Elephants or people?

my husband loved to watch National Geographic TV shows about Africa.

Me, not so much, because often they came with snide remarks against locals who were moving into the animal's habitat, and hey, they are talking about my friends you guys. (I worked in Africa as a young doctor). I love animals, but excuse me for thinking there is a hint of racism behind the push to save the wild life that ignores the plight of local farmers. 

A recent article from the WAPO discusses the farmers who are harmed by elephant overpopulation, this time in Namibia:

Nderiki and her husband had been married 65 years before he was killed by an elephant in 2014. Like nearly everyone else in this cluster of villages, it has been years since her fields weren’t trampled and eaten up by what she calls “the giants.”

She used to grow more than 100 bags of sorghum in a season. Last harvest, she salvaged three.

Growing resentment toward the animals among farmers here and around Botswana is upending the country’s politics and prompting the reversal of policies that turned tourism into Botswana’s second-biggest earner after diamonds.

part of the problem: Tourism. 

The furor has also spilled into a larger debate over race in a country where white foreigners and the descendants of colonialists control much of the conservation and tourism sectors while many who live outside the national parks eke out a living on government subsidies....

and the green eco friendly tourism types don't like the idea of culling the overpopulation of the elephants.

The country’s president, Mokgweetsi Masisi... said that in his view, the numbers of elephants are now “far more than Botswana’s fragile environment, already stressed by drought and other effects of climate change, can safely accommodate,” leading to a “sharp increase” in conflict between humans and elephants. He believes a limited, permit-based return to hunting can solve the crisis.....

headsup AnnAltnouse.

the problem is blamed of course on Global warming.

But back in the 1970s it was blamed on overpopulation, because Ehrlich's book "The Population Bomb" was a best seller.

So organizations have been there at least 50 years pushing population control on the locals....when I worked in Africa, 40 years ago, every village had a "pill lady", but until we got a grant from oxfam, to dig wells, most villages got their water from rivers or water holes that became very polluted in the dry season.

Ah but wait a bit: There is another drought going on. These droughts are periodic in the area.

NYTimes article from 1992:

Zimbabwe kills starving elephants for food.

Faced with the worst drought in southern Africa this century, the wildlife authorities at a national park here are proceeding with what they call the grim but essential step of killing thousands of elephants and impalas so other animals as well as starving people can survive.

nor is this the first time this happened: the article relates what happened in Kenya when they decided not to cull the herds:

Mr. Wright of the World Wildlife Fund said a situation comparable to the one here developed in Kenya in the early 1970's.

The wildlife authorities decided then not to kill elephants during a drought in Tsavo National Park, even though they were deemed too numerous and many people living in the area of the park were in need of food. In the end, thousands of elephants died of thirst and hunger, and that in turned stirred resentment among the peasants living nearby, Mr. Wright said. When the good weather came, the elephant population in Tsavo never recovered because the angry peasants cooperated in poaching.

So global warming? Or the el Nino cycle?

Periodic droughts are not unknown in that area: and the collapse of the infrastructure, combined with a population explosion in the cities, has led to water shortages in cities there: another problem to be discussed in another post.

but again this is not a new problem:

Article on the "great famine" of the 1870s.

The Great Drought actually was several droughts, Singh found, beginning with a failure of India's 1875 monsoon season. East Asia's drought started in the spring of 1876, followed by droughts in parts of South Africa, northern Africa and northeastern Brazil. There were also droughts in western Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia. The length and severity of the droughts prompted the Global Famine...

One of the problems of much of South and East Africa is not just the monsoon type rain cycle, but the geology that makes the soil thin and easily exhausted. This leads to desertification and loss of topsoil.

Here is a technical article on the desertification of Africa.

so how does one fight this type of desertification?

China to the rescue?
There is a Chinese project to fight desertification in Namibia.

China has reversed the expansion of its deserts. An average of 4,400 square kilometers of desertified land has been restored each year since 2000, according to statistics. "China is at the forefront of sand prevention and control," Liu said. "It is urgent to share our methods with other parts of the world."

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a longer version of this article is posted on my Africablog.