World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008 - (Page 23)

A Region in CRISIS 1963 Water Level 1973 Water Level 2001 Water Level The Lake Chad River Basin, made up of Lake Chad and nearly 1 million square miles around it including the Far North region of Cameroon as well as parts of several other countries, is one of the poorest regions of the world. Once one of the great “inland seas” of the world, a vast, shallow body of water with a seemingly inexhaustible population of fish, Lake Chad has shrunk by a stunning 90 percent since 1973. Yet even as the lake shrunk, the region’s population rapidly grew. An estimated 37 million people now live here, many of whom migrated recently from the Sahel region just to the north, where arid land is turning into desert. The combination of disappearing resources and increasing demand is making an already poor region even poorer. Crop productivity is falling as water becomes increasingly scarce (only 5 percent of households in Cameroon’s Far North region have access to fresh drinking water). It is stark evidence of what scientists worldwide are warning: Overuse of the land, along with climate changes, are throwing an already fragile system into precipitous decline. As these droughts intensified, people from the Sahel region, many of whom are nomads, moved southward to find more arable land. But the droughts continued to spread. The lake shrank, rainy seasons became shorter and milder, and the dry periods stretched longer. As the population in the basin increased and its climate changed, residents scrambled to control the region’s declining resources. The old, often nomadic way of living, adjusting to the cycles of the seasons and occasional shift in lake and river levels, was no longer convenient or productive enough. The area’s regular flooding interfered with the growing large-scale agriculture industry, which needed reliable sources of great www.heifer.org volumes of water. Over the last 50 years, the number and size of dams and other diversions to natural water flow increased sharply. As massive irrigation projects along the lake and rivers shunted water away upstream, they touched off changes throughout the basin. There were fewer fish and less vegetation for animal fodder and firewood. Without floods to fertilize the land, the soil became increasingly poor. Even projects designed by well-intentioned engineers to intensify food production along the rivers caused harm as they drained valuable wetlands. These water-management practices, together with the area’s intensifying droughts, set off a vicious cycle. As streams were diverted, plant life throughout the basin thinned; without plant cover, soil temperatures rose, rainfall evaporated more quickly and erosion worsened. Scientists think that the loss of vegetative ground cover may be a significant factor in the disappearance of the monsoons. As less water is recycled into the atmosphere by plants, less falls as rain. As the regular cycles of the seasons become unpredictable and population pressures increase, so does the mismanagement of the land by the increasingly desperate poor. The land is stripped of vegetation as people graze their animals and scavenge for firewood, and the natural fertility of the soil is exhausted as farmers plant too often and too densely. Agricultural productivity declines, along with the September/October 2008 | WORLD ARK 23 http://www.heifer.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008

World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008 Contents Letters For the Record The Good Life Asked and Answered Digging Up the Past Not a Drop to Drink Facing the Ogres of Progress Mixed Media Heifer Bulletin Heifer Spirit World Ark Market Calendar First Person

World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008

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