Mongolia: UN aid pledge - full text
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The UN was reported on March 12 to have announced nearly US$4 million dollars worth of aid to help Mongolia respond to the "zud", a periodic natural disaster caused by extreme cold weather, which resulted in death of livestock caused by frozen fodder. The zud was an environmental phenomenon characterized by extremely low winter temperatures and heavy snowfall following a dry summer, leading to very poor pasture conditions. Heavy snowfall was followed by brief thaws and prompt refreezes, covering rural areas in impenetrable ice that left livestock unable to graze.
Millions of animals had starved since autumn 2009, and in a country where up to one third of the population depended directly on animal husbandry for a livelihood, the effects were devastating. Immediate consequences included human fatalities from exposure, and the crippling of national infrastructure, with pronounced effects on health services. Over the long term, lost herds could impoverish households and intensify the rate of rural to urban migration within Mongolia. The 2009-10 zud affected 19 of Mongolia's 21 provinces, and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) estimated on March 12 that it had left more than 120,000 people with half of their herds dead.
Immediate Context
In late February the UN had estimated that 2.7 million animals had already died in the disaster, with the New York Times of Feb. 26 reporting that another three million animals could die before the end of the winter. Central to the UN's aid package was the announcement of a program, due to commence when the freeze ended, to employ 60,000 Mongolians to clear the carcasses of animals. As well as stimulating the famine-hit economy, the program sought to reduce the threat of disease: it was feared that unburied animal carcasses could result in salmonella and anthrax permeating the soil. The program, due to provide an initial cash stimulus of US$300,000, would also include fuel, medical, and herd rebuilding support for affected families. Several UN and other international agencies, including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), pledged resources.
Reaction and Outlook
An immediate use of UN resources was to address the health needs of children, babies, and pregnant women. Rana Flowers, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF)'s representative in Mongolia, warned on Feb. 12: "this is an unfolding emergency...of most recent and most urgent concern is evidence that babies and young children are dying because they cannot access the medical treatment from trained personnel that they need". Thousands of children were stranded in school dormitories by road closures, which also isolated expectant mothers from medical care.
By early March the extreme weather had reportedly killed at least 11 people, including a woman who had died in childbirth after road closures left her unable to reach hospital. UNICEF freighted supplies for schoolchildren by air into Khovd province on March 2, and the UB Post of March 5 reported that the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) was supporting teams of mobile medics to attend isolated pregnant women in 12 Mongolian provinces. UNFPA also received US$242,000 from the UN's Central Emergency Relief fund, to support 80 local hospitals in treating difficult childbirth cases that would normally have been referred to regional centres. Australia pledged expertise to support households headed by women affected by the disaster. Medical support, coordinated by the WHO, was also pledged for 65 soums (administrative regions) affected by the weather.
China, whose own eastern Xinjiang province was also suffering from heavy snow, on March 15 donated US$100,000 worth of rice and flour to Mongolia to alleviate the effects of the paralysing snow. China had made a previous aid delivery in early February, which Enkhbold Miyegombo, Mongolia's deputy prime minister, had on Feb. 2 hailed: "Although our neighbour China is experiencing a harsh winter in some provinces, it is generously reaching out to help us."
The disaster was expected to intensify internal rural to urban migration, a trend exacerbated by previous dzud events. Ulan Bator (the capital) had after earlier dzuds been left ringed with shanty towns, where facilities - including heating, critical in winters where temperatures routinely dropped to -40 degrees Celsius, were sporadic and inadequate. Many former agricultural migrants to the city were unable to find work, in a country where unemployment stood near 30 per cent. Some farmers, though, were reported to have been shielded from the effects of herd loss by an insurance program, administered through the World Bank and funded partly by the Japanese government that both paid out for livestock deaths and encouraged measures that some farmers had used to reduce their vulnerability to climate variation.
Historical Context
Mongolia had been occupied by numerous tribal polities and nomadic peoples into the middle ages, when Genghis Khan made it the seat of an empire that conquered much of Asia and Europe as far west as Poland. The region was in the late seventeenth century absorbed into Qing dynasty China, from which it declared its independence on the Qing empire's collapse in 1911. Chinese forces reoccupied the country between 1919 and 1921, when Mongolian troops—with the support of Russian Bolshevik forces—successfully repulsed them. Mongolia maintained close relations with the Soviet Union and organized its governance along Soviet lines, though it remained independent and slowly gained broad international recognition as a state from the 1940s through into the 1960s . UN membership followed in 1961. In the 1990s the country embraced democracy, holding free multi-party elections in 1990.
Victory for the Democratic Union (DU) coalition in 1996 saw the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) lose power in Mongolia for the first time since 1924.
The zud was the third to strike in consecutive years and had caused considerable damage to the Mongolian rural economy. The Guardian of Feb. 25 reported that the zud occurred usually every five to ten years, but that the past decade had seen four instances and that more were expected in the near future. Mongolia was sometimes cited as an area where the effects of climate change could be observed, and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon had visited to examine habitat deterioration in mid-2009.
The Economist blog of March 5 blamed some of the zud's worst effects on agricultural inefficiencies: without the infrastructure to sustain agriculture in the country's remotest regions, more accessible areas were overgrazed and unable to sustain the large populations of animals kept on them. Individual animals were consequently thinner and less able to withstand famine than members of a smaller national herd would have been. The news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported on March 15 that smaller-scale herders were among the worst affected, with many losing 50-60 per cent of their animals. These under-equipped smaller farms, were partly the legacy of de-Communization following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Mongolia had been a de facto client state of the USSR, which had exerted tight control on Mongolian markets but had also provided an overarching supply chain structure. UNICEF representative Flowers warned that unless herds were reduced to sustainable size Mongolia could expect a zud every year, as weak herds succumbed to even moderately cold conditions.
South Africa's Independent Online website on Feb. 27 suggested that the economic repercussions of the current zud might oblige Mongolia to rely more on mineral exploitation to generate wealth. The country was rich in mineral resources, including vast deposits of copper, gold, and uranium. Mineral extraction by foreign companies, which had not always returned large revenues to the Mongolian state, remained a prominent political issue.
