Malawi small farmers hit by changes in the climate

By: IRIN News

Chronic food insecurity has made small scale farmers consider options such as cooperative farming to benefit from an irrigation scheme in southern Malawi. Photo: IRIN
Small-scale farmers in Malawi are becoming aware that they are bearing the brunt of climate change, which has been adversely affecting productivity, according to a new study by an international aid agency.

"Changing rainfall patterns and higher temperatures have forced farmers to shorten the growing season and switch to more expensive hybrid crops," said a report based on the study, 'Climate change and smallholder farmers in Malawi', by Action Aid International.

The research was conducted in Salima district, in Malawi's central region, and Nsanje in the south, as part of an effort to understand poor people's experiences in adapting to climate change.

"While policy responses to global warming have been mainly driven by debates among scientists, the insights of poor people living on the frontline have been largely neglected," the report commented.

Farmers are increasingly concerned about the impact of climate change on agriculture and food security. "Food availability has been an issue over the years since the disasters began. Much as we have experienced floods in those days, the impact was somehow not as severe. As time went by, there has been a drop in crop production due to frequent flooding and droughts," said a farmer in Salima district.

Malawi's experiences are often traced back to the 1991/92 drought in southern Africa, which affected over six million people. Since then, the report noted, the severity of disasters has escalated.

"We had a very close look at the interactions between weather and food production in Malawi, and we certainly confirm that there is a direct link between the two," said Rene Gommes, Senior Agrometeorologist with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome.

"Interestingly, Southern Africa was not a region where droughts were frequent until the 1991/92 El Niño. This coincides with the end of the drought in western Africa [in the Sahel], and the mechanism of this synchronism is well known and associated with the movements of the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) in Africa. There is a negative correlation between rainfall in the Sahel and in Southern Africa," he pointed out.

Changes in rainfall patterns have affected the growing seasons and the type of crops planted, the Action Aid study found: long-season local maize varieties are no longer a preferred option, and maize normally grown in November is now being grown in December. "In the past we used to plant our crops after the first rains, but since we started experiencing frequent droughts and floods we are planting our crops much earlier," one farmer explained.

"This is to allow the crops to meet the first rains, with the hope that they will mature before the end of the rainy season, and to prevent the crops from being washed away by the floods. Instead of planting a local variety of maize, we have opted for hybrid maize that takes a shorter period to mature."

There has also been a noticeable increase in diseases, such as malaria, cholera and dysentery, associated with changes in rainfall patterns, creating health challenges that are particularly affecting women farmers. "We now travel longer distances to fetch water, and spend most of the time in health centres instead of working in our fields," the report quoted a female farmer as saying.

Deforestation

Poor land use and deforestation are also serious concerns among people in Salima and Nsanje. Farmers are aware that these activities result in more floods and droughts, but are not empowered to intervene. Many pointed fingers at the role of tobacco estates in felling trees in their neighbourhood.

Chipiza Kalemba, 84, suggested that the traditional authorities should regulate tree felling. "The laws should include enforcement of planting trees by estate owners as well as communities. Communities should also stop the practice of carelessly cutting down reeds that are growing along riverbanks. There were efforts by the local forestry assistant, but people showed no interest to his messages."

Existing forestry laws require tobacco estates to have a woodlot to be used for reforestation, but this was not being enforced. "Monitoring and evaluation of tobacco estates is a challenge for district staff because of lack of financial resources," a forestry official in Salima told the Action Aid researchers.

The increasing food insecurity caused by climate change has also limited the number of casual jobs available on commercial farms. In the past, nearby small-scale sugar and tea plantations were sources of employment for many people in Nsanje. However, farmers say that flood-induced migration means that there are now many more people seeking work on the plantations than there are jobs available.

Government plans

Malawi has developed its National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA) in terms of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty on ways of reducing global warming and cope with altered weather patterns.

The Malawians are considering enhancing food security by developing community-based storage systems for seed and food, and enhancing the resilience of food production systems to erratic rainfall by promoting the sustainable production of maize and vegetables in wetlands and catchment areas.

