The Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV) warned on Friday of the dramatic consequences of a famine which is spreading among the pastoral tribes in the Sahel region. "75 percent of all cattle farmers in Chad are suffering from starvation”, said the STP Africa consultant, Ulrich Delius. "The extreme drought is exhausting the few water-holes and causing the pastures to dry out. With their cattle the nomads are losing their means of subsistence, for these provide them with their daily sustenance and are usually all they have. The native peoples in the centre and north of Chad have in the course of one year lost 40 percent of their stocks of cattle. These pastoral tribes are therefore in real existential danger, urgently in need of fodder for their animals”, said Delius.

Those worst hit by the continuing drought are the more than 300,000 Daza in the Kanem and Bahr El Ghazal regions in the centre of the country. The Daza belong to the Toubou tribe, which with the Tuareg is the largest tribe in the Sahara. More than 70 percent of the Daza have already lost their animals in the drought. In many parts of the country the harvest has failed completely, so everywhere there is a lack of food, both for the people and for the animals.

The Daza, like many semi-nomads, practise nomadic husbandry (transhumance), moving in the dry season from the north to the damper south. It is only in the rainy season that they return to the north. As a result of the continuing drought and the scarcity of foodstuffs the Daza nomads left in the years 2009/2010 their traditional winter-quarters in the north much earlier than usual, which led to an over-cultivation in the south of the country. "We see here a vicious circle, in which the nomads are the losers from the outset, since the land just cannot provide enough to feed their cattle”, said Delius.

The situation is even worse for the more than 280,000 nomads and semi-nomads, mostly of the Toubou tribe, in the three northern regions of Tibesti, Ennedi and Borkou. On account of the difficult security situation only a few aid organisations are active and deliveries of food to the region are hardly possible. More than one million land-mines make the work of the aid-workers extremely difficult. Rebel movements and military conflict between Libya and Chad have had a very severe effect on aid-work in the north of Chad in the past ten years.

Nomads and semi-nomads make up 32 percent of the rural population of Chad, owning 75 percent of all cattle in the country. Animal husbandry (cattle, camels, poultry and goats) accounts for 40 percent of the export revenue of this central African country. Chad is one of the poorest countries in the world, whose place on the index of development is 170th out of 177.