Vital added calories come from frying or reheating it with cooking oil, but that has also soared in price. Many survive on a single daily meal of ugali, the plain porridge made from maize flour that has doubled in price in a year. Yet despite the advance warning, people in Turkana and in 18 more of Kenya’s 23 arid and semi-arid land counties are on a knife edge, with hunger, malnutrition and illness all threatening to push them over. It has been finessed over the years, to assess a wide range of food-security, weather, soil-condition and health indicators, so problems are easily identified. FEWS, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, was set up following the devastating Ethiopian famine in 1984. The Kenyan government has provided small support payments to households and run slaughtering schemes to buy enfeebled livestock that would fetch little at market, so that herders receive a little cash and the meat can be shared among the poorest households.Īid agencies that have been trying, with limited success, to draw attention to the unfolding emergency for much of the past two years have also ramped up operations.Īn international system enables them to sound the alert in good time. So far, the official response to the warnings and events on the ground has been muted. “They have also been becoming more severe, more intense.” “That region has been experiencing a higher frequency of drought,” he says. It said that roughly half the world’s population now suffered severe water shortages at some point during the year.Ĭattle carcasses lie by the side of the road around 35km south of Garissa, in Tana River County, Kenyaĭaniel Olago, professor at the University of Nairobi’s Institute for Climate Change and Adaptation and an IPCC contributor, says the conditions in northern Kenya encapsulate those trends. “Africa suffered from drought more frequently than any other continent, with 134 droughts, of which 70 occurred in East Africa ,” it said.Įarlier, a February report by the United Nations climate-science body, the IPCC, sounded a wider warning. In May, a report for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification said the number and length of extreme water shortages worldwide had risen by almost a third in 20 years. The prospect of this becoming the new normal is alarming but should not come as a surprise. The four failed rains since spring 2020 make for the worst drought in 40 years, and already meteorologists are warning that the signs are that October may bring no relief. In the last 20 years, this has happened more frequently. Get ahead of the day with the morning headlines at 7.30am and Fionnán Sheahan's exclusive take on the day's news every afternoon, with our free daily newsletter.Įnter email address This field is required Sign Up People manage to live here because of the twice-yearly rains, the “long” rains that fall from March to May and the “short” rains between October and December. Nobody can remember a time like this.Ībout 70pc of Kenya is arid and semi-arid land, just one or two steps removed from desert. Never before did they have to depend on it for so long. It stripped the roaming plains of grass and starved the community’s livestock - the only source of earnings in the remote settlements of this semi-nomadic society.Ī single borehole dug deep in the ground sustains the people, but they live in fear that its water will run out because no rain has replenished it. It has blackened the trees, shrivelled the thorny shrubs and dried the throats of those who talk too long. Two years of drought have sucked every visible drop of moisture from the baked earth. It is hard to picture rain or floods around the village of Milima Tatu in Kenya’s Turkana county, a district slightly smaller than Ireland. “Sometimes, the rains are so heavy, they kill animals that are already weak. “When the rains come, if you have not driven your animals from the rivers, they will be swept away by the floods,” Richard Ekale Nakalale says through a translator. Herders learn the hard way in northern Kenya, where the unforgiving landscape and climate mean mistakes have deadly consequences.
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