level below the World Bank’s poverty limit is “quite remarkable,” said Lorenzo Cotula, a researcher with the London-based IIED.

Large-scale export-oriented plantations may keep farmers from accessing productive resources in countries such as Ethiopia, where 13.7 million people depend on foreign food aid, according to a June report by Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food. It called for ensuring that revenue from land contracts be “sufficient to procure food in volumes equivalent to those which are produced for exports.”

Karuturi said his company pays its workers at least Ethiopia’s minimum wage of 8 birr, and abides by Ethiopia’s labor and environmental laws.

‘Easily Exploitable’

“We have to be very, very cognizant of the fact that we are dealing with people who are easily exploitable,” he said, adding that the company will create up to 20,000 jobs and has plans to build a hospital, a cinema, a school and a day-care center in the settlement. “We’re going to have a very healthy township that we will build. We are creating jobs where there were none.” The project may help cover part of the $44 billion a year that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says must be invested in agriculture in poor nations to halve the number of the world’s hungry people by 2015.

“We keep saying the big problem is, you need investment in African agriculture; well here are a load of guys who for whatever reason want to invest,” David Hallam, deputy director of the FAO’s trade and markets division, said in an interview in Rome. “So the question is, is it possible to sort of steer it toward forms of investment that are going to be beneficial?”

Buntin Buli, a 21-year-old supervisor at the nursery who earns 600 birr a month, said he hopes Karuturi will use some of its earnings to improve working conditions and provide housing and food. “Otherwise we would have been better off working on our own lands,” he said. “This is a society that has been very primitive. We want development.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via the Johannesburg bureau at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Last Updated: December 30, 2009

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&sid=aeuJT_pSE68c

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World leaders are taking notice of land in Debre Zeit

The former president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, has purchased 20,000sqm of land in Oromia to invest in the Hotel and Tourism sector. He’s not the only one: the President of Djibouti and Sheik Mohamed Al Amoudi have also recently secured large plots of land there for investment.

Oromia Regional State has granted 20,000 square meters of land to the former president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, who is now proceeding to invest in the hotel and tourism sector.

The region has granted him possession of the land, located in Ada Woreda near Debre Zeit town 50 kilometers East of Addis Ababa.

“We already granted the land a few months ago and the former president is now preparing to enter the business,” Debre Zeit town investment head told Capital.

The Oromia region has named Debre Zeit as one of its horticulture investment sites. Currently there are over five investors involved in flower farming in the town.

Lately however, the region’s focus is shifting from horticulture to a tourist destination.

The town administration has already approved last year’s master plan, which encouraged people to invest in tourism and real estate. There are eight lakes in the town that are not properly utilized. It is only recently that tourism became more of a focus. Some three years ago, Kuriftu, a modern resort center was established attracting others in the area.

Sheik Mohamed Al Amoudi, the Ethio-Saudi billionaire is also developing a modern resort on Hora Lake.

Obasanjo’s recent interest correlates with the town’s tourism potential, the head of the investment bureau said.

Nigeria’s former president is not the only foreigner who acquired land in Ethiopia. Last year the president of Djibouti, Ismael Omar Guelleh, also obtained 10,000 square meters of lakeside land in Debre Zeit to build a holiday home.

President Guelleh has also acquired a 3,000 hectare farm in Bale, a suitable agricultural zone of Oromia region located some 400 kilometers south of Addis Ababa. The Djibouti government bought the land with the intention of producing food for the country.

http://capitalethiopia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12046:global-village&catid=12:local-news&Itemid=4

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Midroc Gold may generate over half a billion dollars

Midroc Gold, one of Sheik Mohammed Hussein Ali Al-Amoudi's many investments in Ethiopia, has announced that it hopes to generate 564 million dollars from the new gold mine.

The Sakaro Mine, located in Oromia Regional State, is the second gold mine operated by Midroc Gold, which started operation back in 1998 after acquiring Legedembi open gold mine pit and its processing plant through a privatisation deal at a cost of 172 million dollars.

