NGINYANG, Kenya — At noon in Joseph Kwopin’s dry and dusty homestead in Kenya’s central Baringo County, a calf shelters from the sweltering sun under a shed made of sticks. The barren ground has no vegetation but for a few shrubs and the red-flowered Carraluma socotrana plant — a rare species whose appearance here could seem cruel given that it isn’t edible, even to livestock.
Clad in a colorful tribal Shuka, sandals made of old tires and a small sword strapped to his waist, Kwopin wipes his brow and looks at the cloudless sky as he explains he’s never seen a drought as devastating as this.
“We normally experience three or four months of drought,” says the 59-year-old. “But the last drop that fell here was last July.”
Experts say the water situation in East Africa is the worst the continent has seen since 2011, when a famine-inducing drought killed as many as 260,000 people in Somalia, Kenya and other parts of East Africa. According to UNICEF, 2.6 million Kenyans have become food insecure as a result of the lack of rainfall. The Kenya Red Cross reported at the beginning of this year that 5 percent of livestock in some areas of Kenya have died since the drought began last year.
Livestock accounts for an estimated 12 percent of Kenya’s gross domestic product and more than 40 percent of its agricultural sector. The mass deaths of the animals are threatening the livelihoods of Kenyan pastoralists like Kwopin, who inhabit the arid and semi-arid lands that comprise 80 percent of the country. In times of drought, they must roam farther in search of grass over which they must compete with people from neighboring tribes.
Some pastoralists have resorted to cattle stealing to recoup their losses — at times through violence. The only solution to the insecurity, some experts say, may be for herders to change their long-held customs by planting and maintaining grass of their own for sustainable grazing.
[READ: 4 Experts Share Significant Climate Change Facts]
Nobody knows how many thousands of cows and goats have been stolen since the drought began in late 2016, when the short rains of November and December failed. But in 2015, 25,000 livestock were stolen in 56 raids in just one county, according to a police report. The animals are either merged into the stealer’s own herds or sold immediately to slaughterhouses.
Last month, a few miles south of Kwopin’s village, Akong Arikor stood with two of his nephews as their few remaining cows and goats grazed in a patch of grass. The drought has not been kind to his livestock — 77 of his goats perished, and many of his neighbors cattle were stolen, he says.
Even worse than the cattle thieves, says Arikor, is the response by Kenyan police. Acting on a regional edict, each time livestock are stolen in one community, police are now authorized to confiscate an equivalent number of animals from the community where the suspected rustlers originated — even if they belong to an innocent bystander.
Arikor recalls the February morning when three police trucks approached his home. His wife was in the house together with their three children. “I told my wife and we took our children and we ran away. A few minutes later, we saw the grass thatch roof of the house in flames,” he says.
Arikor built a new house and now hides any time he sees police vehicles on the road. He says many of his neighbors fled after their houses were burned by police, opting to drive their cattle onto land inhabited by another tribe — the kind of migration that fuels tension.
Arikor and his family aren’t the only ones who fled. A World Vision report released in May found that more than 16,600 people in Baringo County had been displaced so far this year by drought and conflict over resources.
[READ: The Best Countries for Green Living]
Though Kwopin agrees that cattle rustling is a problem, he doesn’t think crude police tactics will solve it. He says the underlying problems run much deeper. “Those who are responsible are youth, because they refuse to listen. Elders tell them every day not to go, but they don’t listen,” he says.
Kenya’s government, nonprofits and other groups have struggled to find a way to addresses the effects of drought and cattle rustling. Some advocate for programs that would buy cattle from herders for slaughter in times of drought so that some of their wealth can be converted into cash. With fewer cattle, there would be fewer animals to compete over the remaining grass.
Others believe that a livestock insurance program that started in July 2014 and now covers 14,000 households will solve the problem. Some of these programs have taken place in Baringo in the past. But experts say such programs provide only temporary relief. The only solution to the lack of grass, many believe, is to somehow grow more of it.
Elizabeth Meyerhoff, an American-born anthropologist who studied Kenya’s Pokot tribe, and her Kenyan-born husband Murray Roberts, have lived on the shores of Lake Baringo for decades. For more than 20 years they’ve been working with local communities to rehabilitate degraded grasslands and introduce the concept of managed, sustainable grazing.
Through their organization, Rehabilitation of Arid Environments (RAE) Trust, they have rehabilitated 6,000 acres around Baringo with natural, indigenous grasses on which different ethnic groups can graze their livestock.
Their hope is that communities will be able to decrease their dependence on naturally growing grass, which is often overgrazed and is easily depleted during times of drought.
Kwopin is a staunch believer in the organization’s work. He first obtained seeds from RAE Trust in 2006, and he now harvests grass seeds to sell back to the organization for use on other plots.
“When I first started, people were laughing at me for trying to plant grass in an arid area such as this,” Kwopin says. “But as I have succeeded, they have come to realize that it is good to have their own areas” on which to graze.
Kwopin is working to rehabilitate more than 200 acres of arid land, and he expects the grass will cushion his cattle from starvation. Unlike his neighbors, some of whom saw entire herds of livestock die from starvation during the recent drought, all but three of Kwopin’s 20 cows survived.
Jacob Kushner contributed to this reporting
More from U.S. News
4 Experts Share Significant Climate Change Facts
Climate Change Sheds New Light on Lesotho’s Water Deal With South Africa
Deadly Heat Waves Caused by Climate Change Now Threaten Third of the World
Drought in Kenya Encourages Some Herders to Farm originally appeared on usnews.com
