home > by publication type > must reads > CSMonitor: How Tuaregs, Hausas Are Avoiding Another Darfur
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| Author: | Tristan McConnell |
|---|
October 3, 2007
Summary:
As climate change escalates the pace of desertification, farmers and herders in Niger are working together to stop the advance of the Sahara Desert, building water traps to make their shared land more productive.
Excerpt:
On the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert herders and farmers with a bitter history of fighting over dwindling resources are now working together to stop a common enemy: the desert's increasingly rapid advance.
"Since I was a young boy, I have seen changes here. It was green; there were trees and rain. But now there is only the wind," says 50-year-old Ibrahim Akoulama, a nomadic Tuareg herder. He lives with his two wives and 10 children in a domed hut covered with grass mats to protect from the scorching sun and dry winds.
As climate change steps up the pace of desertification in the region, competition for resources has reached deadly levels: underlying the slaughter in Darfur and its spillover into neighboring Chad lies this basic economic fight for the land that can save a family from starvation.
But here in southern Niger, Hausa farmers and Tuareg herders are building water traps to make their shared land more productive, an effort which observers hope will reduce the likelihood of future conflict.
"It is totally pragmatic," says forestry expert Kees Vogt who works with the SOS Sahel SOS Sahel International, a nongovernmental group based in the city of Zinder, once the capital of French colonial-era Niger. "The people have no choice but to live from the land. There is no industry, there is nothing [here] except natural resource management. This is all to improve the ecology of the area so you can have more animals and you can attract more nomads to graze their cattle and to trade. The forest is there to be used not conserved."
In Restoring the Balance: A Middle East Strategy for the Next President, experts from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution propose a new, nonpartisan Middle East strategy drawing on the lessons of past failures to address both the short-term and long-term challenges to U.S. interests.
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