Monsanto Go Away
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As part of the Occupy Maui movement, The Human Revolution has a clear message for Monsanto.
More on Monsanto on The Road.
Calling on the good and willing
[i-dead cattle in Horn of Africa]
After 17 years in the field, working in front line humanitarian emergency response, of which 15 years in food aid relief, I took a sabbatical break. Taking a distance allowed me to discover an other side of the humanitarian work, something more longer term, but with no less impact: agricultural development.
Over the past sabbatical year, I had the opportunity to work with a team at CGIAR, mostly on social media related projects. That work brought me to the field, talking to farmers about ways they adapt (or don’t) to the economic and climatic changes, their needs, their wishes,… I wrote about it, made videos, published pictures.. I realized the impact even small things can have, on their daily lives. I talked to researchers, to extension agents, to suppliers… In short, I got hooked.
At this moment, I have the opportunity to work with CGIAR on an event taking place in Nairobi on Sept 1st, highlighting the importance of longer term agricultural research to augment the resilience of farmers confronted with a rapidly changing world, specifically related to the current drought (again) in the Horn of Africa.
The work of the CGIAR is not well known to the outside world. Having worked in food aid for the better part of my professional life, the CGIAR was certainly an unknown to me. It is part of my job is to make it known. And this is where you all can help, even though the effort is still at its early beginning (isn’t it great to be part of something from the start?).
We have set up a repository (in the form of a blog), in which I post simple examples of agricultural research the CGIAR is doing, particularly in the Horn, leading up to the Sept 1 event.
At the same time, we are “populating” a brand Twitter account @cgiarconsortium , using the hashtag #Ag4HoA (Agriculture for the Horn of Africa) for all tweets related to agricultural development. We started publishing development projects related to the Horn, but after Sept 1, we will broaden to other projects the CGIAR does, as time goes by.
On Sept 1st (followed by another event on Sept 2nd and 3rd), I will be live blogging/tweeting from the event, using the same Twitter account.
Now where can you help?
Just as I called out to the social media community for the Addis Sharefair, I am calling out to you now. I am looking for people active in the social media community to help spreading our worthwhile message. You don't have to be related to development or agricultural research, but any reach you have within your own social community, can help.
I am looking for people who are willing to retweet, reblog, post our articles on Facebook, Google+, in short "make some social media noise". I have assembled a good list of people in an email list already, whom I update daily of the new events and posts we are broadcasting.
Are you willing to help? Leave a comment, or email me via peter (at) theroadtothehorizon (dot) org and I will include you on our mailing list.
I hope with this effort, we can do some good, make a change, and maybe contribute our small bit to make sure droughts and floods no longer turn into famine.
Maybe one day, we won't need to put up pictures of cattle starving due to a drought. Maybe one day, we will be able to publish pictures of thriving crops and well-fed cows, even though the area has been hit by yet another drought, or a flood.
The importance of bio-diversity.
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A sweet, unpretentious, yet significant TEDtalk by Cary Fowler, the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, on the importance of preserving the bio-diversity of our seeds, and the role of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in this.
While often dubbed as "the Doomsday Vault", the half a million seeds stored at Svalbard guarantee a future rather than a doomsday: As the natural conditions under which we grow our food continuously change, our seeds also need to adapt. As these changes happen much faster now than before, also the seed adaption needs to go faster, and more targeted.
Unless if we store all varieties of seeds for every crop we grow, they will get lost. Check out my previous article about the ICRISAT genebank, to understand the true implication of this.
In this TEDtalk, Gary explains it in simple terms, but the message can't be misunderstood: "If agriculture does not adapt to climate change, neither will we". And crop diversity is the key to that adaptation.
Another drought. Is the development failing?
[i-drought]
When I started working in the Horn of Africa, in the mid 90's, my first emergency was a drought operation. Between 1900 and now, the region had more than 18 famine periods. This year, we have another one. And I am sure - unless we change things drastically - there will be another drought emergency a few years from now.