Since then it has been intensively searching for more accessible gold deposits, according to Arega Yirdaw (PhD), general manager of the company.

The Sakaro Mine exploration and feasibility studies undertaken since 2004 have revealed 20.4 tonnes of gold. At a price of 1000 dollars per ounce, the mine will generate 564 million birr dollars revenues and 189 million birr net profit.

The revenues are also expected to generate a total of 130 million birr in tax and royalty payments to the national treasury and an increase in the workforce of about 10 percent from the current 1, 400 employees until 2021.

After signing a deal with Dr. Arega that authorises the company's production of gold it has mined, Alemayehu Tegenu, the Minister of Mines and Energy (MoME) last Tuesday at Sheraton Addis said the revenues from the mine sector, particularly from gold exports, has been growing and he expects Midroc to further boost them.

According to the minister, last year the nation pocketed 105 million birr from gold exports and in the first quarter of this year it received 50 million dollars. The budget year's overall performance is projected to be around 150 million birr, nearly a 50 percent increase from the previous year.

According to official estimations, the nation is endowed with 500 tonnes of gold reserves. Including two firms that recently announced the discovery of 40 tonnes of gold, estimated to be worth 1.7 billion dollars, 44 companies have been searching for the reserves, but so far only Midroc Gold is actually producing.
"It is not due to the lack of incentive or lack of exploration, the challenge has been to go to actual production after the exploration," Alemayehu said last Tuesday, emphasising that that the use of traditional methods of gold production have been a factor.

According to the minister, four to 10 kilos of gold is being bought by the national bank every day from the traditional producers and is being exported oversees to earn increasing revenues. He added that more corporate mines are expected to be launched shortly.

"It is because others are not coming," Dr. Arega of Midroc Gold said, "both local and foreign companies were not coming. When

we first started working we had 34 foreign nationals and now we only have just two, so we are making the investment Ethiopiansed while pioneering the investment."

 Midroc Gold during the first ten years of its operation produced 34,000 kg of gold and 10, 000 kg of silver and earned 466 million dollars in revenues.

With global prices for gold shooting up to over 1,113 dollars per ounce this week, the new gold mine, which stretches over 9.7 square kilometres, could well generate even larger sales for the sole corporation in the sector.

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Dutch Minister: Ethiopia scoring encouraging results in agriculture

Agriculture Minister of the Netherlands, Gerda Verburg said Ethiopia is registering encouraging results in agriculture development sector.

State Minister of Ethiopian Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Abera Deressa held talks with the Dutch Minister on Wednesday.

Dr. Abera on the occasion said the government of the Netherlands has been providing various assistances aiming at developing the agriculture sector in Ethiopia.

He said the government of the Netherlands has particularly been contributing a lot towards the development of the horticulture sector.

Several Dutch investors are engaged in the horticulture sector in Ethiopia, according to the minister.

Speaking on her part, the Dutch minister said the activities being executed in agriculture and other development sectors in Ethiopia are bearing fruits.

She expressed her government’s commitment to further strengthen the support it has been providing to the country in the agriculture sector.

The Dutch delegation visited the horticulture farms on the same day. (Press Release)

http://capitalethiopia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11601:dutch-minister-ethiopia-scoring-encouraging-results-in-agriculture&catid=11:news-in-brief&Itemid=3

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Opposition MPs oppose latest loan from China

Unusually for a loan deal, which normally receive unanimous backing, the latest Ethio-China loan agreement was not supported by a handful of members of parliament.

Presented before the House of Peoples' Representatives last Thursday for final endorsement, the Chinese Export and Import Bank (EXIM) agreed to provide the Ethiopian Government with 349 million US dollars and the two parties officially inked the deal earlier this month.

Taking a short period to reach parliament after it was approved by the cabinet, the fund secured from the bank will be spent on executing the Ethiopian Road Authority's plan to build an expressway between Addis Ababa and Nazareth.

