UPSCpedia: Geograpedia - Drought Vs. Famine

Drought

• A drought is an extended period of months or years when a region notes a deficiency in its water supply.
• Common consequences of drought include:
  • Diminished crop growth or yield productions and carrying capacity for livestock
  • Dust storms, when drought hits an area suffering from desertification and erosion
  • Famine due to lack of water for irrigation
  • Habitat damage, affecting both terrestrial and aquatic wildlife
  • Malnutrition, dehydration and related diseases
  • Mass migration, resulting in internal displacement and international refugees
  • Reduced electricity production due to reduced water flow through hydroelectric dams
  • Snake migration and increases in snakebites
  • Social unrest
  • War over natural resources, including water and food
  • Wildfires, such as Australian bushfires, are more common during times of drought
• People tend to define droughts in three main ways:
  1. Meteorological drought is brought about when there is a prolonged period with less than average precipitation. Meteorological drought usually precedes the other kinds of drought.
  2. Agricultural droughts are droughts that affect crop production or the ecology of the range.
  3. Hydrological drought is brought about when the water reserves available in sources such as aquifers, lakes and reservoirs fall below the statistical average. Like an agricultural drought, this can be triggered by more than just a loss of rainfall. For instance, Kazakhstan was recently awarded a large amount of money by the World Bank to restore water that had been diverted to other nations from the Aral Sea under Soviet rule. Similar circumstances also place their largest lake, Balkhash, at risk of completely drying out.
• Strategies for drought protection, mitigation or relief include:
  • Dams - many dams and their associated reservoirs supply additional water in times of drought.
  • Cloud seeding - an artificial technique to induce rainfall.
  • Desalination of sea water for irrigation or consumption.
  • Drought monitoring - Continuous observation of rainfall levels and comparisons with current usage levels can help prevent man-made drought. Careful monitoring of moisture levels can also help predict increased risk for wildfires, using such metrics as the Palmer Drought Index.
  • Land use - Carefully planned crop rotation can help to minimize erosion and allow farmers to plant less water-dependent crops in drier years.
  • Outdoor water-use restriction - Regulating the use of sprinklers, hoses or buckets on outdoor plants, filling pools, and other water-intensive home maintenance tasks.
  • Rainwater harvesting - Collection and storage of rainwater from roofs or other suitable catchments.
  • Recycled water - Former wastewater (sewage) that has been treated and purified for reuse.
  • Transvasement - Building canals or redirecting rivers as massive attempts at irrigation in drought-prone areas.

Famine

• A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including crop failure, overpopulation, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. Every continent in the world has experienced a period of famine throughout history.
• Definitions of famines are based on three different categories – these include food supply-based, food consumption-based and mortality-based definitions. Some definitions of famines are:
  • Blix – Widespread food shortage leading to significant rise in regional death rates.
  • Brown and Eckholm – Sudden, sharp reduction in food supply resulting in widespread hunger.
  • Scrimshaw – Sudden collapse in level of food consumption of large numbers of people.
  • Ravallion – Unusually high mortality with unusually severe threat to food intake of some segments of a population.
  • Cuny – A set of conditions that occurs when large numbers of people in a region cannot obtain sufficient food, resulting in widespread, acute malnutrition.
• Some elements make a particular region more vulnerable to famine. These include:
  • Poverty
  • Inappropriate social infrastructure
  • A suppressive political regime
  • A weak or under-prepared government

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 World Vs. Somalia

 Famine in India

• Famine has been a recurrent feature of life in the Indian sub-continental countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and reached its numerically deadliest peak in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Indian agriculture is heavily dependent on the climate of India: a favorable southwest summer monsoon is critical in securing water for irrigating crops. Droughts, combined with policy failures, have periodically led to major Indian famines