The Dasanech of the Lowermost Omo Basin: From Adaptation to Development Debacle

Abstract

The decline of Dasanech pastoral economy in recent decades, due to increasing marginalization by powerful external political and economic forces, has forced the majority of Dasanech to move to areas along the Omo River and its active delta or around the northeastern shores of Kenya's Lake Turkana. Radical reduction of river flow volume, lake retreat and elimination of the river's annual flood brought about by the Gibe III dam, together with dam enabled irrigation agricultural enterprises, would destroy the key components of Dasanech livelihood. Most flood recession agriculture would be eliminated, along with 'last resort' livestock grazing lands, forest resources and fish reproductive habitats in the lowermost Omo and Lake Turkana northern shoreline. Even if the highly unlikely and in any case inadequate artificial flood program promised by the Ethiopian government were implemented, Dasanech survival systems would have already been decimated. The looming crisis of region-wide hunger and mortality is intensified by the Ethiopian government's eviction and expropriation of thousands of Dasanech villagers for large-scale irrigated commercial agriculture. Political repression and a culture of fear prevail. As the crisis unfolds, Dasanech communities, faced with vanishing means of survival, would inevitably contribute to rapid escalation of cross-border, interethnic armed conflict. Dasanech Pastoral Decline: Roots and Responses➢ Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the Dasanech pastoralists sustained a system of wide-ranging movements throughout the region's dryland plains, as did other indigenous groups in the transboundary region. These movements ranged across different types of habitats (Carr 1977;Bassi 2011), facilitating diversified food production and complex patterns of risk minimization, as described in Chap. 4.By the second half of the century, the combination of direct territorial restriction by the Kenyan and Ethiopian governments, conflict with other disenfranchised pastoral groups in the region and other pressures effectively confined the Dasanech to the plains west of the Omo River and east of the Kibish River for many years. The Dasanech were forced to relinquish most of these areas:• The upland plains of the Ilemi Triangle-formerly, a 'buffer zone' created by agreement between the Ethiopian monarchy and the Kenyan colonial administration.© The Author(s) 2017 C.J. Carr, River Basin Development and Human Rights in Eastern Africa -A Policy Crossroads, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50469-8_7 111• Grasslands in the Kenya/Ethiopia border area to the northwest of Lake Turkana and southeast of the Ilemi Triangleespecially critical during drought periods. 1 • Woodlands and grasslands along the Kibish River, Koras Mountain and much of the pasture lands between Koras Mountain and the Omo River ( Fig. 1.3)-lands previously shared with the Nyangatom but increasingly fought over as resource degradation and loss of land access have taken hold in the region.• Semi-arid plains and relatively wetter footh...

Three decades of pastoralist settlement dynamics in the Ethiopian Omo Delta based on remote sensing data

“…In our RapidEye study, we provide a detailed account of the development of pastoral settlements and infrastructure that have taken place since the start of large governmental investments in the region, including the construction of Gibe III. Our results are consistent with previous studies showing that groups are shifting from mobile to more sedentary livelihoods (Carr 2017b;Homewood et al 2009;Leslie et al 2013). We observed increasing villagization and concentration of settlements in the northern desert plains of the Delta.…”

“…Due to these pressures, previously secondary activities such as flood-recession agriculture and fishing became more important for survival and led many Dasanech to relocate towards the Omo River banks and Lake Turkana (Carr 2017a). In sum, the Omo Delta has become the last option for survival for many Dasanech villagers (Carr 2017b), who now depend on the ecosystem services of the Delta and are thus vulnerable to environmental changes. The Gibe III dam and water abstraction for irrigation agriculture schemes caused a reduction in seasonal floods and may in the future lead to an overall reduction of River flow (Gownaris et al 2017;Hodbod et al 2019a).…”

“…The Gibe III dam and water abstraction for irrigation agriculture schemes caused a reduction in seasonal floods and may in the future lead to an overall reduction of River flow (Gownaris et al 2017;Hodbod et al 2019a). The Dasanech are highly vulnerable to such changes due to their dependency on the Delta's ecosystem services (Carr 2017b). Declining ecosystem services may play a role in Dasanech lifestyle changes: the cessation of seasonal flooding, and thus sediment and nutrient flows, affects the availability of land for livestock grazing and cropland, leading to the collapse of flood-recession agriculture (Hodbod et al 2019a;Hodbod et al 2019b).…”

“…Traditionally nomadic, the villages of the Dasanech oscillate in appearance, number, and size over the course of the year (Carr 2017b). During and shortly after the wet season, households bring their herds to graze on fresh grass, herbs and shrubs on the wide plains (Carr 2017b).…”

“…Traditionally nomadic, the villages of the Dasanech oscillate in appearance, number, and size over the course of the year (Carr 2017b). During and shortly after the wet season, households bring their herds to graze on fresh grass, herbs and shrubs on the wide plains (Carr 2017b). During the dry season, they return to settlement areas with continuous water supply from the Omo River for cattle grazing and agriculture (GoE and EEPC 2009) and only the young men move with the cattle in search of pasture.…”