As an aidworker, I always worked in emergencies. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, wars, were my daily work... Some of these calamities are hard to anticipate, leave alone mitigate. But other, climate change related emergencies, are. At least partially. The question is: "Are we doing enough?".
My answer is: NO. According to me, both the humanitarian community neither the donors put enough emphasize on agricultural development, which -to me- is the core of climate change mitigation for farmers in many parts of the world.
In the past year, I travelled through Kenya, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana and India, interviewing a dozen farmer communities on climate change. I recorded their views on the current state, their wishes, their fears, and condensed it in about 30 videos (the videos you can watch here, some of the stories, you can read here). The problems differed from region to region, and so do the possible solutions.
What got to me is not only the struggles of the farmers themselves, but also the social implications of the failing agriculture in many parts of the world. In Kenya, most of the men went off to work in the cities, leaving the women to farm, and to raise their families. In Burkina Faso, whole villages migrated due to repeated failing crops. In India none of the people I spoke to, saw farming as a viable way to make a living anymore. All but one family saw the future for their kids as getting a "proper" job, somewhere in a remote city. Where will that leave us, ten-twenty years from now? Farming is the basis of many developing countries. No farming, no food, as simple as that. But even more importantly, without proper targeted agricultural development, farmers will even have it harder in the years to come. Already many live on the edge of survival. It does not take much to push them over the edge. As what happens in the Horn of Africa, this year once again.
And yet, it does not take much. Locally adapted solutions make a big change. Be it a dam, constructing low walls to avoid water running off and taking the top soil with it, planting trees to avoid erosion, micro-dosing fertilizer,.... Or wider solutions in breeding crop varieties, better adapted to the changing environment.
But little is invested in agricultural development. I broke a bone before on how cutting agricultural development, is like digging our own grave. The most frustrating part, for me, is to see how the budgets for aid emergencies, like the current drought in East Africa, beats that of agricultural development in the same area, by a ton. How everyone is beating the press drums once a drought hits a region again, but the same drums kept silent for the years before that. How the press is all over the current drought, but hardly made any room to show sustainable solutions, in the past. Everyone cries foul now over the drought, but hardly anyone was interested in the same region, in the past. And still, the impact of the current drought could have been avoided. But we failed to do so. The humanitarian community failed, the press failed, the public interest failed,...
Emergency aid relief is a plaster on a wooden leg. Sure, we have to help the people dying of famine right now, but our interest will fade out once the peak of the emergency is over.
And that gets to me.
More posts about agricultural development on The Road
About adaptation, mitigation, floods and the need for information
[i-Punjab farmer on dam]
Climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture is more than merely “the need for better seeds”. It needs a way to exchange information so we can re-apply proven solutions rather than re-inventing the wheel every single time….
In a wide, slow gesture, Gurbachan Singh shows me a panorama of lush fields. It is as if he hand touches the abundant, young wheat sprouts from afar. They are bright green, showing a promise for a plentiful harvest. Wide fields are bordered with tall poplar trees whose leafs softly whisper in the light wind, chasing away the early morning mist.
“All of this”, says Gurbachan, “All of this was gone. Flooded. As far as you can see. All of it. People had fled to higher grounds, but the twenty-four hours notice we had before the flood, was not sufficient to evacuate all live stock. Most buffalo and cows drowned. The harvest was lost.”
We are standing near the village of Bhoda in Punjab, North West India. From a large dike, made of sandbags, probably five metres (15 ft) high, we see the river, flowing slowly beneath us. It is hard to imagine that in July last year, this small stream had swollen with a mighty force, digging a hole in the dike, half a mile long. (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog
Teak trees or food crops: Will climate change force farmers to make a choice?
[i-teak seedling]
One or two generations ago, smallholder farmers might have grown food crops mainly to feed their own families. But those days are gone. Farmers are looking more and more for cash income.
