What's farming got to do with it?

Farmer Jess is laughing about the fact that her Masters in Humanitarian Action will actually result in a Masters in Ag Science...so what's Ag Science got to do with humanitarian action?

Several years ago I undertook an in-depth analysis of vulnerability in the Tambo Valley, located in East Gippsland Shire, in north-east Victoria. While focusing on the underlying root causes of the 1998 flood disaster, I found that historical analysis showed a pretty clear pattern - when a drop in commodity prices coincided with drought, farmers would over-stock their land because they didn't want to sell their stock at such low prices. This would compound the effects of drought, resulting in over-grazing, which is particularly problematic in this area, which is characterised by very steep terrain and poor quality soils. Financial constraints of farmers limited their ability to maintain their farms, so rabbit numbers would increase. The small populations have - at least since the end of the gold mining era - been vulnerable to any economic change, and the entire community would suffer as farmers did. Sometimes, bushfires would occur before the drought broke, denuding the landscape even further. When the drought did finally break, it would often do so with torrential rain, which would tear down the steep, denuded slopes, taking with it the valuable top soil and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. These patterns aren't unique to the Tambo Valley, or even to Australian contexts - similar patterns can be found in many places throughout the world. Since natural disasters are intimitely related to the ways we use the land and other resources, the link between agricultural science and humanitarian action doesn't seem a particularly tenuous one to me. Indeed, since many civil conflicts stem from the struggle for secure livelihoods, I think it's often going to be helpful to understanding the root causes of civil conflict too.

An interesting article that again raises the links between livelihood security and vulnerability to natural disaster in the Australian context was published in The Age yesterday: Fire hits drought-ravaged farm. The phrase, "it's just one thing after another" was one I heard regularly while conducting my research in the Tambo Valley - again and again, people said "it was just one thing after another", and similarly, I regularly heard the phrase "it was the straw that broke the camel's back" to describe "The Big Flood" of 1998. Here, fire has hit farmers already struggling to cope with the effects of the drought - in academic-speak, they were already vulnerable, they had more limited resilience and their coping mechanisms were already weakened by the drought.