However, Action Aid said the implementation of NAPA faced capacity constraints at district level, and a lack of coordination among sectors. "In addressing adaptation challenges, it is imperative that a multisectoral approach is taken, beginning at the community level with the smallholder farmers who are directly affected by climate change. These farmers need skills, knowledge and access to credit for the addressing short- and long-term needs of diversifying from maize into other crops."

Aid agencies and the Malawian government have been considering providing drought insurance to smallholder farmers. The Commodity Risk Management Group (CRMG) of the World Bank developed an objective indicator that could be used as a proxy measure of the exposure of Malawi's maize production to drought, but it was poorly linked to crop yields, according to the FAO, which was now working on the idea.

Climate Divide

Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their study of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.

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In its fourth assessment of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used its strongest language yet in drawing a link between human activity and recent warming.

Four Reports:

Malawi

Australia

India

The Netherlands

Top, Joost van den Broek for The New York Times; Tony Sernack for The New York Times; above, J. Adam Huggins for The New York Times

Top, floating houses on the River Maas in the Netherlands rise and fall with the water. Middle, a primary filter for incoming water at the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant and a bridge in India has holes to allow floodwaters to flow through it when the monsoon rains come and the rivers swell, bottom.

In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.

Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm — and that are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face — tend to be the richest.

To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news.

“The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell,” said Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale. “But the research is not supporting that. We’re not in it together.”

The large, industrialized countries are more resilient partly because of geography; they are mostly in midlatitude regions with Goldilocks climates — neither too hot nor too cold.

Many enjoy gifts like the thick, rich soil and generous growing season of the American corn belt or the forgiving weather of France and New Zealand.

But a bigger factor is their wealth — wealth built at least partly on a century or more of burning coal, oil and the other fossil fuels that underlie their mobile, industrial, climate-controlled way of life.

The United States, where agriculture represents just 4 percent of the economy, can endure a climatic setback far more easily than a country like Malawi, where 90 percent of the population lives in rural areas and about 40 percent of the economy is driven by rain-fed agriculture.

As big developing countries like China and India climb out of poverty, they emit their own volumes of greenhouse gases; China is about to surpass the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide.

But they remain a small fraction of the total human contribution to the atmosphere’s natural heat-holding greenhouse effect, which is cumulative because of the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide and some other heat-trapping gases. China may be a powerhouse now, but it has contributed less than 8 percent of the total emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use since 1850, while the United States is responsible for 29 percent and Western Europe 27 percent.

Disparities like these have prompted a growing array of officials in developing countries and experts on climate, environmental law and diplomacy to insist that the first world owes the third world a climate debt.

The obligation of the established greenhouse-gas emitters to help those most imperiled by warming derives from the longstanding legal concept that “the polluter pays,” many experts say.

“We have an obligation to help countries prepare for the climate changes that we are largely responsible for,” said Peter H. Gleick, the founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Berkeley, Calif. His institute has been tracking trends like the burst of new desalination plants in wealthy places running short of water.

“If you drive your car into your neighbor’s living room, don’t you owe your neighbor something?” Dr. Gleick said. “On this planet, we’re driving the climate car into our neighbors’ living room, and they don’t have insurance and we do.”

Around the world, there are abundant examples of how wealth is already enabling some countries to gird against climatic and coastal risks, while poverty, geography and history place some of the world’s most crowded, vulnerable regions directly in harm’s way.

Here are four views of the climate divide.

The Climate Divide

Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming

Joao Silva for The New York Times

A communal well at a Malawi village was contaminated in January by floodwaters that swept away homes and crops.

Prone to Drought, and All but Unable to Predict the Weather

BLANTYRE, Malawi, March 29 — Twice a day, 25-year-old Harold Nkhoma checks a series of gauges at the government’s weather station here in Malawi’s second-biggest city.

He skips the barometer because its light doesn’t work and he can’t read the figures. He has waited six months for new batteries.

He ignores the evaporation pan designed to show how quickly water is absorbed into the soil. Peeled-off paint and missing wire mesh have left it useless. And he bypasses the glass sphere that measures the duration of sunshine by burning marks on paper strips. It has been out of paper for four years.

His supervisor, Werani Chilenga, is disgusted. Broken equipment, outmoded technology, slipshod data and a sparse scattering of weather stations are all that his national agency can manage on a $160,000 budget.