Like in Bihar, North-Central India: farmers still value the “yield” of a crop, but the “revenue” becomes increasingly important. It is not just because of the “Modern Times”, where electricity bills and school fees are to be paid, and people want to buy a mobile phone, a television or a tractor.
No, there is more than that: climate change has chased up the expenses: boreholes, mechanical or electric pumps, hybrid seeds… Each of these has a price ticket attached to it. A price ticket, farmers are scrambling to pay, but a necessity for any land to bare any crop.
The droughts
A good crowd had gathered in Rambad, a small village in Bihar. Both young and old, from the better-off farmers to the day labourers, all were sitting around us. We were talking about the change in weather, the effects it had on this farmers’ community and ways these people have tried to adapt over time.
When we asked who of the farmers had experimented with new things in the past years, they pointed out a slim man, probably in his late thirties, standing in a bit of a distance. As we all looked at him, he came nearer, stood up straight and held his arms stiff along his body as he said his name, “Vidyabhushan Kumar”, in a loud voice. As if a teacher had just summoned him. We asked Vidyabhushan to sit with us and tell his story. (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog
Climate change, smallholder farmers and the cycle of poverty
[i-Indian woman]
When discussing climate change, we often discuss about the technical part of “agriculture”: crop varieties, irrigation or farming methods. But climate change also has a profound social impact within the rural communities, which rely mostly on agriculture. Climate change will push many smallholder farmers over “the edge”, back into poverty.
Arti Devi from Rambad in Bihar, India, is one of them.
Arti is married and has three children, two girls and a boy. Up to some years ago, she owned a small plot of land where she cultivated wheat and some vegetables, and had two buffaloes. This was sufficient to provide food and an income to her family.
“As the weather changed, we had less rain in this region. The yearly floods which used to bring in new fertile soil to my fields, just stopped. So my field yielded less and less.”, Arti explains, “As the lands dried up, it also became more difficult to find fodder for the buffaloes”. (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog
Musing on India - Part 5:
Faces from Bihar
Here are some people we met in Bihar, North India
[i-Bihar farmer]
Ramiwash is a small farmer, but probably one of the most create ones we met. On his plot, he combined fruit trees and several vegetable crops. He also implemented convervation farming, planting crops in small holes rather than ploughing his entire field. That way, he could preserve more water, a very scarce resource.
[i-Bihar farmer]
Anil talked to us about the dire need for water, now that the rains have become more scarce and the water level decreased over the past years.
[i-Bihar farmer]
Indramani is a widow taking care of her grandson. Her son, daughter in law and another grandson moved away to the city. She had a small plot with wheat and one buffalo to barely make ends meet.
[i-Bihar farmer]
Susila had to rent out one of her plots, as she had no access to water. Her husband has a mobile temple which he drives around to bring in a bit of extra money. She could read and write, and stressed the importance of educating her children, so they could move to the city and "get proper jobs".
[i-Bihar farmer]
Vidyabhushan invested in a set of teak tree seedlings, which he wanted to plant along his land, so he could harvest the timber and sell it in the years to come.
[i-Bihar farmer]
Arti lived alone with her three children. Her husband worked in the city and came home only once a year. She worked as a day labourer on other people's farms. She told us how the opportunities to work have drastically decreased as people leave their land barren in the summer due to lack of access to water for irrigation.
[i-Bihar farmer]
Arjun is the village chief (or "president") from four villages. He is also the chairmain of PACS, a cooperative bank who gives micro-loans to its members, and allows the farmers to ensure their crops against calamities.
Musing on India - Part 4:
Faces of Punjab
Here are some people we met in Punjab, each with their own story on how they were coping with the changing climate:
[i-faces of Punjab India]
Gurbachan Singh is the village chief of Bhoda, a town which was flooded in the middle of last year. He told us the story of how they got 24 hours notice a flood was coming in, how they evacuated the villagers and constructed an emergency dam with sand bags.
