ABSTRACT

In September 1983, the international relief agency Oxfam took the exceptional step of issuing a ‘Weather Alert’, announcing to the nations that ‘drastic changes in the world's weather are causing havoc around the world’. A special appeal, which was soon echoed by other relief agencies, announced that droughts and floods are currently affecting over forty countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, causing hardship and suffering to millions of people’. Experienced relief officials, it was reported, could not recall any period when so many people had been faced by disaster over such a large area of the globe. Oxfam already then was confronted by more demands for emergency aid than at any time in its 40-year history, and this was ‘in large measure caused by unprecedented weather conditions that had devastated agricultural production’.

In February 1984, the National Geographic Magazine publicized the emergency in a well-informed article by its assistant editor, Thomas Y. Canby, on the exceptional weather of 1982–3 which linked the serious anomalies in many parts of the world to an El Niño ocean current event, a phenomenon which affects the warmth of the wide Pacific in the equatorial zone, and has known repercussions on world weather, as explained in Chapter 1. The 1982–3 El Niño was the strongest occurrence ever measured, with ocean temperatures for some months up to 7 degC warmer than normal in the equatorial Pacific as against the 3 degC anomalies familiar in such cases. The phenomenon is associated also with the so-called Southern Oscillation, mentioned elsewhere in this book. Canby's article expounded the global scale of the effects on the atmosphere and its circulation. It listed droughts and bushfires in Australia, droughts causing crop failures in Indonesia, in the Philippine Islands and in India, and droughts in Africa; in sub-Saharan Africa north of the Equator this was only an intensification of the already long succession of drought years. Near the Equator Ecuador and 195northern Peru experienced excessive rain, flooding and landslides, while the direct effect of the warm water off the coast ruined the anchovy fishery which had already been very severely hit in similar manner by the 1972 El Niño occurrence (that was associated with the first severe phase of the Sahel-Ethiopian drought in Africa). Farther from the equator there was drought in Mexico, as in the same latitudes in Africa; while exceptional storms and rains in the lower-middle latitudes caused floods and destroyed crops in California and Colorado, in Cuba, and in the Gulf coast states of the USA. From all these afflicted regions Canby's estimates indicated a world-wide cost of US $8.65 billion.

The anomalies continued into 1984. At least so far as the countries of Africa along the southern fringe of the Sahara were concerned, worse was to come when the drought of that year proved the most extreme yet. Crop failures set millions of starving refugees flocking to urban centres in search of sustenance, particularly in Ethiopia and the Sudan. More than 10 million are estimated to have been affected by the famine (Oxfam report 1986), and probably more than a million died. Television news reporting shocked the world, which had never witnessed a natural disaster on such a scale at the time of the occurrence, and produced the ‘Live-Aid’ relief fund collection organized by Mr Geldof.

The extent and distribution of the emergency in Africa was certainly affected by the civil war in Ethiopia, and by political factors in various countries. But underlying it was the drought, which had already then continued over nearly 20 years. This is an example of a climatic shift, which few governments or administrators before the 1980s seemed able to take serious cognizance of. It seems to be still regarded largely as something previously unheard of in human affairs. But in poor countries, with rapidly growing populations expanding on to areas with poor soils and always marginal (arid) climate, such changes are menacing and inevitably affect international affairs.

In recognition of this, the Royal Geographical Society held a one-day discussion meeting in London on 25 November 1985 on ‘The geographical background to Africa's crisis’. The rest of this chapter reprints the invited contribution made by the writer.