Regional food security under threat

be sure of a bumper harvest after the rains,” says 70-year old Haruzive Gunge, of drought-prone Chivi District of Masvingo Province, 350 km from Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.
For more than four decades now, life has not been easy for Gunge and other smallholder farmers in this harsh, semi-arid environment. He says things have become worse these days.
“There are no good rains to talk about anymore,” he says bitterly. “It looks like the sun has come closer to us – judging from the sweltering heat,” he complains.
Although Gunge lives in Zimbabwe, his is a common story throughout Southern Africa. Observations being made by smallholder farmers like Gunge confirm scientific evidence which shows that climate change exists and is occurring at an alarming rate.
Parts of Zimbabwe, for example, are already experiencing unpredictable weather patterns. According to the Zimbabwe Meteorological Service, Zimbabwe is experiencing more hot days and fewer cold days.
Climate change will have a significant impact on southern Africa’s already vulnerable food security, environmental experts have warned. It already costs Southern Africa five to 10 percent of its Gross Domestic Product.
This implies a loss of between 10 and 21 billion dollars each year – in a region where nearly half the population is living on less than a dollar a day.
Climate includes patterns of temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind and seasons. “Climate change” affects more than just a change in the weather; it refers to seasonal changes over a long period of time.
These climate patterns play a fundamental role in shaping natural ecosystems, and the human economies and cultures that depend on them.
Because so many systems are tied to climate, a change in climate can affect many related aspects of where and how people, plants and animals live, such as food production, availability and use of water, and health risks.
The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, says one in three people living in Sub-Saharan Africa were chronically hungry in 2007.
According to the Interpress Service (IPS), a development news and features agency, since 2007, erratic rainfall has led to increased food shortages in Southern Africa where droughts damaged and destroyed maize crops in Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
As a result, southern Africa faced a shortfall of 2,18 million metric tonnes of maize in 2006. According to researchers of the Southern African Development Community (SADC); people in the region lacked more than four million metric tonnes of maize in 2007/2008.
Increasing food shortages have become a trend, warns the Climate Systems Analysis Group (CSAG), a climatology research group based at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa.
It is estimated that the maize yields in Zimbabwe and South Africa’s Limpopo Province will decrease by approximately nine percent between now and 2045. This predicted decline will pose a major problem, as maize is the region’s main staple food.
Recently, the CSAG investigated the long term effects of climate change on rain-fed agriculture in southern Africa where the majority of farmers depend on rainfall as a main water source for their crops as they cannot afford irrigation systems.
“When rainfall is low, late or early, these people and their dependents are the first ones to be in trouble,” the CSAG said.
There is a direct link between the projected decrease of maize yields and climatological change, according to the CSAG.
The rain seasons, once predictable, have become erratic and scarce. The region is expected to get hotter as a result of increasing temperatures; more water will evaporate from the soil at a higher pace. This places stress on crops.
Gunge does not know about all these scientific explanations. But millions of other rural people like him in Southern Africa have already started experiencing the negative impacts of climate change.
In another district in Gwanda, in Matabeleland South province in Zimbabwe, Sibaphi Ndlovu remembers the hot years of 15 years ago, saying this is when the weather started to get warmer. The years 1994-1995 saw many SADC countries hit by worst drought in memory, surpassing the effects of the 1991-1992 drought in some parts of the region.
“The extent of the dryness is still unclear,” says Ndlovu who lives in Matshetshe communal area of Gwanda.
Changes in weather patterns have turned agriculture into a gamble with nature for Gwanda farmers.
Prolonged droughts have made the lives of smallholder farmers, who don’t have access to irrigation, extremely difficult. In this district, where the local economy is largely driven by agriculture, the largely poor, rural population has become even more vulnerable.
“We are no longer sure when to start preparing the land for planting or when to start planting. It is pretty much gambling with nature. The weather is no longer predictable as it was some 10 or 15 years ago,” laments Ndlovu.
He adds: “Sometimes the rains are not enough for crop production, while at other times, they are too much. They flood and destroy the crops. If the situation persists, then most of us, who have small farms, will sink deeper into poverty, because we depend on agriculture to take care of our families.”
According to a research by the CSAG, within the next three decades, the rain season in Zimbabwe will start more than a month later, in December instead of in late October.
Poor soil fertility, poor infrastructure, lack of access to markets, climate variability and breakdown in social safety nets are major sources of vulnerability, according to Paul Mapfumo.
