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East Africa drought crisis - 2011 to Now.

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East African drought crisis The region of East Africa has been the ‘primary focus for various drought studies in recent years’ ( Haile et al 2019: 146) . In the last two decades, East Africa has experienced frequent drought events severe in nature causing crop failure due to low rainfall and human losses.  In Somalia for example, there were around 250,000 deaths during the drought of 2010-11 because of large scale food insecurity and a lack of food supplies and in Kenya, 23 million were affected by drought – ‘the highest number of people reported to have been affected by drought in Africa for over 100 years’  (Rourke 2011: 33).   I want to discuss how drought in the region of East Africa mainly in the countries of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia has created a food and water crisis – it has altered the food landscape significantly as highlighted by the following quote: “This drought is leaving nothing behind. In previous droughts, we used to lose some animal...
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Indigenous knowledge and African smallholder farmers

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In my last blog post, I (briefly) touched upon the institutionalised nature of discriminatory policies which have been negatively affecting smallholder farms in South Africa. In this blog post, I want to explore the potential of smallholder farms across the continent of Africa as a solution to securing food security in an increasingly water-scarce world with an emphasis on the role of indigenous and localised agricultural and irrigation strategies. Small holder farmers are defined as farmers with less than two hectares of land  (Conway et al, 2019) . According to  Svrinivasan et al (2017: 138) , ‘water withdrawals mainly for irrigation account for approximately 70% of the world’s freshwater use’. Water for agriculture is increasingly a scarce resource  (Conway et al, 2019)  which is largely due to the effects of climate change, for example below average rainfall and increased temperatures leading to prolonged droughts.   Vilakazi (2017)  states th...
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Smallholder farms in South Africa

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An article that I came across by the Financial Times entitled ‘ ‘ We must decolonise water rights for Africa to advance’  stated that the ‘majority of small scale farmers have no legal access to water’. The term ‘legal access to water’ reminded me of the aftermath of the Oslo II Accords which had paved the way for Israel’s, discriminatory water distribution policies meaning that for decades, Palestinians have been denied access to safe and clean water.It was an artificial water scarcity  (e.g. depletion of groundwater resources, inadequate water infrastructure and resource theft)  implemented and engineered by the state of Israel and sustained by military action and the Israeli water company, Mekorot  ( Rabi, 2014 ). Access to water is a fundamental human right and Sustainable development Goal 6- to achieve clean water and sanitation for all by 2030. In this blog post, I will be discussing how a historic class division in South Africa and a ‘failure to f...
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Introduction: Writing about Africa

I begin this blog by mentioning   Wainaina’s (2005) satiric essay ‘How to Write about Africa’ which is both engaging and brutally honest and is worth mentioning at the start of this blogging experience,  as his ideas provide somewhat of a framework for what follows.  His essay highlights the whitewashing of all things African related from travel writing (sunsets, wide empty spaces) to politics (corrupt politicians,) to western benevolence – ‘without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed’ (  Wainaina, 2005 ). As this blog is writing about Africa, it seemed only fair to engage with this piece of writing in the context of water and food and its impact on development.   According to  Jones and Van Der Walt (2004) , water is at the ‘heart of many of Africa’s problems’. An increasingly ‘scarce resource’  ( Mehta, 2003: 5066) , water in the context of Africa, is closely linked to drought, famine, starvation, c...
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