“We cannot even know the duration of sunshine in our country for four years, so how can we measure climate change?” said Mr. Chilenga, a meteorological engineer. “Oh, oh, it is pathetic!”

The lack of meteorological data is just one challenge as Malawi struggles to cope with global warming. Add to that a lack of irrigation; overdependence on a single crop, maize; shrinking fish stocks; vanishing forests; and land degradation.

Last March, Malawi, which has a population of 14 million people and is one of the world’s poorest countries, identified $23 million worth of urgent measures it should take in the next three years. It delivered them to the United Nations program that helps poor nations deal with climate change.

A year later, the government is still negotiating with donors. “It is sad that up until now we have not gotten the monies that have been talked about,” said Henry Chimunthu Banda, the minister of environmental affairs. That is not to say Malawi is standing still. The government is moving toward bigger grain reserves, changes in agricultural practices and construction of a new dam. Nine out of 10 Malawians are subsistence farmers.

Austin Kampen, 39, is an early adapter. A nonprofit group last year gave him hoses and a huge bucket — a rudimentary but effective crop sprinkler system.

He plants a variety of maize more likely to survive shorter growing seasons and backs it up with cotton, vegetables, potatoes and cassava.

He still lost his entire harvest in January when the river overflowed after a week of nonstop rain, submerging his seven-acre field and leaving 75 of his neighbors homeless. Still, he said, he will manage to plant anew this season.

Another farmer, Jessie Kaunde, also aims for resilience. But her bravest effort failed.

Armed with a $68 loan, she dug two fish ponds in 1999 behind her house north of Blantyre. Since drought struck three years ago, they are nothing but giant grassy pits.

“I am really disappointed,” she said.

One reason is that other farmers have planted by the river that fed her ponds, causing the riverbanks to cave in and disrupt the water flow. Such planting is illegal but enforcement is weak, said Everhart Nangoma, an environmental specialist formerly with CURE, a nonprofit group focusing partly on climate change.

“Malawi is getting ready, but we are not there,” Mr. Nangoma said. “We are not ready at all.” - SHARON LAFRANIERE

Prone to Drought, but Moving Ahead on Desalination

PERTH, Australia, March 27 — Looking out over a sparkling blue bay on Australia’s west coast, Gary Crisp, an alchemist for the new century, saw an ocean of drinking water.

Behind him was an industrial park filled with tanks, pipes, screens, filters and chemicals for converting seawater into drinking water — 17 percent of the water supply for this city of 1.5 million people.

As the world warms and clean water becomes a prized commodity, the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant is using the renewable resources of wind and ocean to produce it, along with a finite resource that is less available in many other countries: money.

The $313 million plant, among the largest in world (behind giant plants in Israel and the United Arab Emirates), opened in November and is already running at capacity, producing up to 38 million gallons of water a day, nearly enough to fill 100 Olympic-size swimming pools.

The seawater is sucked into the plant through a pipeline whose mouth is 200 yards offshore. Once inside, it is filtered through fine membranes in a complex process called reverse osmosis.

About half the water is purified and sent into the city water system to mingle with water from other sources. The salt remains in the other half, which is flushed back out to the ocean.

The plant is one of the newest in a rapid spread of desalination plants in countries that can afford them. Though the plants are expensive to build, water from them costs only $3.50 per 1,000 gallons. They are commonplace in the Middle East, where oil pays for water, and Southern California is home to many smaller plants. What sets the Perth plant apart is not only its size but its engine — wind power.

The plant is driven by power from 48 turbines in the Emu Downs Wind Farm, about 100 miles to the north, that can produce 80 megawatts of electricity a day, more than three times the needs of the plant. That avoids the trade-off at most desalination plants, which are powered by fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.

“We call it alchemy — converting wind to water,” said Mr. Crisp, the Perth plant’s principal desalination engineer.

The treated water offers people here in the world’s most arid continent “security through diversity,” in the local phrase, complementing dams, aquifers and recycling. Water conservation could be a powerful tool, but few politicians dare to suggest any measures more aggressive than limiting the use of lawn sprinklers — a privation Perth’s plant is helping to avoid.

Half the water used domestically in Perth goes to gardens, Mr. Crisp said; of the water used indoors, 30 percent goes into washing machines. Affluent suburbs use twice as much water as the city proper, he said.