He is from the University of Zimbabwe and working on a project called Soil Fertility Consortium for Southern Africa (SOFECSA). This is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary consortium founded in May 2005 to develop and promote technical and institutional innovations that enhance contributions of integrated soil fertility management, research and development to sustainable food security and livelihood options in Southern Africa.
Presenting a paper at a National Climate Change Conference in Harare recently, Mapfumo said: “Management of climate change information and knowledge should be viewed in the context of known agricultural development challenges.”
He said there was a general lack of comprehensive capacity building programmes for farmers and their service providers to adapt to climate change.
Historically, international concern and attention has tended to come after disaster events, rather than preparing for disasters before they occur. Whilst preparedness has been encouraged, whereby community evacuation plans and the stockpiling of emergency supplies are organised – international activities to reduce the impact of disasters have been comparatively rare.
Lately, however, there has been a shift in development emphasis. The progressive approach considers that both the hazard and people’s vulnerability are the cause of disaster. Emphasis is now focused on “disaster risk reduction” (DRR) – reducing vulnerability and thereby the risk of disasters – as an integral part of poverty reduction.
The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Hyogo Framework places disaster risk reduction firmly at the centre of development activities.
Disasters are having a negative impact on attaining the Millennium Development Goals, and this recognition provides further incentives for adopting a more holistic approach to development and disasters. Advances made in past poverty reduction programmes can be reversed by the impact of known hazards, if there is no proper disaster risk reduction planning and management.
Practical Action, an international development organisation, subscribes to the view that “hazards are natural, disasters are not”.
Whether sudden large-scale hazards, or successions of smaller events – disasters are rarely isolated events.
Southern Africa, including Zimbabwe, has long faced problems of disaster risk, especially the cumulative impacts of both natural and man-made hazards, which have destroyed the livelihoods of the most vulnerable. In many cases, failure to address the risks posed by prevailing hazards has impacted negatively on development initiatives.
Disasters are defined as a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or society causing widespread human, material, economic and/or environmental losses. These losses exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using their own resources.
While disasters have traditionally been viewed as dramatic natural occurrences over which passive victims have little or no control, many more resource – poor people are at risk from hazards other than cataclysmic events.
Hunger, disease, slow – onset man-made disasters, and conflict claim many more lives than floods or earthquakes. Yet these disasters pass largely unnoticed; they are “normal” events in less developed countries.
“Disasters only occur when a hazard impacts on vulnerable people. Disasters are triggered by hazards. These hazards are external factors or events that can impact on people’s lives with the potential to affect the well-being or to do harm – depending on the circumstances in which they hit,’ says Kudzai Marovanidze, Practical Action Southern Africa ‘s Programme Team Leader for the Reducing Vulnerability Programme.
Hazards come in many forms. Natural hazards are weather-related or geophysical in origin, for example floods, earthquakes, landslides, and drought, among others.
Some supposedly “natural” hazards are partly human induced, due to environmental degradation, for example, landslides caused by deforestation, erosion gullies exacerbated by over-grazing and veld fires or poorly executed infrastructure development.
Says Marovanidze: “Human activities contribute to climate change, increasing the uncertainty of meteorological events.”
People are threatened by hazards because of their social, economic and environmental vulnerability. But poverty and vulnerability are not the same – not all poor people are vulnerable to all hazards.
Nevertheless, the links between disaster and poverty are clear: the poor tend to be the most vulnerable, have limited assets (physical, social, financial, human and natural) and it is the most vulnerable that are worst affected and suffer most. The capacities of the poor to cope with hazards and recover from the effects are constrained by their lack of access to information and resources.
“Disasters are rarely just one-off events, but more often the result of deep-rooted long-term failures of development. Very often, the impact of several small adversities is all that is required to drive the poor from a state of vulnerability to one of total destitution,” according to a “Livelihood Centred Disaster Risk Reduction(LCDRR), a newly published training manual by Practical Action Southern Africa. The training manual is a guide for facilitators based on field experiences in Zimbabwe.
“When hazards impact on poor people, it is their livelihoods that are usually affected. Our work has shown that secure and sustainable livelihoods can reduce both poverty and susceptibility to disasters,” says Marovanidze.