[i-faces of Punjab India]
Mohamed is a dairy farmer who migrated from the north. Last year, his house and that of his neighbours got flooded, and they moved to a new location. He told us of his difficulties to find feed for his animals.
[i-faces of Punjab India]
Dilbar Singh (R) and his neighbour Paramjit Singh (L) explained how new hybrid seeds helped them to cope with the changing rainy season. Paramjit was planting poplar trees so he could harvest the timber as an extra income.
[i-faces of Punjab India]
Dr. R.P.Singh works at the Punjab Agricultural University where they have an active breeding programme, selecting varieties of wheat which need less water, yield more and can grow over a shorter period.
More precious than gold:
Preserving biodiversity at the genebank
[i-ICRISAT genebank]
“Germplasm collection”, “allele diversity”, “Crop registers”, might sound like mystic academic terms to you. Likewise for me, I could hardly link them into the discussion about climate change and food security…. Until I visited the genebank on the ICRISAT campus near Hyderabad in India.
The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is a non-profit organization conducting agricultural research for development in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. ICRISAT is part of a consortium of similar agricultural research centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
…and they have a bank. Not to store money or gold, but to safeguard something much more precious: the genetic material – or “germplasm”- of 119,000 “accessions” -or varieties- of sorghum, pearl millet and six other types of small millets, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut, collected from 144 countries.
“Genetic diversity is key to the future”
Over thousands of years, different food crops have evolved into zillions of different varieties, either grown as a cultivated crop, or flourishing in the wild. Each variety differs from the next in the way it naturally adapted its genetic code to the environment it grows in: how it deals with drought or a high soil salinity, how it built up resistance to certain pests. Many differ in their yield, size, leaves or roots.
[i-crop_bushel]But, as Bob Dylan sung: “Times are a-changing”. Farmers now often concentrate on monocultures, or grow only a selection of high yielding crops. Commercial companies have been “successful” in promoting certain varieties, which farmers adopted quickly, and –thanks to globalization- were spread widely. Understandably so, as “the world needs to produce more food”. However, all of this became nefast for the bio-diversity: Today, the rate in which traditional seed varieties disappear, is higher than ever.
This stands in stark contrast with the demand for more and specialized seed varieties, adapted to the ever changing weather patterns. If the genetic biodiversity disappears, where will we find the seed varieties helping farmers to cope with future environmental changes?
Unless if we safeguard our existing seed varieties for the wide range of crops the world grows, we will no longer have the genetic material to re-generate seeds adapted to the future climate changes.
And that is where genebanks come in. Genebanks like the one I was standing in this morning, at ICRISAT.
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog.
About Super Chickpeas and Silent Heroes
[i-ICRISAT researcher in test field]
During my past visits to Kenya, Ghana, Mali and Burkina Faso, one common streak always came up when talking to farmers about climate adaptation techniques: they were all actively using new seed varieties for their different crops.
I had not really questioned where those seed varieties came from. I saw them in the shops of commercial seed traders, so I asked no more. A bit like a child does not ask where Santa comes from. A long and complex process of seed selection and breeding remained hidden for me.
A visit to ICRISAT, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics near Hyderabad in India, changed all of that. I discovered the world’s headquarter for the agriculture research on five crops: sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut. And I discovered the link between chickpeas, chickpea heroes and the war against hunger.
Food diets, malnutrition and chickpeas
Sufficient food, but also a balanced food intake are key to battle malnutrition. Often the world’s attention goes to staple foods like rice, maize or wheat. We often forget it takes other crops too, to make a balanced diet, in a global fight against hunger.
