Residents of Malawi circumvent climate to be able to plant – 05/10/2023 – Environment

When it comes to growing food, some of the world’s smallest farmers are rising among the world’s most creative. Like Judith Harry and her neighbors, who are sowing pigeonpea (or pigeonpea) to protect their soil from a hotter, scorching sun. They are planting vetiver grass to contain the floods.

Villagers are resurrecting old crops like millet and forgotten yams, and planting trees that naturally fertilize the soil. Some are rejecting a legacy of European colonialism, the practice of planting rows and rows of maize and saturating the fields with chemical fertilizers.

“One crop may fail, another may succeed,” said Harry, who abandoned his parents’ tradition of growing only corn and tobacco and added peanuts, sunflowers and soybeans to his fields. “It could save your season.”

It’s not just Harry and his neighbors in Malawi, a largely agrarian country of 19 million people that is on the front lines of climate risk. His set of improvised innovations is multiplied by small subsistence farmers in other parts of the world.

This is out of necessity. It’s because they depend on the climate for food, and the climate has been altered by 150 years of greenhouse gas emissions produced mainly by industrialized countries.

Droughts burn its soil. Storms lash them with fury. Cyclones, once rare, are now common. Add to that the shortage of chemical fertilizers, which most African countries import from Russia, now at war. Furthermore, the value of their national currencies has shrunk.

All things at once. Farmers in Malawi have to save themselves from starvation. Corn, the main source of calories in the region, faces problems. In Malawi, maize production has been hampered by droughts, cyclones, rising temperatures and erratic rainfall.

Across southern Africa, weather shocks have already reduced maize yields, and if temperatures continue to rise, yields are expected to decline further.

“The ground has gone cold,” said Harry.

Giving up is not an option. There is no insurance to fall back on, nor irrigation when the rains fail. So you do what you can. You experience. Take the hoe and try to build different types of protection to save your banana orchard. He shares manure with his neighbors who have had to sell their goats in difficult times. You start eating soy porridge for breakfast instead of the corn couscous you’re used to.

There is no guarantee that these adaptations will be sufficient. This was made abundantly clear in March, when Cyclone Freddy hit southern Malawi, dumping six months of rain in six days. She dragged crops, houses, people, livestock.

Still, you move on.

“Giving up means you have no food,” said Chikondi Chabvuta, the granddaughter of farmers who is now a regional adviser for the international aid group CARE. “You have to adapt.”

And for now you have to do it without much help. Global finance to help poor countries adapt to climate risks is a small fraction of what is needed, the United Nations said.

Crisis in corn country

Alexander Mponda’s parents grew maize. Everyone did — even Malawi’s founding president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, an authoritarian leader who ruled for nearly 30 years. He urged Malawi to modernize agriculture, and maize was considered modern. Not millet.

Hybrid seeds proliferated. Chemical fertilizers were subsidized.

Corn had been promoted by British colonists long before. It was an easy source of calories for labor on the plantations. Millet and sorghum, once widely consumed, lost market share. The yam has practically disappeared.

Tobacco became the main cash crop and maize the staple cereal. Dried, ground and then cooked like angu, it is known in Malawi as “nsima”, in Kenya as “ugali”, in Uganda as “posho”.

So Mponda, 26, grows maize. But it’s not just corn anymore. The soil is degraded by decades of monoculture. The rains don’t come on time. This year, neither will the fertilizer.

“We are forced to change,” Mponda said. “Practicing only one culture is not beneficial.”

The total area dedicated to maize in the Mchinji district of central Malawi has decreased by about 12% this year compared to last year, according to the local agriculture department, mainly due to the shortage of chemical fertilizers.

Mponda is part of a local group called the School of Agricultural Business, which runs experiments on a small plot of land. In a flower bed, they planted two soybean seedlings side by side. The next, just one. Some beds they treated with animal manure; others do not. Two peanut varieties are being tested. The goal: to see for themselves what works and what doesn’t.

Mponda has been growing peanuts, a cash crop that is also good for the soil. This year he planted soybeans. As for his 4,000 m2 of maize, they yielded half of a normal harvest.

Many of your neighbors are planting sweet potatoes. Similar experiments led by farmers have begun across the country.

Malawi has seen recurrent droughts in some places, extreme rainfall in others, rising temperatures and four cyclones in three years. As in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, climate change has lowered agricultural productivity, with a recent World Bank study warning that climate shocks could reduce the region’s already fragile economy by 3% to 9% by 2030. Half the population already lives below of the poverty line.

Eighty percent of them don’t have access to electricity, don’t own cars or motorcycles. Sub-Saharan Africans account for only 3% of the planet’s warming gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere. That is, they have little or no responsibility for the problem of climate change.

There is a limit to what small farmers in a small country can do if the world’s biggest climate polluters, led by the United States and China, cannot reduce their emissions.

“In some regions of the world it will no longer be possible to grow food or raise animals,” said Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor at Cornell University (USA) who has worked with farmers in Malawi for more than 20 years. “That is if we continue on our current trajectory.”

inherited seeds

At 74, Wackson Maona is old enough to remember that in the north where he lives, near the Tanzanian border, there used to be three small showers before the start of the rainy season. The first were known as the rains that wash the ashes from the clean fields after the harvest.

Those rains are over. Now, the rains can start late or end early. Or they can go on and on for months. The skies are now a mystery, which is why Maona takes care of the soil more.

He refuses to buy anything. He plants the seeds he keeps. He feeds the soil with compost he prepares in the shade of an old mango tree (which he calls his “office”) and then manure from his goats, which helps retain moisture in the soil.

Your field looks like a chaotic garden. Pigeonpea grows thick under the corn, protecting the soil from the heat. Pumpkin branches spread across the floor. Soybeans and cassava are sown together, as well as bananas and beans. A climbing yam produces year after year. Maona has tall trees in her field, whose fallen leaves act as fertilizer. It has low trees whose flowers are natural pesticides.

“Everything is free,” he says. It is the antithesis of industrial agriculture.

Planting multiple trees and crops in one plot of land often takes more time and work. But it can also serve as a kind of insurance.

‘Here we have history’

The cyclone imposed a painful decision on the Chabvuta family.

The storm hit the house his grandfather had built, the one where his mother grew up, where Chabvuta spent his childhood vacations. He flooded the fields, took six goats. He left his uncle, who lived there, devastated.

It hit him the hardest because he was always the resilient one. When a previous cyclone knocked down a wall of the house, he encouraged the family to rebuild. When he lost his cattle, he wasn’t intimidated. “I used to say ‘Here we have history,'” she recalled. “This year he said, ‘It’s over for me’.”

The family is now looking to buy land in a village farther from the riverbank, protected from the next storm, which they know is inevitable.

“We can’t keep insisting on living there,” said Chabvuta. “As much as we have all the precious memories, it’s time to go.”