Due to its climate, geology and vegetation, Zimbabwe is prone to a range of natural hazards such as storms, floods, droughts and cyclones. Some of these are seasonal, such as cyclones and floods, others are less predictable. Many areas of Zimbabwe (Matabeleland, Masvingo and southern parts of Manicaland) are naturally dry, some areas experiencing less than 350mm of rain in a “normal” year. Yet attempts are still being made to cultivate crops such as maize, which are ill-suited to these conditions.
Given the uncertainty of adequate rains, it is not surprising that frequent crop failures occur. Disastrous “droughts” are most frequently the result of the adoption of inappropriate crops coupled with erratic rainfall. As such, they are largely man-made disasters.
Drought is the most frequently occurring “natural” hazard in Zimbabwe, made worse by the clear trend, since 1980, of decline in rainfall that the country has received each year.
The semi-arid areas have been hardest hit, but the frequency with which other areas are experiencing reduced rainfall is increasing, according to the Meteorological Office of Zimbabwe.
The impacts of drought have been widespread, affecting economic performance, social infrastructure and the environmental resource base – and, most importantly, people’s livelihoods.
“What has received little attention from the Government of Zimbabwe and other development partners is the disaster preparedness. More emphasis has been placed on reacting to disasters through food aid as opposed to building communities’ resilience through increasing their asset base so that they are in a better position to react to disasters when they occur,” says Reginald Sithole, a Social Scientist with Practical Action Southern Africa.
Sithole said, “There have been few attempts to integrate disaster risk reduction into developmental processes and planning thereby often resulting in the reversal of development gains.”
For this reason, Practical Action Southern Africa is engaged in on-going dialogue with the Department of Civil Protection in the Ministry of Local Government, Rural and Urban Development, to integrate people’s livelihoods into disaster risk reduction.
Evidence from Matabeleland South Province, where Practical Action Southern Africa implemented a UK Department for International Development (DFID) funded Livelihood Centred Approaches to Disaster Risk Reduction from 2006 to 2010, has shown that the approach reduces people’s vulnerability and strengthens their capacity to cope with hazards through involving communities and local organisations in identifying, analysing and evaluating their own disaster risks and in developing and managing their own plans for reducing vulnerability.
The concept of total disaster risk reduction requires that the Department of Civil Protection integrates the livelihood centred approach to disaster risk reduction in the national strategy as this strengthens community coping mechanisms, making them less reliant on external support in the event of a hazard.
Meanwhile, some government ministries are already carrying out mitigation activities to reduce the impact of hazards. Some of these are the promotion of conservation farming by the Department of Agricultural Extension and Technical Services in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development.
Disaster management in Zimbabwe has focused on post-disaster response. Experience has shown that while natural hazards cannot be avoided, their effects can be minimised if timely measures are taken to mitigate them.
Practical Action Southern Africa has found that changing the focus from response to emphasis on preparedness and mitigation strategies has worked effectively in Zimbabwe.
Hazard and vulnerability analysis can empower people to make informed choices which reduce the risks to which their assets and livelihoods are exposed.
“For example, being aware of the likely impacts of future droughts, farmers have been able to make informed decisions as to the number and type of livestock to keep, what crops to grow, and to plan appropriate strategies to reduce their losses and protect their livelihood systems,” says Sithole.
While communities have always lived with shocks and stresses, their coping strategies are being eroded by rapidly changing external pressures such as population growth, environmental degradation and the negative impacts of climate change.
Changing weather patterns and increased frequency and intensity of hazardous events are overwhelming traditional coping strategies evolved over generations.
While communities are all too aware of these challenges, their poverty and lack of access to appropriate information and technologies has increased their exposure to disastrous events. Facilitating community-based planning, which incorporates disaster reduction and the promotion of appropriate technologies which strengthen and diversify livelihood options, provides opportunities to increase the resilience and reduce the poverty of resource poor communities. Development and disaster risk reduction are thus part of the same continuum and cannot be addressed in isolation. Mitigation should address the underlying causes of vulnerability; namely poverty, lack of access to resources and underdevelopment. Disasters should not be seen as extreme events created entirely by natural forces, but as unresolved problems of development.
While there is no single formula for risk reduction for the poor, disaster risk reduction should be a core component of all long-term sustainable development activities. Without the application of effective risk reduction strategies positive development gains and the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals are unlikely.
There is, therefore, a great need for all countries in the region and development practitioners to re-think their development approaches in terms of disaster risk reduction.
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