Rejecting the bill, Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement chair Bulcha Demeksa said the loan deal needs to be scrapped.

Bulcha added that he considered the loan as a costly one and only favoured by the government because of the lack of transparency and conditions involved in dealing with the Chinese.

Government Whip Wondimu Gezahegn had tabled a motion for the agreement to be endorsed directly without a need for it to be sent to parliament standing committees for scrutiny; a normal procedure for approving loans unless a motion to endorse it quickly is not presented.

However, Bulcha said that in this instance the government was rushing the deal in order to showcase the start of the road project in an effort to sway voters before next May's general election.

The Addis Ababa Adama Toll Motorway Design and Build Project total cost is 612 million dollars, 57 percent of which will be covered by the loan with the balance to be generated from the treasury.

The planned road will be able to accommodate six vehicles at once and will have numerous feeder roads, which are said to ease congestion and reduce accidents.

The whip explained that the road, which is part of the crucial trading route to Djibouti, includes a toll system, and so the loan should be welcomed and authorised as efficiently as possible.

Twelve opposition MPs, spearheaded by Bulcha, voted against the loan agreement, while another 14 abstained. However, the ruling party's overwhelming majority resulted in 270 votes for the bill.

http://capitalethiopia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11854:opposition-mps-oppose-latest-loan-from-china&catid=12:local-news&Itemid=4

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ENVIRONMENT: Invasion of the Little Green Molecules

Elizabeth Grossman* - IPS/IFEJ

PORTLAND, Oregon, Dec 31 (IPS) - While the world's climate negotiators were getting ready for Copenhagen earlier this month, a meeting was taking place in Mumbai to discuss progress in green chemistry, a field that – like the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions – has the potential to greatly enhance the world's environmental health and sustainability.

In the developing countries where so much of the world's manufacturing occurs and which are home to much of the world's worst industrial pollution, a move to green chemistry has the potential to improve working conditions as well as health and safety for communities where industry is located.

As defined by the movement's founders, Paul Anastas, director of Yale University's Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering, and John Warner, president of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, the goal of green chemistry is to create new synthetic materials that are "benign by design".

The aim is to prevent chemical pollution – and by extension, related adverse health impacts – by eliminating potential chemical hazards of new materials at the design stage.

The fundamental idea is that eliminating chemical hazards at the outset – rather than trying to contain or treat these problems after they've occurred – is the best way to prevent such toxics from being released into the environment and of protecting people from exposure to such substances.

"Green chemistry," write Anastas and Warner, involves the design of "chemical products to prevent pollution and thereby solve environmental problems".

Put simply, if you do not send noxious fumes out a smokestack, you do not have to try to contain that pollution once it's left the chimney. If a new material is designed without compounds and elements hazardous to human health and the environment – lead or mercury for example – you eliminate the need to protect against these exposures, during manufacture, product life, and disposal.

Historically, what is now a three-trillion-dollar global chemical industry that produces over 80,000 different chemicals has focused on performance – what new synthetic chemicals do in their intended applications. This applies to everything from lightweight shatterproof plastics, to waterproofing compounds, flame retardants, and synthetic dyes, to cleaning products and pharmaceuticals.

Such chemicals perform admirably, but many also behave in ways harmful to the environment and human health. Green chemistry ups the ante by asking synthetic chemists to consider environmental and health impacts along with performance.

This seems straightforward, but as Terry Collins, who directs the Institute for Green Science at Carnegie Mellon University, points out, "We don't have a community well educated in toxicity and ecotoxicity."

Training in toxicology and environmental health has not been part of a synthetic chemist's education. Despite the high profile of environmental issues, to this day, most chemistry degree programmes do not require courses in environmental health or ecology. Green chemistry aims to change this.

Two countries where green chemistry is being incorporated into university curricula most widely are China and India. There are now over a dozen research institutes in China where green chemistry is being taught at the undergraduate, masters and PhD level.

