Climate change: Farmers have no choice, but adapt

Obert Chifamba Staff Writer
The ruckus on climate change has been gathering tempo since the turn of the millennium and a myriad of adaptation and survival strategies have been proffered to farmers from various stakeholders and sources. While some of the strategies are very effective if espoused to the last letter, some only have the capacity to moderate the effects of the climate blight and leave the farmer a little merrier. Governments on their part, have convened many a meeting on the matter and passed resolutions some of which have even found their way to the lowest ranking citizen but the uptake has not been very encouraging.

It is a fact that climate change will, and has already, started impacting negatively on agriculture and food production around the world mainly due to the effects of elevated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, higher temperatures, altered precipitation and transpiration regimes, increased frequency of extreme events, and modified weed, pest and pathogen pressure. In general, low-latitude areas are at most risk of having decreased crop yields.

Evidence gathered suggests that droughts have been occurring more frequently because of global warming and are expected to become more frequent and intense in Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. However, other research suggests that there has been little change in droughts over the past 60 years. Their impacts are aggravated because of increased water demand, population growth, urban expansion, and environmental protection efforts in many areas. Droughts result in crop failures and the loss of pasture grazing land for livestock.

Farmers have not received advice on conservation farming methods well. The zero-tillage concept, though labour intensive, has its positives that outweigh negatives. This method does not expose the soil entirely to elements of the weather, as only the spot on which a seed will be planted is disturbed and there is not much moisture loss due to evaporation

The soil crumb structure is also not disturbed and so are microbial activities. Of course there is need for serious weed management strategies but there is always the option to use herbicides, which many farmers now consider. Yields from such projects have been noted to be higher than those from where conventional soil preparation methods have been used.

Zero tillage allows the farmer to beat deadlines and when a season is going to be shorter than usual, the farmer can at least salvage something, as he/she can always be on top of his/her game time wise.

Climate change has brought about droughts, sporadic and heavy rainfall periods, soil erosion, declining yields, pests, disease infestation and short growing seasons. On the menu of adaptation strategies, water harvesting technologies, conservation tillage, use of keyhole and trench gardens, agroforestry and application of traditional medicine to control pests and diseases have featured prominently but have not been warmly embraced.

Water harvesting is one strategy farmers do not seem to find very rewarding probably because the idea of setting up structures that trap water is tedious and therefore less appealing.

Agroforestry on the other hand provides many opportunities for value added production and is also used as living contour hedges for erosion control to conserve and enhance biodiversity. It is often perceived in the narrow sense of inter-cropping food plants and trees while in the broader sense, it signifies any system that includes food, and/or fodder and wood production.

Again this has not been an appealing option to many farmers while the concept of crop diversity is well known among farmers for its capacity to offer considerable protection against farming risk, including climate-related risk but has in recent years been slowly dumped out of the picture.

While crop diversity helps prevent total loss of crop production larger farming enterprises with a range of different crop types, or even cultivars of the same crop with differing drought or pest resistance traits have in recent years seemed less appealing to farmers who are either targeting the high-value tobacco or some other cash crop.

The idea of adopting crop varieties that fare better under adverse climatic conditions has been said over and over but it seems the more the noises on the need to change attitude are made the more deaf the farmers seem to become. They want to stick to their traditional varieties and to their usual planting methods and times.