After the Famine in the Sudan

This paper contends that there are sufficient climatic similarities between dryland Sudan and dryland Australia to pose the question: Can the experience of a more developed Australia help a less developed Sudan evolve a better strategy for the use of its threatened drylands? Population, agricultural and pastoral land use, rangeland improvement, wild life management and non-agricultural activities are examined. It concludes that Australian experience might suggest that carefully controlled pastoralism would be preferable to crop production; more intensive use should be made of the Sudan's wetter areas; and a coordinated approach to land use bringing together crop, livestock and forest production is required. However, it points out that whilst it is relatively easy to suggest certain theoretical remedies for the Sudan's difficulties, the cultural acceptability of any proposed change is crucial. The Australians have encountered this in their attempts to assimilate the Aboriginal community into the mainstream of Australian economic life. the degree to which successful projects and programmes from one part of the world can be replicated in another. To date such transference of successful techniques from one society to another has been singularly unsuccessful in the rural sector in Arid Lands. The United Nations University set up a research programme to investigate this problem in the Sudan in 1977 (Davies, 1985). Since this programme began the subject has become more urgent for the Sudan and for other parts of the Sahelian Zone of West Africa with the poor rainy season of 1983 and the disastrous one of 1984. The rains in northern and central Sudan in 1984 were the poorest since records began at the beginning of this century (Table I). According to Sudan Government figures some eight million people (40 per cent of the country's population) were affected by famine by mid-1985. The immediate reaction after the humanitarian efforts to alleviate the food shortage is to look to projects and programmes which will prevent a repetition of the catastrophe. Developed World countries such as the USA and USSR, with significant areas under arid and semi-arid conditions, have introduced large-scale irrigation schemes in their attempt to increase the economic value of such regions and, in the case of the USSR, to settle its nomadic pastoralists as well. The Sudan has tried to do the same, and since 1955 has increased the area under irrigation roughly five-fold. Not only have such schemes proved costly in capital expenditure and in running costs, but they have also failed to fulfil their promise (Thimm, 1979; Davies, 1986). To date such schemes have not achieved their aims, and in any case such projects can only be effective in areas with accessible major rivers. Large areas of north and central Sudan are therefore necessarily excluded and the major problem here is the management of the rainland. Research in the Sudan has shown clearly that to be successful, any innovation in the agricultural sector must fulfil four main criteria (Davies, 1985). It must fit into the existing physical environmental conditions; be economically viable; be acceptable in terms of the existing socio-cultural constraints; and take into account the available administrative and managerial manpower. In practice most research has centred on the environmental aspects, concerning itself with the identification of plants and crop varieties suitable for transference on purely scientific agronomic grounds. Economic factors have also been kept under review, but conventional wisdom has assumed that

Archaeology · Famine · Geography · History · Pasture and Agricultural Systems · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

• The Creeping Desert in the Sudan and Elsewhere in Africa

  E B Stebbing•Geographical Journal•1955

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