One man's fortune...

My sources back home tell me that Boston missed by one sunny day the distinguishment of having the rainiest June on record. Now that the weather forcast predicts the spell to be lifting, and sunny days ahead - after tomorrow at least, I will take a moment to lament at how appreciative we in Tanzania would be to get that kind of rain.

The rainy season in Tanzania has ended. The long dry season has been heralded in with the coming of winter - July in Tanzania is cold. Well, not by New England standards, but when you are used to 80 degree days, waking up to 55 degrees is downright chilly. Of course it usually warms up by afternoon, or in my world, sometime after 3-4 cups of hot ginger tea have been drunk. While I can't boast of any records being broken, this past rainy season has been dry by anyone's standards. The effects are painfully obvious.

Crops that were planted over the past few months in expectation of the rain that never came are past wilted to in many cases completely ruined. In Monduli, which typically gets more rain because of its altitude, most corn and potato crops have failed and even plants better suited to dry weather such as banana trees have begun to wilt.

the corn field next to my house

When I come down from the mountain, the crop failure is even more obvious, with field after field of yellow half grown corn, and dry grass as far as I can see. There is a human component to this, both in cause and effect. Many of these crops were planted in land that was previously used for grazing short grasses, and the land was in many cases never suited for crop production. The ever growing population of Tanzania has led to both over grazing of these areas and over cultivation, and a resulting desertification which I have previously discussed. Last year, the rains did not fail, and as a result perhaps there was overconfidence in the amount of farming and grazing the land is able to sustain. However, this year is different.

In Northern Tanzania near Lake Natron (where an astute observer may remember I stayed with a Maasai homestay family in 2004), the government has already begun providing food aid because the price of corn (the only ingrediant aside from water in Tanzania's staple food Ugali) has risen so high.

On the Tanzanian border with Kenya, there are reports of Kenyan Maasai herding their cattle accross the border to Tanzania. On the Northern slopes of Kilimanjaro which offer a small respite, there are reports that over 40,000 head of cattle have crossed the border within the past two weeks.

In the Serengeti, home to one of the worlds largest migrations, migration is not occuring because the 1.2 million wildebeast - the grass eating ruminants that form the base of the migrations - are not migrating. Usually they go north to eat off the grasses of the Maasai Mara plains, but with the grasses dry, they are not moving.

Tanzania (and Kenya) face both a short and long term crisis. In the short term, over the next few months there will likely be water shortages, electric shortages (as much of Tanzania's electricity is water powered), rising food prices as crops continue to fail, hunger, and massive herd mortality. In the long term, there are questions of population, land use, conservation, and food security that will need to be addressed.