Land degradation, famine, and land resource scenarios in Ethiopia

Famines resulting from epidemic hunger must be seen as cultural catastrophes. Usually, but by no means exclusively, they are triggered by natural events. In Ethiopia, many recent famines emerged after severe droughts occurring predominantly in rainfed agro-ecological regions. Famines are cultural catastrophes, because the persistent local economic, social, political, and also ecological and land-use set-up does not respond to overcome the extreme shortage of food in the peasant sector. The famine vulnerability of a country has to be sought in the land use, the human, and the natural elements of a geo-ecological system. In addition, international elements such as economic, political, and humanitarian influences must be included in the systematic approach, in order to understand famine vulnerability and the possibilities of reducing it. Such a geoecosystem approach is used to discuss famine vulnerability in Ethiopia in this chapter. The role of ecology in the creation of famines must be seen in its long-term rather than its short-term impacts. Due to millenia-old traditional land management and use, land resources and productivity potentials have already been considerably reduced in many parts of Ethiopia through deforestation, soil erosion, and fertility decline. This contributes considerably to the present level of famine vulnerability. Long-term trends, on the other hand, give an even worse scenario indicating increased vulnerability in future. Long-term ecological impacts of human and livestock populations on land resource utilization are modelled in this chapter in order to see long-term trends of land use in Ethiopia over the next 50 years.