jaggernaut wrote:How have the Turkana people survived for hundreds of years in their environment, and how come they are no longer able to survive in the recent past due to the frequent devastating famines? Surely no one was giving them relief food in 1700AD.
Maybe reconstructing their lifestyle and how they coped in their environment in the ancient times could be the key to solving the hunger problem now and in the future.
Nditto, that question needs to be asked and answered satisfactorily before we move forward. Let's not make the mistake of assuming we know what they need and then going ahead to prescribe our own tailor-made 'solutions.'
I'm told of a place in Moyale county (exact name escapes me) where a certain NGO came and established an irrigation scheme. You know what the locals have done? Instead of taking to farming as was expected, the bulk of them simply abandoned the place and moved elsewhere leaving only a few in the disused facility. I'm informed that recently Kamaus, Mwangis and other 'wabara' have moved in to make use of the idle irrigated land.
One more thing: whereas droughts are natural occurences, famines are more often than not, man-made. I have lived in some of the perennially famine-stricken regions of this country and the one thing I always noted was that despite people starving to death in the villages, there was always food available in the local markets, albeit more expensive. In my opinion, famine isn't so much a problem of lack of food but rather a problem of lack of (stable) household incomes. We fix that and we shall be home and dry.
And finally, infrastructure. The sooner we fix this the better. We all recall how in the last time milk as well as other fresh farm produce were going to waste in places such as Mwea, Kijabe while our Turkana kin were starving at the same time. Yaani, the deficiency in infrastructure (principally, motorable roads) introduces market deficiencies where some have too much while others lack. I am of the opinion that if Turkana was well connected to the rest of the country by road, they would hardly starve. We'd buy the animals from them and in turn take food to them.
Just my opinions...
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.