adminJeffrey Gogo Climate Story
EDWARD KUTSONGA’S boiling sweat greased some sweet profits for a number of small-scale Wedza tobacco farmers during the just ended marketing season. Now, the 52-year old Chemhanza village communal farmer is inspired and wants to try his hand at tobacco farming – the new “gold” rush in Zimbabwe.
Mr Kutsonga will not be outsourcing his labour to competitors this season. Instead, he has ganged up with a friend targeting, as a start, one hectare of tobacco on “hired” land, to eat the fruits of their labour from own produce. Necessary inputs have been acquired on time and the tobacco nursery is currently being manicured in preparation for the coming planting season.
“We have gained enough skill from many years of working on other people’s farms to be able to produce good quality tobacco on our own,” said Mr Kutsonga, confidently.
However, while these are happy days for numerous smallholder farmers like him, the future might not as be rapturous for their posterity in tobacco farming. Much of the land producing good yields in Mashonaland East Province, in which Wedza lies, will become unsuitable for rainfed tobacco production in 70 years’ time due to changing climate, according to new research by a group of scientists from Chinhoyi University of Technology.
Chemura et al (2013) says there’s a high probability that by 2080, the worst case scenario under a 4 degrees Celsius warmer earth, over 50 percent of the current land under tobacco in the province will turn marginal, unsuitable, owing to increased rainfall and temperature variability.
Temperatures will increase by up to 12 percent, the scientists forecast, and precipitation declines by between 2 and 6 percent. This will likely result in lower yields and reduced incomes for farmers, who are dependent on rainfed agriculture, if no adaptive measures were implemented beginning now.
“When environmental conditions were modified to resemble probable future climatic conditions, the model predicted a national decrease in areas suitable for rain-fed tobacco production especially in Mash East,” Chemura said.
“These changes were driven by precipitation-related factors which were found to be driving suitability for rainfed tobacco production in Zimbabwe.”
Suitability changes were seen to be less radical in the other major tobacco-producing regions of Mashonaland Central, Mashonaland West and Manicaland. The most suitable areas for tobacco production in Zimbabwe are below an altitude of 1 400m with deep medium to heavy soils.
These factors run through most of the tobacco growing regions, which lie in agro- ecological zones two to four.
In a separate 2011 study, Steven Jerie of the Midlands State University’s Environment Department found that in the 10 years to 2009, climate change had severely affected the production of tobacco in Nyazura, Manicaland Province, historically the biggest tobacco-producing district in the country.
The study showed that among other causes, rainfall variability was a major factor influencing the decline in yield, Jerie said.
Production declined from a peak 1 102 tonnes in 1999/2000 season to just 90 tonnes in 2002 before recovering to around 500 tonnes during the 2008/2009 season. In that period, average annual rainfall gradually declined to a low of 578mm from as high as 1 379mm, reflective of the variations in output.
“Tobacco yield changes in resonance to the variability of rainfall and thus shows a strong relationship between rainfall and tobacco yield in Nyazura,” asserted Jerie.
Temperature variations also showed a negative correlation with tobacco output. An increase in temperatures resulted in decreased yields while the opposite was true.
Potential adaptation mechanisms
Tobacco is a crop of strategic national importance, sustaining families and raking in millions of foreign currency for the Zimbabwean economy. It accounts for over three quarters of all agriculture foreign receipts with smallholder farmers now responsible for 80 percent of production.
Disruptions in production as a result of climate change or anything else will be disastrous for the socio-economic well-being of the country. Farmers will have to adapt. Yet, “in Zimbabwe, the threat posed by rainfall variability has not been taken seriously”, Jerie said.
Globally, tobacco is grown extensively under rainfed conditions, but that’s precisely the problem here where climates are highly variable, making dependence on natural rain risky.
To minimise losses and improve coping capacity, Jerie suggested the tobacco sector in Manicaland “be overhauled” embracing such technologies as water harvesting to supplement rainfall and enable longer tobacco growing reasons as well as capacitating women farmers to grow and manage the crop under dry conditions.
“There is need for resource mobilisation to fund community-based projects such as borehole drilling, irrigation and cultivation of tobacco cultivators that are drought tolerant,” he said.
Extensive research is needed on tobacco varieties, particularly those that are drought- and pest-resistant as well as improving early warming systems.
Chemura et al says Government and the private sector should develop innovative tobacco crop insurance schemes for smallholder farmers and strengthen institutional capacity for responding to crop failures as well as promoting crop-livestock synergies. For areas that are to become marginal or unsuitable, diversification of land uses, agricultural systems and income sources is advised.
God is faithful.
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