Our hot and hungry continent is getting hotter and hungrier

The scorching heat due to global warming means it is getting more difficult for plants to grow under the decreasing rainfall. Yes, the continent is growing hungrier and hungrier. And hungrier. PHOTO | NATION 

In Summary

• As climate change ravages Africa, more and more people are going to bed hungry, and the United Nations thinks the answer to the nagging food problem is an ecosystem-based approach to agriculture.
• Even as climate change ravages Africa, the wastefulness of the continent’s farmers has not abated, which explains why the continent imports less than what it wastes, especially at the post-harvest stage.
• A new proposal by the United Nations seeks to end that wastefulness and adopt ecosystem-based agricultural practices, and this, at least according to food experts, is the last shot for the continent. No one dares imagine the consequences if it fails.

By NGARE KARIUKI
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If the almost one billion people inhabiting the African continent went really quiet for a moment; and if all the sounds of birds and animals and waterfalls and everything in nature were muted for a second, a more disturbing “human” sound would be heard.

Turn off the factory machinery and all electronics; switch off the cars, trains and planes for a few seconds; and still, a deep growling sound will be heard reverberating over the surface of the continent.

That sound, amplified 230 million times over, is the familiar rumbling of the stomachs of people going to bed hungry all over the continent.

Africa is rising, promises the familiar chorus; but so are its temperatures. The scorching heat due to global warming means it is getting more difficult for plants to grow under the decreasing rainfall. Yes, the continent is growing hungrier and hungrier.

And hungrier.

Reports by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show that nearly a quarter of the Sub-Saharan population lacks adequate food. Over 200 million people suffer the devastating symptoms of chronic-to-severe malnutrition, leading to high mortality of children under five years old.

By 2030, the World Bank projects that droughts and heat will leave 40 per cent of the Sub-Saharan land now under maize unable to support the crop. Rising temperatures could cause major balding of the savannah grasslands, which means pastoral communities in Kenya’s Baringo, West Pokot and Turkana counties will have to find something else to fight over.

But perhaps all this is just empty, alarmist rhetoric. Depending on how one looks at it, the numbers do not look as depressing as the experts warn. Everything else seems to be going well for Africa. According to the Africa Economic Outlook of 2013, the continent has experienced a 5.1 per cent growth since 2000, which is twice the average growth rate witnessed in the 1990s. And six of the world’s 10 fastest growing economies are on the continent.

World Bank projects that droughts and heat will leave 40 per cent of the Sub-Saharan land now under maize unable to support the crop. Rising temperatures could cause major balding of the savannah grasslands. PHOTO | FILE

EMERGING MIDDLE CLASS

A steadily growing middle class has been the pride of the continent and the content of numerous praise songs and speeches. Despite the bleak future, Africa still thinks it is on the right track; it boasts great agricultural potential, claiming 65 per cent of the world’s arable land and 10 per cent of the globe’s renewable water resources.

But no one eats potential, and the United Nations Environmental Programme (Unep) regional climate change coordinator Richard Munang agrees.

“Africa is faced with a barrage of shocks, unprecedented in complexity as well as scale,” says Dr Munang. “These include ecological degradation, food insecurity, malnutrition and youth unemployment, all happening when climate change is already reversing development gains of the continent.”

Those gloomy words were part of Mr Munang’s welcome remarks at the second Ecosystem-based Adaptation for Food Security (EBAFOSC) conference at the Unep headquarters in Gigiri, on July 30 and 31 this year.

He might as well have said “welcome to hell”.

Africa is indeed reeling from being pillaged by elements that a large majority of its inhabitants can barely understand, let alone articulate. But one culprit that seems to be increasingly rearing its ugly head in talks about the fate of the continent is “Climate Change”. The phrase has been bandied about so much and for so long that everyone who encounters it presumes to understand its meaning, not to mention its implications.

But what is Climate Change? Traditionally, weather and its mother, climate, have been regarded as forces of nature that we can do nothing about. Our best chance at conquering the climate has been to find the most comfortable seats when the ride gets bumpy. So why is everyone speaking of “Climate Change” as if it is something we can do anything about? Well, the key lies in how those who arrested the phrase and put it on the dock define it.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change defines it as a “change of climate attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods”. Simply put, the world is getting hot, and it is our fault.

Africa, therefore, is reeling under the effects of Climate Change. And if the status quo remains, the comma-shaped animal may soon go into a coma because it will no longer be able to feed itself.

But there is hope, and this comes in the form of a programme referred to as the Regional Ecosystem-based Adaptation for Food Security Programme (EbAFoS), a Unep brainchild.

