Posted on 11/09/2017 9:57:34 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
The sun is setting over Karamoja. Time for the nomadic herders to return their cattle to thorn-ringed enclosures. They've roamed since first light, searching for pasture in Uganda's poorest region where water and grazing land are scarce.
Now the changing climate has brought hunger and bewilderment as traditional coping methods for the harsh environment fail. As the first major global climate conference convenes in Germany since President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will pull out of the 2015 Paris accord, many in Africa fear they will be hit harder than most.
Historically, the rainy season runs from April to September and the dry season from November to March, creating one harvest per year. But now that pattern has changed, causing crop failures and lower milk production.
"The seasons are now different," said Michael Lokwameri, a father of seven children.
As tradition dictates, when changes in nature are noticed, village elders gather at a local shrine to decide on a way forward.
This year, the fruitless tamarind trees tell the elders that the upcoming dry season will not be as severe as last year's, said elder Max Adjaka during a gathering in his village in Nakapiripirit district.
Last year, more than half of Karamoja's population, or about 640,000 people, faced food shortages. Many resorted to selling their cattle or begging in the streets. Others ate wild plants.
"It is just desperation of hunger that forces us to eat such things," said 72-year-old Nakoki Nayep.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Nomadic Herder: “Where’s my Obamaphone?”
My daughter has been to Uganda three times over the past ten years, the last time being about three years ago. She has pictures of lush, green landscapes. She was in Hoima. Perhaps the herders should seek out greener pastures.
Fighting something that doesn’t exist is quite the daunting task, but miraculously they found some african moron to do it.
how are they ‘fighting’ this fictional malady? By pouring massive amounts of money into it? By not farting so much? By killing all their cattle?
Heaven knows cattle ranching in Uganda has always been a lucrative enterprise until Donald Trump came along.
There’ll be a ton of this crap over the next few weeks when the United Nations tries to control the World with the Global Warming Scam
And here I was thinking (just from the story header), that maybe they'd found some way to make their cattle fart less often, because that contributes to global warming.
Of course, if they don't have much to eat, maybe they already do fart less often. Oh well, I'm sure I'll be dead before the sky starts falling, so screw it.
Perhaps the greener pastures are owned and used by other herders with longer spears with sharper heads.
Strange. I just looked on Google Earth and only tiny spots of Uganda aren’t lush and green.
If those greener pastures belong to cattle herders who are just using their herding as a front, while making their real income poaching on government game preserves, then they probably have other weapons at hand, full-auto not excepted.
I can see why they might consider staying out of those pastures to be a smart move.
Karamoja usually has two times of rain. The Long Rains start in late March and run through July, then the Short Rains start in October and run for a few weeks into November. Some years the Short Rains fail and it will not rain from the end of July until the end of March. The Southeast Monsoon brings in the moist air.
In very bad years, the Long Rains are sporadic. It will rain enough to soften the soil and everyone plants. The crops (Maize, Sorghum, Millet, Ground Nuts) sprout, but then the rains falter and the resultant crop is meager or nonexistent. Hunger occurs about every five years and famine every ten years or so.
The tribes in the Karamoja region and those in Turkana & Pokot on the Kenya side of the border are semi-nomadic pastoralists. The men & boys herd small cattle in herds of up to 20 to 30 thousand. Cows are bled from a neck vein and about a quart/liter of blood is collected. Each cow is bled about once a month. This blood is mixed with milk and curdled with a bit of the cow’s urine. This mix, with some grain and wild greens, sustains the cattle herders. It takes about 40 cows to support one man. Most of the women and small children stay at village and farm.
During the great famine of 1980-81, 500 people a week were dying in Karamoja, which is a very sparsely populated area. In the small hunter-gatherer tribe of the IK who live in far NE Karamoja, of the 6,000 people in the tribe, 2,000 people died. Colin Turnbull’s book, The Mountain People ( https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-People-Colin-M-Turnbull/dp/0671640984 ), tells of the Ik during the famine in 1967. [note: Turnbull was experiencing a bit of culture shock when he wrote this. The Ik are much nicer people than he describes in the book]
Karamoja is a very difficult place to live. Not as bad as Turkana or the Sahara, but totally different from southern Uganda where the usual abundant rain allows two or even three crops per year.
Yeah, in all of recorded history, the weather in Africa has been completely stable and predictable. Until now.....
The sane folks are meeting just up the road from Bonn in Düsseldorf.
My daughter-in-law was in Jinja, Uganda, two years ago visiting and volunteering at an orphanage run by her high school friend. She didn’t see any of this “climate catastrophe.” Instead, she said that even though it was different, it was not as bad a place as she feared. They even had a Mexican restaurant in Jinja.
She also got to go bungee jumping over the Nile River gorge as it exits Lake Victoria, which was pretty cool. Except for the crocodiles.
2nd article today on FR that’s just a steaming pile of horsesh*t. Soros must have sent out new talking points for his minions in the media.
I guess global warming has caused the Sahara to form too.
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