Australia is suffering some of the worst droughts in its recorded history. Stream flows into dams in Perth have shrunk by two-thirds in the last 30 years, even as its population swells by more than 20,000 people a year.

Perth is talking about building one or two more plants in the coming years, and similar plants are in the early stages of development in Sydney and the town of Tugun in Queensland.

Having proved itself, the plant will have its official opening next month. Standing by the sparkling blue bay, people will be invited to drink from small plastic bottles bearing labels that read, “Limited edition desalinated water from the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant.” - SETH MYDANS

The climate divide: How rich and poor countries are dealing with global warming

Harold Nkhoma, left, and Werani Chilenga, with their antiquated meteorological gear in Blantyre, Malawi, where most weather data simply go unrecorded. (Joao Silva for The New York Times)
The climate divide: How rich and poor countries are dealing with global warming
Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their studies of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.
In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.
Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm - and are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face - tend to be the richest.
To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news.
"The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell," said Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University.
But the research is not supporting that. We're not in it together."
The large industrialized countries are more resilient partly because of geography; they are mostly in mid-latitude regions with Goldilocks climates - neither too hot nor too cold.
Many enjoy gifts like the thick rich soil and generous growing season of the American corn belt or the forgiving weather of France and New Zealand.
But a bigger factor is their wealth - wealth built at least partly on a century or more of burning coal, oil and the other fossil fuels that underlie their mobile, industrial, climate-controlled way of life.
The United States, where just 4 percent of the economy is in agriculture, can endure a climatic setback far more easily than a country like Malawi, where 90 percent of the population is rural and where about 40 percent of the economy is driven by rain-fed agriculture.
As big developing countries like China and India climb out of poverty, they emit their own volumes of greenhouse gases; China is about to surpass the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide.
But they remain a small fraction of the total human contribution to the atmosphere's natural heat-holding greenhouse effect, which is cumulative because of the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide and some other heat-trapping gases.
China may be a powerhouse now, but it has contributed less than 8 percent of the total emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use since 1850, while the United States is responsible for 29 percent and Western Europe 27 percent.
Disparities like these have prompted a growing array of officials in developing countries and experts on climate, environmental law and diplomacy to insist that the first world owes the third world a climate debt.
"We have an obligation to help countries prepare for the climate changes that we are largely responsible for," said Peter Gleick, a co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Berkeley, California.
Around the world, there are abundant examples of how wealth is already enabling some countries to gird against climatic and coastal risks while poverty, geography and history are placing some of the world's most crowded, vulnerable regions directly in harm's way.
Here are four views of the climate divide:
Twice a day, 25-year-old Harold Nkhoma checks a series of gauges at the government's weather station here in Malawi's second-biggest city.
He skips the barometer because its light doesn't work and he can't read the figures. He has waited six months for new batteries.
He ignores the evaporation pan designed to show how quickly water is absorbed into the soil. Peeled-off paint and missing wire mesh have left it useless. And he bypasses the glass sphere that measures the duration of sunshine by burning marks on paper strips.
It has been out of paper for four years.
His supervisor, Werani Chilenga, is disgusted. Broken equipment, outmoded technology, slipshod data and a sparse scattering of weather stations are all his national agency can manage on a $160,000 budget.
"We cannot even know the duration of sunshine in our country for four years, so how can we measure climate change?" asked Chilenga, a meteorological engineer. "Oh, oh, it is pathetic!"
Lack of meteorological data is just one challenge as Malawi struggles to cope with global warming. Add to that lack of irrigation; overdependence on a single crop, maize; shrinking fish stocks; vanishing forests; and land degradation.
Last March, Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries with 14 million people, identified $23 million worth of urgent measures it should take in the next three years. It delivered them to the United Nations program to help poor nations deal with climate change.

