Climate only partly to blame for Africa food woes

Africa may seem incapable of growing enough food to feed its starving millions, but in the fields of South Africa’s Free State, farmers are taking in more maize than they know what to do with.

While most African countries run at a substantial food deficit, with millions dependent on food aid and malnutrition rife, South African maize yields per hectare are the highest on record - and farmers say it is not just down to good weather.

“If you look at rainfall patterns, a lot of other African countries get more than we do,” says Laurie Bosman, President of South Africa’s commercial farming union Agri SA. “Only 14 percent of our country is suitable for agriculture.”

This year’s rains were good, but even in a bad year South Africa produces a surplus. This year, farmers say new improved seed types - some genetically modified - have helped the white-dominated commercial farming sector to the highest yields on record, and prices so low farmers fear they may go bankrupt.

But across most of the continent, food production is dominated by small-scale subsistence farmers, much less sophisticated in their techniques and much more vulnerable to climate shocks such as sudden rain failure.

From Niger to Zimbabwe, Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, crop failure leaves millions hungry. In Southern Africa, the World Food Programme says 10 million will need aid after rains failed.

WAR, DISEASE

Climate is not the whole story. In Malawi, well-irrigated sugar plantations sit next to villages that have seen almost their entire harvest shrivel up and die.

And only a couple of miles from full silos and healthy fields in South Africa’s Free State, Lesotho’s maize production continues to dwindle, with yields falling to 450-500 kg a hectare against 1400 in the 1970s.

With almost a third of the population HIV positive, many farmers have died or are either too sick to tend their fields properly. AIDS and crop failure lead to an increasing cycle of poverty that leaves them unable to buy seeds or tools.

While HIV is the dominant issue in Southern Africa, elsewhere war and locust plagues have done damage. In Eritrea, land mines left over from a border war with Ethiopia prevent cultivation, while conscription takes workers from the land.

In Angola, weather is almost irrelevant if farmers cannot get their crops to market because roads have been destroyed by war and neglect. Angolan farmers produce some 5,000 tonnes of coffee a year, but 2,000 tonnes rots on the farms.

In the worst affected countries, war, illness and poverty combine with ever-worsening drought - which environmentalists fear could become worse as climate change bites.

DIVERSIFY OR DIE

“Yearly rainfall rates have been decreasing since the late 1990s, falling from about 500mm to nearly 200mm,” said a United Nations report on Eritrea earlier this year. Two thirds of the population now relies on food aid.

Teaching new techniques to minimise soil erosion and protect crops may help. Farmers can be told not to simply scatter seeds but to dig a hole for each seed, and dig more holes around the seedling, retaining moisture.

Across Africa, aid workers say growers should also consider diversifying from maize to crops like sorghum and millet that are more drought resistant and might help prevent serious shortages.

“When the right crops are grown in the correct ecology they should do well to resist a normal drought,” said Nancy Matuga, of U.S. funded famine monitor FEWS NET in Kenya. “I don’t think it is just a question of climate change.”

But sometimes, it is the weather.

Agriculture experts are unwilling to blame the latest food shortages in Southern Africa on “drought” - they say annual rainfall may be little different from normal - but the lack of rain in February and March just as crops ripened was devastating, even in countries lauded for agricultural reform.

Zambia was widely praised after it bounced back from serious shortages in 2002 after distributing seeds and fertiliser to subsistence farmers, but the rain failure undid the good work and the country will again need large volumes of food aid.

“This year, you can’t say it wasn’t the climate,” said Catholic Relief Services Zambia Country Representative Michele Broemmelsiek. “Up until the early part of the year we thought it would be a normal year. Then the rain just stopped.”

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