In India, the University of Delhi, part of the country's largest educational system, now requires every chemistry major to take a full year of green chemistry.

"The Indian government's Department of Science and Technology has set up a task force to promote green chemistry in research and in university curricula from the undergraduate through post-graduate levels," explains Professor R.K. Sharma, coordinator of the Green Chemistry Network Centre at the University of Delhi.

India has also recently established a green chemistry awards programme to recognise and promote work in the field. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has also been doing this through the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge, now in its fourteenth year.

Winners of the Indian award have developed methods of reducing hazardous byproducts – one in the pharmaceutical industry, another in chemical manufacturing – key goals of green chemistry.

"There are a lot of memories of Bhopal," notes Amy Cannon, executive director of Beyond Benign, an organisation devoted to green chemistry education.

India's experience of the devastating chemical accident is a powerful motivator for improving these processes, she explains. Designing industrial processes to reduce use and creation of toxics is green chemistry's aim.

In addition to eliminating chemical hazards, green chemistry also advocates resource efficiency and the reduction and elimination of waste, attributes that make it attractive to both environmental health advocates and those looking after a business's bottom line. Handling, storing, transporting, protecting workers from and disposing of toxics carries considerable costs. By reducing or eliminating hazardous materials, green chemistry reduces these expenses.

As Nitesh Mehta, director of Newreka Green-Synth Technologies – one of the Indian green chemistry award winners – in Mumbai told the 2009 Industrial Green Chemistry Workshop, one of the goals of the December 2009 meeting was to "debunk the myth that investments in Green Chemistry exacerbate the industrial cost burden".

Eliminating the use of toxic solvents and other process chemicals has made green chemistry very attractive to both the pharmaceutical and textile industries – both of which are working on green chemistry efforts in India.

Also prompting research and development of green chemistry products is the growing awareness of the health hazards associated with numerous widely used synthetic chemicals – among them components of common plastics, cleaning products, and flame retardants.

Growing consumer demand for safer products along with increasing restrictions on many long used but ultimately hazardous industrial chemicals – formaldehyde-based wood products are one example – are prompting research and development of green chemistry products.

Innovation in chemistry and engineering is a "big positive" in the movement towards safer and green chemistry, says Terry Collins. But he, like other observers of green chemistry efforts worldwide, including Kira Matus, who has been studying green chemistry in China at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, caution that there is still much work to be done before green chemistry truly takes hold.

Promising efforts are underway, but much more investment in such research and development as well as education is needed.

As Amy Cannon points out, one of the great challenges is green chemistry's commitment to continual improvement. "It's like looking to run a zero-minute mile," she says, only partly in jest.

The goals of zero impact, zero waste and 100 percent renewable, recyclable materials may be impossible to attain, but that's the direction green chemistry wants to go.

Despite the challenges, green chemistry advocates are optimistic.

http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=49871

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CLIMATE CHANGE: Doors Opening for Carbon Tax

Julio Godoy* - Tierramérica

BERLIN, Dec 30 (IPS) - With the chance for a global climate change treaty on hold, a tax on greenhouse gases could be an effective alternative for discouraging the activities that create emissions, say economists and environmentalists.

Revenues generated by the tax could then be made available to developing countries to finance the technological leap necessary to modernise their economies while also reducing emissions of greenhouse-effect gases.

Economists, environmentalists, international organisations and even some European government are in favour of the idea.

One such enthusiast is economist Dennis Snower, president of the Institute for the World Economy, of Germany's Kiel University, located some 300 kilometres west of Berlin.

"The climate consequences of carbon dioxide emissions are equal around the world, independent of where the gas was emitted," Snower told Tierramérica.

"As such, each emitter should pay the same rate per tonne of carbon, regardless of whether it is from an industrialised or developing country, or the quantity of CO2 emitted in the past," he said.

