13 February 2006
A Kenyan pastoralist walks past carcasses in drought stricken Wajir, in north-eastern Kenya. Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images
The bushes should be sprouting fresh leaves but, after last year's rains failed, the ground is littered with the bleached bones of dead animals.
Cows were the first to succumb, and now even hardy camels are dying of thirst and hunger in a landscape where the soil has turned to yellow dust.
The obvious question is: why does anyone live here at all? At the best of times, there is just enough of a living to be scraped out of the thin soil to keep going for another year.
But this is not the best of times. A prolonged drought has withered the pastureland. The flat, dusty plains go on for empty miles, and the only glimmer in the distance is a treacherous mirage. Donkeys and goats pick at plastic bags and the bones of dead animals.
Over the past decade, Africa's ability to feed itself has steadily declined. There are now more than 40 million people needing emergency food aid across 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Climate change is one factor - Kenya has seen a steady decrease in rainfall over the past 10 years. However, the crisis is also to do with politics and a lack of development.
In Kenya's case, the north-east has been neglected by successive governments since the British. There are no asphalt roads, and no lorries to take goods to market.
So when a crisis hits and herders need to sell off some of their cattle, they must drive the animals to the nearest town on foot.
"From where we are [Arbajahan], they have to walk five days with their cattle to reach Wajir," the Oxfam spokesman Brendan Cox said. "Then they have very little choice but to sell. If they walked their cattle back, the animals probably wouldn't survive."
When the seller has few options, he cannot hold out for the best price - and certainly not at times like this, when cows have little to feed on.
Because nobody wants to pay good money for a skinny cow, prices have collapsed, slashing herdsmen's resources when they are most needed.
There is little alternative but to turn to food aid, and herdsmen such as Hassan Ali have no other option. "I used to have 220 cattle but now I have just 30," he said as he stood in a field littered with rotting carcasses. "Day by day, the animals are dying.
"I have 10 children. I'm not a farmer or a businessman, and all I know is how to rear my animals. If they die, only God knows how we will survive."
Oxfam estimates that 70% of cattle in Wajir district - one of the two worst-affected districts in the north-east - have died. With families left destitute, hunger has begun to bite.
Malnutrition rates among children under five now run at 30%, double the level at which an emergency is usually declared. At Wajir district hospital, the paediatric ward is filled with hollow-eyed, emaciated children.
"We have 18 patients, of whom 13 have malnutrition. On average, we are admitting between one and three children daily," Dr Ahmeddin Omar said. "We never used to have malnutrition here."
Six children died of malnutrition in the hospital last month, and doctors say many more families in far-flung villages, too distant to seek medical help, are losing children.
Kenyan newspapers have criticised the government for being slow to respond to the crisis. Elsewhere in the country, the harvest has been good and grain silos are filled with maize.
But the nomadic herdsmen who crisscross the dusty north-eastern plains are ethnic Somalis with little political muscle in Nairobi.
The Kenyan government has only now begun to heed their plight after being spurred into action by the local media over Christmas. Now Kenya is the biggest donor to the UN-coordinated aid effort.
According to the UN, 3.5 million Kenyans are in need of emergency food aid, despite living in a country that exports flowers and vegetables to Europe.
A week before visiting arid Arbajahan, I went to the shores of Lake Naivasha, in the Rift Valley, where thousands of Kenyans labour in greenhouses harvesting roses for the Valentine's Day market.
Most of these workers were once peasant farmers, but had abandoned their hand to mouth subsistence farming lifestyles for jobs in the cash economy.
Under sweltering equatorial sunlight, they snip roses from bushes and bundle them up in plastic wrappers carrying the logos of British supermarkets.
The farms have their critics, with concerns being voiced about pesticide use and compulsory overtime. But they, and not the desolate herdsmen in the north-east, are a glimpse of Africa's future.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1708703,00.html