Signs of a Growing Climate Divide

The world's richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas.
But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world's most vulnerable regions - most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.
Next Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. body that since 1990 has been assessing global warming, will underline this growing climate divide, according to scientists involved in writing it - with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but better able to withstand them.
Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries. These and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers and floatable homes, in grains and soybeans genetically altered to flourish even in a drought.
In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments. As the oceans swell with water from melting ice sheets, it is the crowded river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, along with small island nations, that are most at risk.
"Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic," said Henry I. Miller, a fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost. We'll see the same phenomenon with global warming."
Those in harm's way are beginning to speak out. "We have a message here to tell these countries: that you are causing aggression to us by causing global warming," President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda said at the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in February. "Alaska will probably become good for agriculture, Siberia will probably become good for agriculture, but where does that leave Africa?"
Scientists say it has become increasingly clear that worldwide precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles. That will nourish crops in warming regions like Canada and Siberia while parching countries like Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa, which are already prone to drought.
While rich countries are hardly immune from drought and flooding, their wealth will largely insulate them from harm, at least for the next generation or two, many experts say.
Cities in Texas, California and Australia are already building or planning desalination plants, for example. And federal studies have shown that desalination can work far from the sea, purifying water from brackish aquifers deep in the ground in places like New Mexico.
"The inequity of this whole situation is really enormous if you look at who's responsible and who's suffering as a result," said Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. climate panel. In its most recent report, in February, the panel said that decades of warming and rising seas were inevitable with the existing greenhouse-gas buildup, no matter what was done about cutting future greenhouse gas emissions.
Miller, of the Hoover Institution, said the world should focus less on trying to rapidly cut greenhouse gases and more on helping regions at risk become more resilient.
Many other experts insist this is not an either-or situation. They say cutting the vulnerability of poor regions needs much more attention, but add that unless emissions are curbed, there will be centuries of warming and rising seas that will threaten ecosystems, water supplies and resources from the poles to the equator, harming rich and poor.
Cynthia E. Rosenzweig, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration expert on climate and agriculture who is a lead author of the U.N. panel's forthcoming impacts report, said that while the richer northern nations may benefit temporarily, "as you march through the decades, at some point - and we don't know where these inflection points are - negative effects of climate change dominate everywhere."
There are some hints that wealthier countries are beginning to shift their focus toward fostering adaptation to warming outside their own borders. Relief organizations including Oxfam and the International Red Cross, foreseeing a world of worsening climate-driven disasters, are turning some of their attention toward projects like expanding mangrove forests as a buffer against storm surges, planting trees on slopes to prevent landslides, or building shelters on high ground.
Some officials from the United States, Britain and Japan say foreign-aid spending can be directed at easing the risks from climate change. The United States, for example, has promoted its 3-year-old Millennium Challenge Corp. as a source of financing for projects in poor countries that will foster resilience. It has just begun to consider environmental benefits of projects, officials say.
Industrialized countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol, the climate pact rejected by the Bush administration, project that hundreds of millions of dollars will soon flow via that treaty into a climate adaptation fund.
But for now, the actual spending on adaptation projects in the world's most vulnerable spots, totaling around $40 million a year, "borders on the derisory," said Kevin Watkins, the director of the U.N. Human Development Report Office, which tracks factors affecting the quality of life around the world.
The lack of climate aid persists even though nearly all the world's industrialized nations, including the United States under the first President Bush, pledged to help when they signed the first global warming treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in 1992. Under that treaty, industrialized countries promised to assist others "that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation." It did not specify how much they would pay.
A $3 billion Global Environmental Facility fund maintained by contributions from developed countries has nearly $1 billion set aside for projects in poorer countries that limit emissions of greenhouse gases. But critics say those projects often do not have direct local benefits, and many are happening in the large fast-industrializing developing countries - not the poorest ones.
James L. Connaughton, President Bush's top adviser on environmental issues, defended the focus on broader development efforts. "If we can shape several billion dollars in already massive development funding toward adaptation, that's a lot more powerful than scrounging for a few million more for a fund that's labeled climate," he said.
Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale focused on climate, said that in the face of warming, it might be necessary to abandon the longstanding notion that all places might someday feed themselves. Poor regions reliant on unpredictable rainfall, he said, should be encouraged to shift people out of farming and into urban areas and import their food from northern countries.
Michael H. Glantz, an expert on climate hazards at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has called for wealthy countries to help establish a center for climate and water monitoring in Africa, run by Africans.
"The Third World has been on its own," he said, "and I think it pretty much will remain on its own."