According to Snower, the CO2 tax should replace the system of transferable emissions permits, which, he says, suffer two weaknesses: the permits are granted free of cost and in huge quantities by governments in the rich world to domestic industries. In general, economists consider taxes a tool that governments can use to influence the behaviour of their citizens and to guide consumption patterns, discouraging products considered harmful to the individual or the community, or encouraging healthy alternatives.

Richard Tol, an environmental economist who teaches at several European universities, also supports a tax on carbon emissions, saying it should be a global measure against climate change, starting at a low initial rate, and gradually increasing over time.

Like Snower, Tol criticises the system of transferable emissions permits. He believes the system could work if the rights were auctioned off instead of distributed free of cost, as is the case currently in Europe.

The carbon tax is already becoming a reality in some parts of Europe. On Dec. 10, the Irish government introduced a tax on the consumption of, initially, petroleum and diesel. Beginning May 1, 2010, the tax of 15 euros (22.5 dollars) per tonne of CO2 emitted will be applied also to heating fuel and gas.

Brian Lenihan, Ireland's finance minister, said the tax is a demonstration of Ireland's real interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

France will enact a similar tax on Jan. 1, 2010, as President Nicolas Sarkozy announced in September. "The tax, at a rate of 17 euros (24.35 dollars) per tonne of emissions, will be applied to industries as well as households," the president said in a speech at the time.

Sarkozy explained that the value of the tax is equal to the average price per tonne of CO2 on the European carbon market, in operation since 2008.

Former French prime minister Michel Rocard (1988-1991), who in early 2009 headed the commission that proposed the introduction of the carbon tax, told Tierramérica that the "purpose is to penalise some polluting behaviours that fuel global warming, like the consumption of fossil fuels."

Multilateral institutions, like the International Labour Organisation, support a global tax on CO2. In a report published Dec. 11, the ILO estimated that the tax would lead to the creation of some 14 million jobs by 2014.

The ILO suggests a tax similar to those of France and Ireland. The report "Green Policies and Jobs: A Double Dividend?" also calculates that some 600 million workers around the world, representing about 40 percent of all jobs, currently work in sectors with high CO2 emissions.

However, some economists and the governments of emerging nations like China see the tax as counterproductive. Beijing believes it ignores the different responsibilities of industrialised countries and developing countries in terms of how much they have contributed to global warming.

Ottmar Edenhofer, a professor at the Technical University of Berlin, says the CO2 tax would "motivate the petroleum or carbon producing countries to accelerate extraction of those fuels and would increase emissions. The system of transferable emissions permits is preferable because it allows immediate control of national emissions budgets," he told Tierramérica.

But the emissions rights - in practice, permits to pollute - need to overcome two obstacles: first, the international community should adopt a binding system of allocation, whether based on the size of the population, which would favour developing countries, or according to economic yields, which would benefit industrialised nations. The second is that the market itself should be global.

In any case, said Edenhofer, the urgency of climate change demands an immediate solution.

"The global budget of greenhouse-effect emissions in the current century must not surpass 830 gigatonnes of CO2 if we are not to go beyond the maximum temperature rise of two degrees C," he said.

"In the last decade, humanity produced 270 gigatonnes. At that pace, the world will have exhausted its budget in less than 30 years," warned the expert.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.) (END/2009)

http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=49857

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AFRICA: Drying, Drying, Disappearing…

Paul Virgo

ROME, Dec 26 (IPS) - Lake Chad was bigger than Israel less than 50 years ago. Today its surface area is less than a tenth of its earlier size, amid forecasts the lake could disappear altogether within 20 years.

Climate change and overuse have put one of Africa's mightiest lakes in mortal danger, and the livelihoods of the 30 million people who depend on its waters is hanging by a thread as a result.

An unprecedented crisis is looming that would create fresh hunger in a region already suffering grave food insecurity, and pose a massive threat to peace and stability, experts say.

"If Lake Chad dries up, 30 million people will have no means of a livelihood, and that is a big security problem because of growing competition for smaller quantities of water," Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, executive secretary of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) tells IPS in Rome.

