The history of these terrible famines that are repeated time and time again ought to make people ask the simple question: “why?”
In the 1950s, Sir Frank Fraser Darling, the Huxleys and myself were arguing that the land use and agricultural policies being imposed on East Africa by International agencies and European Governments was fundamentally flawed and carries a large load of responsibility for these famines.
Driving through Uganda when I was working in the causes of bladder cancer and volvulus the commonest surgical emergency, I witnessed cattle dying beside the roadside and many desiccated carcasses picked over by the vultures. The culture of using cattle in Africa dates back some 5,000 years. However, it was nomadic and the people would migrate to follow the seasonal variability of the pasture. That should make one realise that raising cattle in the one place all year round might have some disadvantages. None the less the UK Government funded a multi million pound exercise in Ankole to raise cattle on a large scale (not quite the size of Wales).
Huge bulldozers were brought into service. With chains strung between them they marched through the bush land where the wild life thrived despite any threat from the tsetse fly. Bushes and trees were pulled down, cut and burnt. The wild game, water buck, buffalo, hartebeest, kob, wart hogs and bush pigs were shot and piled into great heaps and burnt. Protein that would have kept several townships in high quality food for a great part of the year went up in smoke.
Soon the cattle arrived to the lush green pasture. An image of good Norfolk land stretching for miles upon miles. For a moment in time the English cattle thrived and congratulations were voiced loudly all round no doubt to the sound of clinking glasses. Then – bit by bit the green grasses died. The heat resistant and coarse lemon grasses took over. Largely inedible to the cattle the success story turned sour. The reason was elementary. The bushes and trees have deep roots that feed off deep water tables. They transpire water into the air during the day and replenish it during the night. So wild life can exist by browsing and even without access to water can get all the water they need from feeding off the leaves of bushes and trees at night. During the day the sedges, herbs and soft grasses are protected by the shade of the bushes and trees and enjoy the humidity of the transpired water. The animals rest in the shade of the trees in the heat of the midday sun. Moreover their physiology is adapted to water conservation unlike the cattle whose faeces are often swimming in it. The East African wild animals produce hard pellets with water recycled from the intestine. Remove the bushes and trees and you expose the herbs and grasses to the tropical sun. With shallow roots they die and are replaced by inedible grasses with deeper roots. Even these would die eventually creating a desert.
The Ankole scheme was a failure like the East African Groundnut scheme but unlike that much publicised failure, very little was heard about the cattle scheme outside of Africa, its Game Department and the World WildLife Fund who were up in arms about the destruction of wild life and ecological damage. Typical of the resilience of Africa, the bulldozers had inadvertently been tramping bits of twigs, broken from the bushes and trees into the ground as they marched forward on their destructive route. These twigs made roots and so the bush began to grow back. However, the wild life had received a terminal blow.
This new famine in East Africa again raises the question of what to do. Clearly people do not try to grow bananas large scale, in the moors in the Scottish highlands. So the first lesson is do not try to replicate English farming in an equatorial setting. . None the less the International Community established the International Livestock Centre funded with millions if not billions of dollars in Ethiopia which is so often a target for these famines.
In the 1960s the argument was that you should develop a new system of agriculture and animal husbandry based not on Norfolk pasture but on the semi-arid habitat. The deep rooted trees, bushes and sedges and a range of meat and milk animals are adapted physiologically to the hot dry habitat. In the 1962 famine I saw cattle dying and not far distant herds of eland which were thriving. The Russians domesticated the eland in Askania Nova for milk and meat and indeed the Karamajong run them with their cattle.
In fact with the Game department we put forward a scheme of developing the semi-arid ecosystem which intelligently managed as a poly culture would provide animal food, vegetable and honey. Moreover, the ecological development would enhance the bird life and so naturally spread of the near desert adapted flora. In other words you would not only have a new system of agriculture and animal use you would have a tool to reverse desert encroachment. The Overseas Development Agency in the UK took this proposal seriously and following a first design one in Karamoja and a second scheme in the contrasting flats of Tonia-Kaiso was seriously considering funding it. The we had the rise to power of Idi Amin and the scheme fell foul of that political crisis. It is time for its revival.