Chickpeas is one of those crops, and an important one, as they make up for more than 20 percent of the world pulse production. Chickpeas contain 22-25% proteins, and 2-3 times more iron and zinc than wheat. Chickpea protein quality is better than other pulses. …
So understandably, agricultural researchers, like Dr. Pooran M.Gaur, a principal scientist and chickpea breeder at ICRISAT, make continuous efforts to develop new chickpea varieties, adapted to fast changing environmental conditions. “Super Chickpeas”, as it were. Bred by –what I would not hesitate to call - “super scientists”, in the quiet isolation of agricultural research centers. (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog
Farmers in Africa and mobile phones - Part II
[i-Farmer in Ghana with mobile phone]
Remember I wrote in an earlier post about my surprise to see how mobile phone technology had proliferated in Africa since my last visit?
That was in Kenya, a country which always stood on the forefront of connectivity. I was curious to see the difference during my trip to West Africa, back in November.
Well, I can tell you, while travelling through the remote areas of Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana, my observations are the same as in Kenya. Actually, my conviction of how mobile phones have changed the lives of farmers in Africa, is even stronger now.
I talked to many farmers, as part of the interviews I did on the way they adapted to changes in the climate. Curiously enough, mobile phones played a significant role in that.
To really understand it, one has to comprehend the difference between living in a remote village in Africa, and living in Europe or North America. Up to recently, even the simplest of tasks was complex, because people could not get in touch with each other.
In Africa, if my neighbour Charles left for the market, 10 km further, there was no way to get in touch with him. I could not ask to buy a bag of fertilizer, or to check on the prices of maize, or to see if a supplier had sorghum seeds in stock. Short of actually going there, I would not know. I would never know, as Charles might not have looked for the information or goods while he as at the market.
Information did not flow. And information is power, certainly in rural Africa.
Helene, in Burkina explained how she called around to colleague farmers in different areas to check on the market prices for vegetables. Andrew in Ghana uses his mobile phone to get in regular contact with his extension worker. During the planting season, Petri uses his GSM to trace the contractor who has a tractor. And during a visit to a studio from a farmer's radio in North Burkina, I saw how different farmers from all over the region called into a live programme, with advise on a particular problem a farmer had with pests in his tomatoes. Using their mobile phones.
[i-Farmer in Ghana with mobile phone]
Naapi, in Lawra, on the border of Ghana and Burkina, explained how matters as simple as "talking to the guy next door", were complex. "In the past, it often happened I saw a colleague, on his field further down the hill, but I could not contact him. Unless if I walked to his field, I could not even ask him if he had a axe I could lend. So in the past, I would walked to him, often in vain, as what I needed, he did not have. Hours and efforts wasted. Now, I just pick up the phone and call him."
Wherever I stopped on the 2,000 miles we drove in West Africa, there were scratch cards available, and different networks covering the areas, no matter how remote they were. People used mobile phones, even if it meant they had to go to the next village to charge the phone, as many had no electricity in their house.
True, in West Africa, the use of mobile phones for farmer support "call centres", was not as developed as in Kenya. And the system to pay, or transfer funds, through mobile phones (like the M-Pesa system from Kenya's Safaricom), was just starting up, there is no doubt that mobile phone connectivity is key to rural development.
And it has just started.
Farmers adapting to climate change:
Naakpi Kuunwena from Ghana
[i-Vegetable farm in Ghana]
His name is written “Naakpi” and pronounced “Naakwi”, that we understood fast. But it took us much longer to comprehend why Naakpi looked so tired, and walked around with a back bent as if he had a burden too heavy for one man to carry.
We understood even less as we walked through an opening in the earth wall surrounding his farm and stepped onto his vegetable field: This one hectare plot was the largest, greenest and best maintained vegetable field we had seen so far. The cabbage, beans, tomato, peppers all stood in straight lines. A perfectly geometric maze of five inch wide irrigation canals divided the field into small sub-plots devour of any weeds.
All of us stood in awe. The sight of green that lush came as a surprise. So far, during our West-Africa trip for the Adaptation and Mitigation Knowledge Network (AMKN), we had been interviewing farmers harvesting at this time, one to two months into the dry season. Here, in Lawra – Northeast Ghana, it had been no different. But Naakpi still had a green plot. Why then did it not make him a happy man?
