One of the great journalists of our time, Paul Salopek, recently published an article on the famine in the Horn of Africa this year (Foreign Policy Magazine, March 2012).
Salopek, with his characteristic, ethnographic approach, details the impact of the famine, of the environmental change, on nomadic, pastoralist communities in the north of Kenya, in the region of the mythic Lake Turkana, "...A gargantuan wilderness of hot wind and thorn stubble..."
Salopek's investigation turns him, seemingly unwittingly, as he is also a humanist, into a critic of humanitarian aid; his words encapsulate the conundrum of long-term humanitarian assistance:
"The savannas were crisscrossed by invisible migration routes, seasonal pasturage rights, proprietary water holes. In a place as destitute as the Turkana Basin, food aid hadn't just swollen human populations, but undermined those antique rules. It had also encouraged the nomads, ruinously, to maintain more animals than the fragile pastures could sustain; living on donations, they saw little need to eat or sell off their herds in times of drought. And so, the rangelands eventually wore away, becoming sterile as concrete."
The fine line of humanitarian assistance, of ecological devastation, of the increasingly heavy human burden on remote, ragged, thin lands, in addition to its thickening presence elsewhere; the human as the occupier of this earth, its burden.
Stopping food aid to these communities would cause mass death, which is not a viable solution, even for the most hardened critics of foreign assistance.
Is it possible to go back? Has the West, has our benevolence, brought about systematic destruction of survival mechanisms, and, if so, what is to be done?
Salopek, with his characteristic, ethnographic approach, details the impact of the famine, of the environmental change, on nomadic, pastoralist communities in the north of Kenya, in the region of the mythic Lake Turkana, "...A gargantuan wilderness of hot wind and thorn stubble..."
Salopek's investigation turns him, seemingly unwittingly, as he is also a humanist, into a critic of humanitarian aid; his words encapsulate the conundrum of long-term humanitarian assistance:
"The savannas were crisscrossed by invisible migration routes, seasonal pasturage rights, proprietary water holes. In a place as destitute as the Turkana Basin, food aid hadn't just swollen human populations, but undermined those antique rules. It had also encouraged the nomads, ruinously, to maintain more animals than the fragile pastures could sustain; living on donations, they saw little need to eat or sell off their herds in times of drought. And so, the rangelands eventually wore away, becoming sterile as concrete."
The fine line of humanitarian assistance, of ecological devastation, of the increasingly heavy human burden on remote, ragged, thin lands, in addition to its thickening presence elsewhere; the human as the occupier of this earth, its burden.
Stopping food aid to these communities would cause mass death, which is not a viable solution, even for the most hardened critics of foreign assistance.
Is it possible to go back? Has the West, has our benevolence, brought about systematic destruction of survival mechanisms, and, if so, what is to be done?