The rather technical-sounding programme, simply referred to as EbA (Ecosystem-based Adaptation), is designed to counter the effects of Climate Change, otherwise referred to as “global warming” in more familiar terms. Agriculture and climate experts believe that the ecosystem-based approach to farming will not only maintain but also improve the fertility and productivity of land.

The programme lays emphasis on traditional practices such as conservation agriculture, crop rotation, inter-cropping and biological control of pests — but with a little technical twist.

Such sustainable practices prevent soil erosion, improve soil fertility and enhance biological diversity, and the outcome is higher farm yields and its economic cousins. The approach is also meant to reverse the staggering losses being made annually as a result of degraded ecosystems.

WASTEFUL TECHNOLOGIES

Approximately 6.6 million tonnes of grain is lost annually due to degraded ecosystems. These yields, it is argued, would be enough to meet the annual calorific needs of approximately 30 million people in the continent. PHOTO | FILE

According to FAO, approximately 6.6 million tonnes of grain is lost annually due to degraded ecosystems. These yields, it is argued, would be enough to meet the annual calorific needs of approximately 30 million people in the continent. Furthermore, the conventional farming approaches have gone rogue with wastefulness, with post-harvest losses estimated at 23 per cent of field harvests.

The theme of the July conference at Gigiri, where Mr Munang said made that jarring welcome, was Re-imagining Africa Food Security through Harnessing Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EBA) Approaches Now and Into the Future under Climate Change. The event brought together delegates from all over Africa, from scientists, the private and public sectors to UN agencies, academia, research think tanks, students, youth organisations, policy experts, and the civil society.

Their goal? To ensure Africa will feed the bulging billion population by 2050 using cost-effective approaches while adapting to the impacts of climate change.

The wastefulness of current agricultural practices in the continent featured prominently in the conference, with Ms Rhoda Tumusime, the Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture of the Africa Union (AUC), strongly decrying the fact that so many Africans (233 million) go to bed hungry. She also noted that the continent loses more food to post-harvest wastefulness ($48 billion) than it imports ($35 billion).

It was evident from the conference, and the data, that Africa needs to work on value chains — the series of activities that will add value to the agricultural products such as production and marketing. This can be achieved through food processing and the application of storage and mobile technologies to reduce post-harvest losses and unlock additional income and job opportunities. Otherwise, the number of beds cradling growling stomachs will continue to increase.

Probably the most noteworthy take-home from the two-day conference was the adoption of the Nairobi Action Agenda on Africa’s Ecosystem Based Adaptation for Food Security.

Launched from the springboard of the fact that EbA-driven agriculture reduces waste, conserves the climate, creates employment opportunities, especially for the youth and women in Africa; the Nairobi Action Agenda encapsulates promising resolutions and declarations aimed at these ends.

So, do all this talk by experts and plenty of good intentions guarantee a continent that will feed itself in the next five decades? That remains to be seen. But it is a good place to start.

Since women produce up to 80 per cent of food in Africa, both for household consumption and sale, it was proposed that extension services and new technologies be made available to women. PHOTO | FILE

WAY FORWARD

Value chains, women and youth at centre of Nairobi action plan

The experts meeting at Gigiri in July came up with a few suggestions and resolutions that will, hopefully, reverse the current negative trend. The following are some of the solutions suggested and agreed upon: 

FOCUS ON VALUE CHAINS:

Africa, through its various finance institutions, should explore agricultural value chain financing which looks at value chains in entirety, identifying opportunities and putting in place required interventions while transferring risks to those better equipped to handle them. Such financing should help both farmers and other post-farm gate entrepreneurs to expand their businesses, which is vital in creating the demand chain for these productivity-increasing EbA technologies and contributing toward scaling up their use. 

DON’T OVERLOOK THE WOMEN:

Since women produce up to 80 per cent of food in Africa, both for household consumption and sale, it was proposed that extension services and new technologies be made available to women. Gender stereotypes and dynamics such as land rights, education, access to technologies, labour, capital, support services and credit, are just a few of the obstacles in the way of women maximising this potential. 

AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, THE YOUTH TOO:

Approximately 350 million young people will be entering the labour market in Africa by 2035. This signals more mouths to feed and jobs to create. Yet agriculture, which holds much opportunity, has for a long time been shunned by the youth as many find it less appealing. It was agreed that education curricula should be reformed at elementary, secondary and university levels while ensuring principles of EbA-driven agriculture are integrated in basic learning to facilitate a generational appreciation of ecosystems, which will increase awareness and likelihood of their adoption in the future. 

PUBLICITY AND POLICIES:

Governments were encouraged to establish and communicate clearly and consistently a country vision for ecological agriculture, and support its implementation through appropriate policy and collaborative development and implementation of strategies to ensure effective application and allocation of resources, both budgetary and manpower to facilitate implementation.