The Cooperative Society Newsletter
August 2024, Issue 48
By E.G. Nadeau, Ph.D.
Editor’s Note: Be sure to check out E.G.’s new book, “The Emerging Cooperative Economy”
People have a tendency to think that if we just pretend a problem isn’t there, voilà, the problem disappears. This magical-thinking approach to “problem-solving” is especially prevalent when the problems are somebody else’s. For many of us, heat waves, torrential rains, rising sea levels, hurricanes, and droughts are somebody else’s problems (including our children’s and grandchildren‘s) and not our own. Therefore, we needn’t worry about them or take actions to solve them.
To illustrate this “out of sight, out of mind” mentality, most of us have no idea that much of Africa south of the Sahara has been experiencing extreme drought conditions since 2020. And why would we? Our “Global North” news media tell us little or nothing about these ecological and humanitarian disasters, despite the fact that they are affecting about 50 countries and 1.25 billion people – approximately 15% of the world’s population.
Southern Africa
According to the US Agency for International Development, “Southern Africa has recorded the most severe drought during the January-to-March [2024] agricultural season in more than 100 years. . . . An estimated 26 to 30 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity throughout the region . . . . Four countries [Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe] had declared a state of emergency due to drought as of May.”
The Greater Horn of Africa
The World Health Organization recently stated that the Greater Horn of Africa [Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda] “accounts for close to 22% of the global humanitarian caseload in 2024. It is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change. The historic four-year drought that hit East Africa caused massive suffering. The increase in deadly climate-related disasters together with conflict has driven large displacements and extremely high levels of hunger. 45.9 million people are facing high levels of food insecurity. . . . 10.8 million children under the age of five years are estimated to be facing acute malnutrition.” For comparison, that is more than half of the total number of children under five in the entire United States.
The Sahel (West and Central Africa)
The ten countries of the Sahel region comprise about 5% of the world’s population. Drought conditions in the Sahel are currently less widespread than in eastern and southern Africa. However, the region has a long history of droughts, and many changes in agricultural practices and contingency plans must be implemented to prepare for future disasters related to food insecurity.
Potential ways to ameliorate drought in Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa is not powerless in the face of frequent and widespread food insecurity. The following represent examples of efforts to address this crisis:
- Emergency food assistance
The United Nations World Food Programme is “the world’s largest humanitarian organization, saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.” Emergency food aid like this is important but is not a replacement for ongoing efforts to sustain agricultural production in the countries most affected by food shortages.
- Increased irrigation
ODI, an independent international think tank, makes a strong case for increasing irrigation in Africa, which “can increase yields and production, protect against yield losses to variable rains, and enable cultivation in dry seasons and of potentially high-value crops that consume more water. Crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa are often compared unfavourably to those seen in Asia. . . . Asia has 30% of its arable land irrigated, compared to 6% or less in sub-Saharan Africa.”
- Conservation agriculture
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, “Conservation Agriculture (CA) is a farming system that can prevent losses of arable land while regenerating degraded lands. It promotes maintenance of a permanent soil cover, minimum soil disturbance, and diversification of plant species. It enhances biodiversity and natural biological processes above and below the ground surface, which contribute to increased water and nutrient use efficiency and to improved and sustained crop production.”
- Regenerative agriculture
The Noble Research Institute defines regenerative agriculture as “a management philosophy that seeks to improve soil health. At its core, regenerative agriculture is the process of restoring degraded soils using practices (e.g., adaptive grazing, no-till planting, no or limited use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizer, etc.).” One way to think of regenerative agriculture is that it applies to animal farming as well as crop agriculture.
- Agricultural cooperatives
I have conducted approximately a dozen evaluations of agricultural co-op development projects in sub-Saharan Africa during the past 20 years. Most of these co-ops play an important role in training small-scale farmers in conservation agriculture and other drought-resistant practices. A key benefit of these co-ops is their ability to bring large numbers of farmers together in order to efficiently improve farming techniques and help farmers gain access to agricultural supplies and identify markets for their agricultural products.
Of course, all of these approaches to reducing the toll of drought and the resulting humanitarian and ecological consequences in sub-Saharan Africa cost money. Multi-lateral aid through the United Nations and other sources, bilateral assistance from countries in the Global North, cooperation among African countries, and philanthropic support are needed to make a positive difference, especially as the negative impacts of global warming continue to mount. Farmers often know effective ways to improve agricultural management techniques and market access. They just don’t have the funds to implement them. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a program that provides small cash grants to farmers and others that allows them to make their own investment decisions.
Conclusion
The main problem with magical thinking is that we can only fend off reality for so long. The longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive problems will be to solve, and the more unnecessary suffering and damage to the environment will occur. What’s more, drought in sub-Saharan Africa is only one example of a worldwide set of catastrophes resulting from human-caused global warming. Disastrously, most countries are not acting quickly enough on this broad set of global problems.
As the climate crisis impacts more and more people, it is becoming increasingly difficult—and increasingly perilous—to ignore. A shift in the way we think about community is necessary. We can no longer afford to consider our sheltered enclaves as separate from the plight of others. To understand the effects of climate change in some distant village not as an injury to “them” but as an injury to “us” can at least guide our thinking on how to be responsible members of a global community.