Sahel Drought and Famine
- Date
- 1968-1974
- Category
- Environment & climate
- Region
- Sahel, West and Central Africa (Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Upper Volta)
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
Beginning in 1968, a prolonged failure of the monsoon rains across the Sahel—the semi-arid belt south of the Sahara—triggered one of the twentieth century's worst environmental and humanitarian disasters, peaking with widespread famine between 1972 and 1974.
The crisis devastated Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), along with parts of northern Nigeria and Cameroon, killing an estimated 100,000 people and roughly a third of the region's livestock while leaving hundreds of thousands dependent on emergency food aid. As rivers shrank and the surface area of Lake Chad collapsed, the catastrophe was initially blamed on overgrazing, deforestation, and overpopulation, fuelling fears of permanent desertification; later research instead emphasised shifts in global sea surface temperatures as the dominant driver of the rainfall deficit. The disaster spurred the first large-scale international famine-relief mobilisation in the region and led to the creation of the United Nations Sahelian Office in 1973 and, later, the International Fund for Agricultural Development. The event reshaped scientific understanding of drought, desertification, and the interplay of natural climate variability with human land use.
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Empires active in 1968-1974
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
- Dutch Empire1581 CE – 1975 CE
Related environment & climate events
- Bhopal Gas DisasterDecember 2-3, 1984
- The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster1986
- Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer16 September 1987
- The Bhola Cyclone Kills Hundreds of Thousands in East Pakistan1970
- The Sahel Drought Triggers Mass Famine Across West Africa1972–1974
- Rachel Carson's Silent Spring launches the modern environmental movement27 September 1962
Further reading
The wider story
A New Green History of the World
The classic accessible account of how environment and climate have shaped human history.
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