Coping Strategies during Drought and Disaster

Abstract

The following section of the book describes coping strategies which are applied during drought and disaster to prevent starvation and the loss of livestock. The change in dietary habits is an important strategy which is applied early on to cope with famine (Halstead & O’Shea, 1989; Mink & Smith, 1989; Colson, 1979; de Garine & Harrison, 1988; Amborn, 1994; Watts, 1988). More animals are slaughtered than usual, food is shared more intensively, and/or everyday food is substituted by less preferred food. Herders all over the world react to drought conditions with increased sales of livestock. When milk supplies fall short, market bought cereals make up the major part of the daily food. Intensified spatial mobility is a distinct strategy of pastoral people to cope with a crisis “by taking advantage of the spatial and temporal structure of resource failure”(Halstead & O’Shea, 1989: 3). Diversification is necessary in order to exploit resources that are not affected by drought, epidemics or violence. Diversification in pastoral households ranges from multi-species herding to so-called “ten-cent-jobs” such as brewing, charcoal burning, and the sale of traditional medicine (see for example Browman, 1987; Odegi-Awuondo, 1990; Legge, 1989). However, coping strategies during a disaster are not only tied to the material world. Many ethnographers observed that during a crisis people look for explanations of the misery and hardship (Scoones, 1996; Mink & Smith, 1989; Colson, 1979). They try to reduce unpredictability by oracles and attempt to influence the course of events by rituals.