“This is by far the nicest plot I have seen so far, Naakpi”, I said, and congratulated him. He looked at me with sad eyes and shrugged: “Give it one more month, and I will loose it all”, he said. He told us the story. (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog...
Farmers adapting to climate change:
Joel Yiri from Ghana
[i-Ghana farmer]
After his first two sentences, I knew Joel Yiri from Jirapa was the man I was looking for. I had asked Peter Kuupenne, an extension officer from Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture, to meet “a creative farmer”. And that is what I found: Joel was a man with a vision.
As we shook hands, and sat down in front of Joel’s house, he introduced himself in perfect English. I asked him how come, and if maybe he had been a teacher. But he shook his head: “You know, over here, you are born as a farmer’s son, so that’s what you do for your life: you farm. Just as your father and your father’s father. But that also includes the core challenge: with the current climate change, we can’t farm anymore like they did. We need to adapt our methods. Our fathers had fertile grounds. The rains were plentiful, and for generations they used the same tools, the same seeds and the same technologies. Our generation needs to change.” (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog...
Farmers adapting to climate change:
Helene Nana from Burkina Faso
[i-Helene Nana on her vegetable farm in Burkina Faso]
“Twenty years ago, famine reigned our area”, says Helene. “The men went off to Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Togo and all countries around us. They farmed other people’s lands. But we, the women, we could not move. We had to raise the children. And it was hard.”
“You know, for a farmer, the crop is everything. As the weather changed, as the erosion took our soil away, we were left with infertile land. Whatever small crops we could still harvest, was not enough for our kids. They got sick, many died. Those were very hard times.”
Adama, the chairman from the farmers’ union, had told us how the village succeeded in constructing a dam. “That was good as a drinking hole for the cattle”, Helene explains, “but I realized we could do more with it, and thought about growing vegetables during the dry season. We never did that, I had no experience, but I wanted to give it a try. If you don’t try, you won’t learn, in my opinion.” (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog...
Farmers adapting to climate change:
Ganame Ousseni from Burkina Faso
[i-Burkina Faso farmer]
“You have no idea”, says Ganame Ousseni, a cattle farmer in Ninigui in the North of Burkina Faso, “You can not imagine. When I was a small boy, the grass was this high”, and he holds his arm above his head. “We used to hunt wild animals here. We had loads of cattle too.”
But now it is gone. The forest and the grazing grounds. The whole area is barren with a compacted crust as top soil. “What were we to do?”, Ousseni shakes his head, “We had to stay here to mind the crops, so we gave our cattle to nomads passing through. They herded them for us, taking the cows to the grazing grounds hundreds of miles away, all the way up to Mali. At the end of the dry season, when the cattle came back from the migration, we saw we lost more cattle each year. Some were stolen along the way, or were eaten by wild animals. Our herd disseminated.” (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog...
Farmers adapting to climate change:
Ganame Adama from Burkina Faso
[i-farmer in Burkina Faso]
“My grandparents grew crops without any fertilizer, and had no problems. But with the 20 hectares I inherited, the yield was not enough to even feed my own family”, sighs Ganame Adama. “The forest was gone; the fertile soil was taken away by the waters gushing over the land during the rainy season. A hard crust was everything we were left with. We had to find ways to use that water.”
The people from Ninigui, in Burkina Faso’s north, looked for advise from other farmers who lived through similar challenges. They learned how to build small dams, called ‘diguettes’, ‘digues’ or ‘digues filtrantes’ to break the water flow and block the fertile ground from running off: Using a simple long tube, filled with water, they mark ‘contour lines’ with sticks: areas on their flat plots which are at an equal height. Then they stack rocks, only half a foot high, following those contour lines.
“These dams break the flow of the water as it gushes off the plains. While the rain water slowly seeps through one dam, the soil carried by the water, sinks to the bottom, forming strips of fertile land. The water leaking through one dam is stopped again by the dam on the next contour line, about twenty meters further down the slow slope. And again on the next, and again. Each time, a fertile strip of land forms between the lined-up rocks”, explains Adama. (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog...
