Replacing Pastoralism with Irrigated Agriculture in the Awash Valley, North-Eastern Ethiopia: Counting the Costs

by Roy Behnke and Carol Kerven

The development of hydropower and the availability of irrigated land per capita is lower in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other major region of the world. After several decades of avoiding investment in large infrastructural projects, particularly big dams, international donors are under pressure from African governments to remedy this situation or themselves look forward to doing so (Lautze et al. 2010; You 2010; World Bank 2004). Accelerated dam development would impact directly on pastoral welfare and livestock productivity. With the exception of the Congo, all of Africa’s major river flood plains – the Niger, Nile, Zambezi, Senegal, Volta, Okavango and Lake Chad basin – support significant numbers of pastoralists. In East Africa alone, 56% of the Nile Basin is used by pastoralists (Amede et al. 2011), and smaller river systems used by pastoralists include the Tana, Omo, Jubba-Shebelle and Awash. Few other systems of land use can survive in the empty expanses of rangeland that pastoralists can profitably exploit, but it is also clear that African pastoralists rely upon access to valuable riverine real-estate, and new dam building will intensify competition for these key resources (Scudder 1991).