THE MOST important visitor to the village of Mabwera is more than a month late.
It’s November and the seasonal rains have yet to arrive. For the smallholder farming community in this village of just over 1,000 people in southern Malawi, the wait is an anxious one.
Lands have been hand tilled into neat furrows, but the farmers who have prepared the fields dare not plant their maize and other cereals until they have had rainfall. It’s far too risky.
“We had showers just over a week ago and some people went out and started planting right away,” says farm extension adviser Mavuto Kamanga from Self Help Africa.
“We told them all to wait – the rains have become unpredictable, and showers like that don’t mean the rainy season has arrived. We were right, because seed planted last week won’t survive now.”
Sowing seeds before the rains arrive – a practice known as “dry planting” – was once common, but is now just too risky.
Small-scale farming in Africa is a daily gamble, and climate change means the odds are climbing higher. Without irrigation, a farmer has just one chance to harvest enough food to feed her family. Plant too early, and the seeds germinate and die before the rains arrive. Plant too late, and the crop becomes prey to a variety of other conditions.
So the rains are late again this year in Malawi. In the mud huts of Mabwera village, they say it’s climate change. Here there’s no talk of who’s to blame; only of how to survive.
“It wasn’t like this,” says smallholder farmer Moffat Magombo (35) quietly. “My father and grandfather could read the signs in the weather because they were nearly always the same. The rains started in late September or at the beginning of October, and they could be confident that it would continue until the end of March or early April.”
With world leaders gathering 2,400km (1,500 miles) away in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th annual UN Conference of the Parties summit this week, the government of Malawi sees the delay in seasonal rains, and an anticipated foreshortening of the rainy season, as compelling evidence of the effects of climate change.
The solution, in large part, is to help farmers adapt to these new climatic conditions. The difficulty rests in finding someone to pay for this. “Finance is not forthcoming as quickly as climate change is happening,” says Dr Aloysius Kamperewera, Malawi’s deputy director of environmental affairs.
“Smallholder farming communities are particularly vulnerable. They haven’t caused the problem, yet they are suffering the effects of climate change. In the past year we have seen destructive flooding in the far north of the country, droughts in the south, and have experienced numerous other unpredictable weather events.”
He adds: “Nationally we are also seeing evidence of rural farming communities beginning to migrate to urban areas, not because of the promise of a better future, but because the land is not able to support them any more.”
For the Irish Government, helping farmers to cope with climate change has been one of the key focus areas since it established a diplomatic mission in Malawi four years ago.
“Farming is critical for Malawi, given that it supports up to 85 per cent of the population, most of them on small landholdings,” says Adrian Fitzgerald, Irish Aid’s head of development for Malawi.
“The challenges that these farming families face is considerable, not least because climate change has shortened the rainy season in which they plant, while the risks of more intense rainfall in the latter months of the season have grown, resulting in increased incidents of flooding, erosion and destruction of crops.”
The Irish Aid programme invests €10 million a year in bilateral aid, and also provides backing to development agencies working in the country. The focus for this funding is hunger, food security and nutrition.
Two Irish agencies – Self Help Africa and Goal – are part of a multi-agency consortium that will invest up to €10 million over the next five years to help 900,000 rural households in Malawi mitigate the effects of climate change.
The Discover project, funded by the British, Irish and Norwegian governments, will help communities prepare for and respond to climate variability by diversifying household food production and improving access to better-quality drought-tolerant seed.
Part of this project involves a link to the global carbon markets. Wexford-born Conor Fox and Kerry-born John O’Connor head a company called Hestian Innovation, which provides training and technical support to village groups making fuel-efficient cooking stoves.
These stoves – 50,000 of which will be manufactured in association with the Discover project – reduce household fuel consumption by about one tonne of firewood a year.
“That’s a carbon saving,” says Fox, “and it’s one we are now able to take to the global carbon market and sell. We advocate that the revenues raised should be used to make the benefits of cleaner energy accessible to more African households.”
The potential is enormous, says Fox. “Across Africa, there’s a possible saving of 250 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year if we can make it possible for everyone to cook on a stove that’s simply more fuel-efficient. The stoves are made locally and cost about $2 [€1.49].”
The Irish Government is an investor in Hestian Innovation’s initiative, following former minister for the environment John Gormley’s decision to buy Gold Standard carbon credits from the company to offset the carbon footprint of ministerial flights.
Irish Aid, too, is playing its part in this collaboration. It funded the development of new strains of pigeon pea, a cash crop whose stalks are used by Malawian villagers as a firewood substitute.
Tiwonge Ng’ona is chief reporter with the
Guardian
newspaper of Blantyre, Malawi. She is attending the Durban climate change summit on a fellowship from the Climate Change Media Partnership, which is seeking to improve media coverage of climate change