Ninigui: A war against… erosion and desertification.
[i-barren landscape Burkina Faso]
In the north of Burkina Faso, about one hour’s drive from Ouahigouya, the trees change into low scrubby bushes, the grass turns yellow, and as we drive on, it eventually disappears. The dirt track dissolves into a rocky river bedding, climbs up a steep ridge and levels on a plateau. We stop for second, and take in the scenery.
The landscape is barren. The soil is a dark brown crusted gravel, often bereaved of any vegetation. Houses are grouped together, with the mosques and low mud grain stores sticking out. Here and there a group of kids walks to the school at the edge of the village. A large troop of cows, herded by two nomads, kicks up a cloud of dust.
Ninigui feels like a border town. A village on the edge of the desert and on the edge of survival.
Ganame Adama, who heads NAAM, the local farmers’ union, takes us to his field where he just harvested his millet crop. “Look around you”, he says, “All of this used to be forest. At the time of my father’s father, they hunted wild animals here. They grew a crop without using any fertilizer. They had crops every year without much effort.”
As the forest was cut for firewood, gradually the rains carried away the thin top soil. To make matters worse, the rainy season shifted: it started later, lasted shorter, and came in repeated violent squalls, often causing flooding as the barren ground was no longer able to absorb the rain.
“Rains just gushed over the ground”, Adama explains, “In the hills, it dug out ravines, emptying into the flats. The water would just carry away whatever we had sown. It was no use to apply fertilizer neither. Each time it rained, everything was carried away.” (...)
Read my full post on the CCAFS blog...
Farmers adapting to climate change: Emily Marigu from Kenya
[i-Farmer in Kenya]
Anyone doubting the effect of climate change, and how farmers can adapt continuously to changing weather patterns, should talk to Emily Marigu Ireri.
We met Emily, near Meru, eastern Kenya, where she farms a five acres plot, 1,500 meters high on the steep slopes of Mount Kenya.
She describes how, in recent years, the rains are more erratic. At the beginning of the rainy season, often it would only rain for a few days, and then stop, sometimes for weeks. “Often seeds would start to sprout during those first rains, but then they would dry up”, Emily explains. She takes us to the bottom of the valley just below her fields. “By this time of the year, this small stream would normally be a river, but now, it hardly irrigates the fields around it. A few miles from here, the river is dead, water is just absorbed by the soil.”
“But it is not only the erratic rains that makes the life of farmers difficult“, Emily explains. “Here, so close to Mount Kenya, we also used to get misty drizzle in May and June. From the time of my father’s fathers, we used that moisture for a crop in the middle of the year. Now that drizzle does not come anymore. I don’t know why, but nowadays, we can only get one harvest a year, in the rainy season. Now is the time for the rain to come." (...)
Read the full post on the CCAFS blog...
An update from the African dust tracks
[i-Mali village chief]
Mali village chief
We did not have too much connectivity during this trip, so could not post regular updates. I will catch up during next week.
During this trip, we interviewed 17 farmers and people who assisted farmers to adapt to climate changes.
After over 2,000 km, half of it off road, I am writing this from Ouagadougou while we are waiting for the flight back to Europe.
Next week we will start editing the videos.
I still wanted to share some pictures from this trip.
[i-Mali nomad with his cattle]
A nomad in Mali with his cattle
[i-Cattle keeper in Ghana]
Yousif in Ghana spoke about the difficulties to find grazing grounds for his cattle
[i-Jumuo and his fruit trees in Ghana]
Jumuo in Ghana described the way the shortened rains had insects attack his fruit trees up to the level they would no longer bear any fruits.
[i-Naakpi and his vegetable garden in Ghana]
While Naakpi stood in front of his large green vegetable field, he told us how most of it would be lost, as the rains had stopped, and the water level was too low to continue irrigating the crop.