Socio-economic Impacts of Drought and Desertification on the livelihood on farmers and pastoralists in El Duiem Locality, White Nile State, Sudan

Abstract

The White Nile State is one of the states, which were severely affected by drought and desertification, and El Duiem Locality is among those areas. This study focused on the socio-economics impacts of drought and desertification on the livelihood of farmers and pastoralists in that area. The main data of the study was obtained through direct interviews using questionnaire in May 2008. A multi-stratified random sampling procedure was used to select 8 villages from 4 units in both the less and the more affected areas by drought and desertification, and then quota sampling was adopted to select the farmers and the pastoralists from each village to have a total sample size of 100 farmers and 73 pastoralists, in addition to collect secondary data from related sources. The research had come to a conclusion that drought and desertification had resulted in migration and some conflicts between farmers and pastoralists, lack of food and water. The prevalence of poverty made the farmers and pastoralists practice a number of occupations, and selling their animals to cope with the state of income insufficiency. The occurrence of migration among the farmers was more than among the pastoralists. There were significant differences in income among farmers in the less and more affected villages, but there were no significant differences in the other socio-economic characteristics under consideration. Also there were significant differences among pastoralists in secondary occupation and income, but there were no significant differences in the rest of socio-economic criteria considered in the less and the more affected villages. The desertification and drought in the study area lead to decline in iv productivity of the main crops. Desertification and drought also lead to deterioration in the rangelands productivity and species compositions, which led to decrease of animals numbers. There were significant differences in the number of animals per household before the drought of 1983/84 and in 2007. The study recommended rehabilitation programme, awareness about environment problems, establishment of shelter belts, improves basic services and the need to conduct further studies of the problem to face these deteriorated situations.