Earth Equity News

The Great Drought: Disaster Looms in East Africa. By Daniel Howden, The Independent UK, October 3, 2009. "Rotting carcasses testify to the scale of the disaster looming in East Africa. No rainfall for three years has left the Kenyan landscape strewn with animal carcasses...Carcasses of cattle and camels are strewn about the burnt red dirt in every direction. Siridwa Baseli walks out of the haze along a path of the dead and dying. He passes a skeletal cow that has given up and collapsed under a thorn tree. A nomad from the Rendille people, he is driving his herd in search of water. He marks time in seasons but knows that it has not rained for three years: 'Since it is not raining there is no pasture,' he says. Only 40 of his herd of sheep and goats that once numbered 200 have survived. Those that remain are dying at a rate of 10 every day...Across East Africa an extraordinary drought is drying up rivers, and grasslands, scorching crops and threatening millions of people with starvation. In Kenya, the biggest and most robust economy in the region, the rivers that feed its great game reserves have run dry and since the country relies on hydropower, electricity is now rationed in the cities."