The Horn of Africa is currently facing acute food shortage, severe malnutrition, famine and over 11.6 million people are being directly affected. Scores of people and animals have reportedly starved to death and millions are surviving on a single meal a day. Scenes of rotting animal skeletons and sunken eyes of malnourished bony children on national television are commonplace. In the face of these difficult economic times, it is only obvious that the crisis is bound to worsen unless a lot is done to mitigate the situation.
In Uganda, districts of Moroto, Napak, Kotido, Amudat, Kaabong, Nakapiripirit, Abim, Amuria, Katakwi, Adjumani, Arua, Koboko, Moyo, Yumbe and Bulambuli have already been tagged a red-zone area by the government. It is however wise to anticipate that the humanitarian crisis may stretch across more districts in the face of sky rocketing food prices amidst declining purchasing power and low harvests.
In as much as several factors are responsible for this huge humanitarian crisis, poverty, starvation/famine and environmental problems are children of the same mother, and that mother is ignorance. Ignorance of the relationship between nature and human well-being.
The challenge of seeking to avoid future starvation and famines in the region is daunting but one we immediately must all work towards since drought is a recurrent phenomenon and we have to live with it. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that “short-term relief must be linked to building long-term sustainability …….this means an agricultural transformation that improves the resilience of rural livelihoods and minimizes the scale of any future crisis. It means climate-smart crop production, livestock rearing, fish farming and forest maintenance practices that enable all people to have year-round access to the nutrition they need."
There is no way agricultural transformation which improves rural livelihoods can be attained when man is hostile to biodiversity. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment presents a credible argument that human well-being largely depends on the services provided by nature.
Biodiversity is declining rapidly due to drivers of which most of them are human-induced such as climate change, land use change, economic activity, technology, human population, habitat loss, pollution, overexploitation and other socio-political and cultural drivers. These drivers tend to interact and amplify each other.
Biodiversity loss posses strong negative effects on several aspects of human well being such as food insecurity, and sudden environmental changes such as droughts, acute deterioration of farm soils fertility, floods, diseases and scarcer access to water resources.
With the explosive human population in this region of the world, communities have various competing goals, many of which depend on biodiversity. Due to socio-economic pressures, people are increasingly putting more pressure on ecosystems by trying to modify them to improve on their productivity which results in an irreversible change of the ecosystems. In the long-term, the value lost of such trade-offs may by far exceed the short-term economic benefits that may have been gained from the trade-off as we are now experiencing.
To mitigate this calamity, the necessity to tag monetary value benefits to an ecosystem by assessing their full economic value is crucial.
It is wise for us to conserve our biodiversity by integrating it into agriculture, forestry, and fishery sectors because they affect it directly since they are wholly dependent on biodiversity. We need strong institutions in place to enforce sustainable use of ecosystems and inform communities of the benefits of conserving biodiversity. Other actions such as adapting to climate change and increasing transparency of decision making processes need to be put in place as well.
Masake Anthony
The writer works with Uganda Law Society
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