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198 CHAPTER 5were struck just as hard by rainfall deficits, offering no relief to the alreadyhard-hit herds. There was therefore a collective move towards the river Niger,as had taken place during the droughts of 1947 and 1914. 10 This was to no avail.The river had dried to a trickling stream, leaving the sedentary population withfailed crops and the pastoralists without pasture for the animals. Fourth, themove towards Algeria to sell surplus livestock was impossible as there was nosurplus livestock left to sell. 11 Livestock losses were estimated at around 80%.Early warnings by academic specialists in the field were, as usual, not heeded. 12When it dawned on governments and international agencies that a disaster wastaking place in the Sahel, relief aid was organised, but largely ineffectively. 13The bureaucracies of agencies such as FAO and USAID were highly ineffectiveand unprepared. The FAO early warning system signalled food shortages in theSahel in September 1972, but it took FAO director Adde Boerma until May1973 to react to this warning by installing the Office of Sahelian ReliefOperation (OSRO) that came to the conclusion that at least 1,000,000 tons ofgrain were needed to avoid total disaster. This conclusion was reached byautumn 1973. Only by February 1974 did the FAO start its campaign, a delaypartly due to the FAO staff Christmas holiday. 14 Most relief aid came from theUnited States, but their food aid distribution was bound to Law 480 stipulatingthat US food aid stocks should first be bought from surplus production withinthe US, thus subsidising US farmers. To aggravate matters, most of the US1972 harvest surplus and the shipping capacity to transport it had already beenbought by the USSR. USAID also took an extraordinary amount of time to assembleits relief efforts, partly due to internal competition within the organisation,and through competition with FAO. When sufficient amounts of foodstuffsand medicine were finally assembled, they were shipped to the ports of WestAfrica without taking into account the handling capacities of these ports and thedifficulties in transporting the goods from these ports to the landlocked Sahelcountries. Transport was not only handicapped by lack of infrastructure in theconcerned countries, but also by a lack of means of transport. What transportwas available was in the hand of government agents who demanded outrageousprices for transportation of relief aid. The result of this disastrous course ofevents was a massive exodus of Kel Tamasheq seeking refuge elsewhere.1011121314ag Sidiyene, E. & G. Klute 1989; Spittler, G. 1993.Swift however, reports that Algerian merchants residing in Gao still bought livestockfor export to Algeria in the early 1970s. Swift, J. 1979: 297.In 1973 the French development anthropologist and Tamasheq specialist EdmondBernus published a first article on the ongoing drought and its effects, based onfieldwork dating from 1972 and previous. Bernus, E. & G. Savonnet 1973.Derrick, J. 1977; Glantz, M., ed., 1976; Sheets, H. & R. Morris 1974.Stol, A. 1975: 100.