"Poverty and hunger will increase. When there is no food to eat, there is bound to be violence."

The lake, which shrank 90 percent between 1963 and 2001 from 25,000 square kilometres to under 1,500, is bordered by Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria.

Four more countries, the Central African Republic, Algeria, Sudan and Libya, share the lake's hydrological basin and are therefore affected by its fortunes.

"Lake Chad has experienced shrinkage," Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said at November's World Food Security Summit at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome. "If it dries up, it will be a real disaster. I want to warn the world about this imminent disaster."

That disaster has already started. Villages that used to be thriving lakeside ports are now stranded miles from the water, and have been swallowed by the advancing Sahara desert. Fishers and farmers are struggling to survive.

"The dramatic situation is already taking place," Maher Salman, a technical officer with FAO's land and water division tells IPS. "It's clear that the consequences have started. There is outward migration. People are looking for water, so they leave the basin area."

Fishers have seen once massive catches frequently reduced to half-filled buckets. The FAO says the lake's fish production has fallen 60 percent, and the variety of fish caught has dramatically declined too.

Farmers who rely on lake waters for irrigation are having to move nearer to the water or abandon their activities. Lack of water has caused pasture lands to shrivel up and led to a serious shortage of animal feed, estimated at 46.5 percent in some areas in 2006, resulting in cattle deaths and plummeting livestock production.

This is the sort of situation former World Bank vice-president Ismail Serageldin was worried about in 1995 when he said that "the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, and the wars of the next century will be about water" – a view echoed in reports by several organisations including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

While some experts remain sceptical about the prospect of all-out wars being fought over water, there have been numerous reports of clashes between farmers and herds-people competing for productive land in the Lake Chad area.

Biodiversity too has been hit by the lake's retreat. So has the region's health situation.

"Due to the movement of people looking for food there is a high level of interaction, which complicates matters because of the high prevalence of HIV among Lake Chad inhabitants," says Ganduje. "The African Development Bank has come to our aid, and we are tackling this."

Little can be done at the regional level about climate change, which is attacking the lake on two fronts - reducing the rainfall that feeds it, and accelerating evaporation of its waters due to higher temperatures. Its shallowness for such a major water body makes it particularly vulnerable to these attacks.

It is a grim situation, but not a hopeless one. The other half of the problem, over-extraction, can be tackled locally.

"We are optimistic," says Ganduje. "We are regulating the use of Lake Chad water. We are drawing up a charter so everyone has common rules and regulations in the use of water.

"We are also controlling activities on the tributaries to Lake Chad, such as the construction of dams and irrigation activities. We are controlling human behaviour in response to other factors that are outside of our control."

This confidence is justified in part by growing understanding of the need for a response.

"There is recognition of the need for new management strategies to be put into place," says Salman. "The most common conclusion of studies on the lake's shrinkage is that it is due to both human pressure on water resources and on climate change. A solution should be possible.

"There needs to be optimum use of the waters in each sector, up-scaling water conservation and small-scale agricultural technologies for more efficient irrigation. Awareness about use of the waters is important as well, so people cut down."

The LCBC also has high hopes of an ambitious plan to replenish the lake to its 1960s levels by diverting water from the Oubangui River, which is the major tributary to the Congo River.

"The feasibility study has started and a fund has been set up," says Ganduje. "The heads of state are confident of progress. If the feasibility study is positive, we believe we have the political support required."

The FAO says it does not have a position on whether the transfer project should go ahead, although it has called for very careful consideration of its impact, including that on the Congo River system. What it views as key is the presentation of concrete plans to save the lake, so donors can be badgered into committing to a cause that is crucial to millions of people .

"There is a strategic action plan for the sustainable development of Lake Chad, but to translate that into action we need an investment plan," says Salman. "We need more meetings of donors to get them to commit and make good those commitments through investment. The good news is that there is a consensus on the need for action." (END/2009)

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