UN official visits Uganda’s ground zero of climate change and humanitarian woes

Visiting a semi-arid region of Uganda where the economic and environmental effects of climate change have been added to humanitarian needs and chronic under-development, the top United Nations emergency relief official today saw first-hand an area of potential conflict over increasingly shrinking resources.

“They are living on the edge, daily facing the biggest challenges we must confront today as a global society,” Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes said of the people of Uganda’s north-east Karamoja region. “Climate change has brought increasingly frequent droughts and, with them, greater insecurity and water shortages.”

The majority of the 1 million people are pastoralists or agro-pastoralists in one of Uganda’s most under-developed and politically marginalized areas. Whereas droughts used to occur every 10 years, narrowing to every five over the past 20 years, there have now been four consecutive years of drought and/or poor rainfalls. In January, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) launched an emergency operation to feed more than 970,000 people, 90 per cent of the total.

Mr. Holmes visited Apa Lopama kraal, where 3,000 men and boys and 15,000 livestock subsist, and the Lobanya resettlement where nearly 900 people have moved to access more fertile land for planting. But the site sits on a major crossing between two districts, providing dry season grazing for pastoralists and increasing the potential for conflict over access to pasture, farmland and water during the October to April dry season.

Cattle raiding and gun-running are already all too frequent occurrences in Karamoja, which borders on southern Sudan and the Turkana region of north-western Kenya. In 2006, the Government began a disarmament operation in the region’s five districts and has linked them into a national programme that seeks to bring poorer parts up to par with the rest of the country.

“We need to work with the Government on creating long-term food security through improving agricultural and pastoralist livelihoods, and development of basic services such as education, health and road infrastructure,” Mr. Holmes said. “Disaster risk reduction activities are part of the key to this – for example, gathering and making better use of what rain does fall.”

“While voluntary resettlement of some of the population to areas in which they can farm more productively is one solution, we must also find more effective ways to support pastoralism as the most viable livelihood in many parts of the region – for example, by improving animal health and building better rural infrastructure including access to markets.”

Against nearly every basic indicator, Karamoja exhibits the lowest standards in the country, even below the conflict-affected districts of northern Uganda, which Mr. Holmes visited yesterday.

Some 82 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, maternal mortality averages 750 per 100,000 live births, and infant mortality 105 in 1,000 live births. The under-five mortality rate is 174 per 1,000 live births compared to the national average of 134. Only 9 per cent of the population have access to sanitation facilities and only 40 per cent to safe drinking water. Only 11 percent of the region’s population can read.

During his four-day visit to Uganda, Mr. Holmes is attending an African Union (AU) Special Summit on Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons.