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http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/12/14/africa/AF_FEA_GEN_Chad_Shrinking_Lake.phpShrinking of Lake Chad: Tale of human abuse, climate change The Associated Press Published: December 14, 2006 KOUDOUBOUL, Chad: 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.
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