Food security’s unholy trinity – the case of the Sahel

International Relations and Security Network at ETH (Zurich): The Sahel region of Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming more unstable. Our partners at the United Nations University (UNU) warn that because of climate change, environmental degradation and migration, increased food insecurity across this fragile region will only make matters worse.

Yesterday we broadly outlined how climate change, environmental degradation and migration continue to have a negative impact on global food security. This hardship is being felt both in the economically hard-hit developed world and, worse yet, in the developing world. Indeed, the problem of food insecurity is particularly acute throughout the Sahel portion of Sub-Saharan Africa, a geographical region that has long been the focus of international efforts to combat the dual threat posed by poverty and starvation.

To explore this particular area of vulnerability further, today we present some of the key findings from Livelihood Security: Climate Change, Migration and Conflict in the Sahel , a report commissioned in 2011 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and our partners at the United Nations University (UNU). More specifically, Livelihood Security analyses the historical climate trends across the 17 countries that make up the Sahel region in order to understand how these trends have both led to and exacerbated the area’s growing social, economic and political instability.

Stretching from the borderlands between Senegal and Mauritania to northern Eritrea, the Sahel region is a 1,000 km belt separating the Sahara desert from the rest of Africa. Its population has grown rapidly since the 1960s (an estimated 50 million people are currently living across the region) despite patterns of recurring drought and an increase of 1°C in the area’s mean temperature over the past 40 years.

...However, the growing vulnerability of Sahelian lives is not only attributable to the growing irregularity of the weather, but also to the uncertain timing of rainfall and droughts. In turn, such climatic irregularity and uncertainty has resulted in a general decrease in agricultural yields, damage to traditional grazing land, and the shrinking of important water sources, particularly in the landlocked countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger....

Niger River in Mali, 2001, shot by NASA. Just south of the Sahara Desert in Africa, the Niger River creates a lush area of wetlands and lakes in an otherwise arid environment. In this true-color MODIS image from October 18, 2001, the Niger enters at left as a thin strip of green and flows northeast through Mali. The river then turns south and heads into the country of Niger. (Note, this is at the end of the rainy season, showing the Niger Inland Delta in dark green).