King Famine

Even in the best of years, much of sub-Saharan Africa is stalked by the grim specter of famine. This year has been one of the worst. A 40-month drought has left the area brown and blistered. Crops have failed; millions of cattle have died. Thousands of farmers are eating seed grains to stave off starvation, thus ensuring that there will be insufficient food from future harvests. In lands where suicide is rare, starving nomads, after losing their herds, have killed themselves in desperation.

Hardest hit is Mali, a landlocked country where livestock are considered more precious than money. There, at least 1,000,000 of the nation's estimated 5,000,000 cattle have perished in the worst drought in memory.

Along sandy roads in neighboring Mauritania, the skeletons of hundreds of cattle bake in the sun, picked nearly clean by vultures. Hundreds of other cattle, sheep and goats lie on the parched sand, eyes glassy and ribs protruding, too weak to move. Soon they also will die. In Senegal, desert herdsmen, short of water and grazing land, are driving their scrawny herds to Dakar in a desperate effort to sell the animals before they die. The price for cows these days is as low as $3 a head.

The drought has caused even greater disruption in Upper Volta, where a southward migration of more than a million people is under way. Nomads are pouring into Ivory Coast and Ghana in a search for grazing lands. Their starving animals are poaching on cropland tended by subsistence farmers. The result has been a number of pitched battles, similar to those between cattlemen and sodbusters in America's Old West.

A major reason for the drought is man's neglect of the land. Goats and camels have denuded millions of acres of savanna. In order to feed their animals, herdsmen cut off the tops of trees, halting their growth. Weather experts believe that this systematic stripping of land has altered the climate and brought about an unmistakable decline in the rainfall. As a result, the Sahara is spreading south at a rate of more than half a mile each year.

The U.N.'s Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization is coordinating an airlift to bring more than 400,000 tons of grain to the stricken nations. This is a stopgap measure at best. U.S. officials in Dakar estimate that grain gifts may have to continue for another 30 years. They also believe that it may take three decades to build irrigation and reforestation projects to contain the desert--assuming that the poverty-stricken sub-Saharan nations can find the billions necessary for the job.

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