Global Policy Forum

The fried fish offered on the blackboard menu of La Tchadienne is just for show. For weeks its chef has cooked nothing but goat and beef, though the restaurant stands spitting distance from Lake Chad, once the third-largest freshwater source in Africa. The lake that once provided adequate livelihoods for 20 million people in west-central Africa, from Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger, has lost 90 percent of its surface area in 30 years.

The extent of the tragedy — a horror story wrought by human abuse and climate change — is marked by the boundary where sand dunes and sable-colored desert sands give way to rich black loam, earth once covered by up to four meters (12 feet) of water. Down the hill, the thatch-roofed mud huts of Koudouboul cluster on land once covered by the lake. Yet, even as some fear Lake Chad could shrink to a pond, people still come to its shores, searching for water, fish, pasture and farmland. Today, some 30 million people struggle to survive along the lake. Friction has arrived along with the newcomers from further north and across borders, according to Mayor Adam Youssouf Terri of the lakeside capital, Bol. There are arguments over territory between fishermen and fishermen, farmers and fishermen, farmers and farmers, cattle herders and farmers, Chadians from elsewhere in Chad and those with deeper roots in this region, and between Chadians and foreigners.

"We've been largely able to negotiate peaceful settlements, but we're seeing more violence, even deaths," Terri said. In 1995, World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin said "The wars of the next century will be about water." Since then, the warnings are coming more frequently and with increasing urgency, from bodies as diverse as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the U.N. Development Agency.

There are examples in Lebanon, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, but from here you don't have to look further than eastern Chad, where clans are fighting in a spillover from Darfur, the bloody conflict in Sudan's far west rooted in disputes over water and grazing rights between sedentary farmers and semi-nomadic herders. Zones most prone to conflict are rivers and lakes shared by several countries. The head of the Lake Chad Basin Commission, Muhammad Sani Adamu, said the various nationalities that live off the lake have got along for decades. He blamed politics for rising friction. "All the problems are with the leaders who want to define boundaries and are territorial," he said. "At the grass-roots level, people are well integrated — economically, socially and culturally.

Chad has the biggest share of Lake Chad, followed by Nigeria, then Niger and Cameroon. At Koudouboul, just one tiny dot on the map of Lake Chad, a third of the fishing village has left in the past 10 years, some to go farming, some to become itinerant vendors, others seeking work in the capital, N'Djamena, according to Abakar Ibrahim, the oldest resident at 70.

Everything has changed, from the geography and climate to the quality of life. "Thirty years ago, I used to fish here and those islands didn't exist," he said, pointing to Kourimirom, several hundred yards (meters) away, now inhabited by Nigerians though within Chad's border.

Once, he said, fishermen risked having their oar-propelled wooden canoes tip over, their hauls were so big. And the fish were giants, he said, stretching his arms wide to indicate a fish seven or eight feet (more than two meters) long. Now, they're luck to get a bowlful of tiddlers smaller then the palm of his hand. A catch that included 20 types of fish has diminished to half a dozen of lesser quality. "Two-thirds, more, of the different types of fish have just disappeared in my lifetime," Ibrahim said.

The larger, fleshier varieties would come in the rainy season. "It used to be really icy this time of year," he said at dawn on a chilly December day. "Now that it's got warmer, the big fish aren't here anymore." In the days when fishing sustained a comfortable income, fishermen were a force to be reckoned with by government officials, he said. Now they are poor, he said, and no one listens.

Children used to be strong and plump. "But look at those puny legs, and they're always getting sick now." Babies die of malaria, he said of the mosquito-borne disease that debilitates the healthy but can kill a malnourished infant. In 1960, Lake Chad it covered 45,000 square kilometers (about 17,000 square miles). By 1998 it had shrunk to 10,000 square kilometers (about 4,000 square miles), according to Chad's Ministry of Environment and Water. After a particularly dry spell, it covered just 550 square kilometers (about 200 square miles) in June 2002, according to Adamu, from the lake commission.

Adamu and Chadian government officials in Bol insist the lake is disappearing solely because of global warming — with severe droughts since the 1970s and temperatures rising up to 50 degrees centigrade, which causes large volumes of water to evaporate. But international experts say other factors also have contributed. Environmentalists point to the Global International Waters Assessment of the Lake Chad basin, which lay primary blame on irrigation projects, including about 20 reservoir dams built in the 1970s and early 1980s that irrigate rice fields at the expense of downstream traditional farmers.

The report questioned growing a water-intensive crop such as rice in a water-deficit area that brings low production rates. Adamu denied irrigation was a problem, saying Nigeria had shelved plans for large-scale irrigation schemes. Abakar A. Mahamat Kaila, an agronomist who returned home to run the government's Lake Development Company, says canals built to provide domestic water and irrigation have not received enough water from the lake for years.

So there's no running water in the homes of Bol, and well water from the depleted water table is making people ill. Water engineers say they now would need to dig deeper than 100 meters (300 feet), an expensive proposition, to provide potable water.

Adamu for years has nurtured ambitious plans proposed by the Central African Republic to transfer water from the Obangui River, the biggest tributary of the mighty Congo, to refill the lake.

Tenders will be put out in January for a feasibility study on the impact on the Congo Basin of the project, which would involve constructing a dam on the Obangui. Adamu said the dam would be hydroelectric, providing electricity for the project and industrial development. He also envisions the return of fish, and water for farms and forests.

But the proposed project likely could create exactly the same kind of problem for the Congo basin that Lake Chad is now suffering, said Jamie Pittock, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Freshwater Program, which has a wetlands reserve at Lake Chad

Last month, Kaila and other residents performed the annual bathing in the lake waters, a ritual meant to welcome the rains. "When I was young, in the rainy season, the lake waters came right up to our homes and sometimes flooded them. This year, we had to walk nearly 30 kilometers (about 20 miles) to reach the lake edge," he said sadly.

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