Water and Africa 
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| Title: | Desertification: the historical significance: on the association of desertification with drought, famine and poverty in Africa in the late twentieth century |
| Author: | Spooner, B. |
| Book title: | African Food Systems in Crisis. Part 1: Microperspectives |
| Year: | 1989 |
| Pages: | 111-162 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Subsaharan Africa |
| Subjects: | rural poverty famine droughts |
| Abstract: | Over the past fifteen years, desertification, drought, famine, poverty and Africa have become inseparably linked in the media and the public mind. However, scientists still discuss them separately, and each factor does occur without the others. Why then should they all coincide in Africa now? Even if they are not causally dependent, are they perhaps mutually reinforcing? More importantly, are they likely to reinforce each other in the foreseeable future? Why should desertification be particularly bad in Africa now? What is the engine that drives desertification? Does it depend on decisions that could be foreseen and made differently, or changed? And to what extent are other factors, besides famine, associated with it and how? In this article, the combined human and natural context which generated the factors which led to both desertification and famine is reconstructed. The author discusses the definition of desertification and traces the story of the antidesertification effort so far. He then develops the human dimension of the story and establishes the relation to drought as a physical variable on the one hand, and famine and poverty as social variables on the other. The author argues that in Africa desertification and famine are related not in the manner of direct cause and effect, like parent and child, but as cousins. Desertification is first a social and only secondarily an ecological process. The solution is to reintegrate the marginalized populations into the larger social process, and of marginalized nations into the international community. Bibliogr. |