Tiwonge Ng’ona is chief reporter with The Guardian Newspaper in Blantyre, Malawi. She is attending the COP17 Summit in Durban, South Africa on a fellowship from the Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP). CCMP is a joint initiative between the International Institute for Environment and Development, Internews and The Panos Institute, London that is seeking to improve media coverage of climate change. She travelled with Self Help Africa to file this report.
The most important visitor to the village of Mabwera is over a month late.
It's November and the seasonal rains have yet to arrive. For the smallholder farmers in this village of just over 1,000 people in southern Malawi, the wait is an anxious one.
Lands have been hand tilled into neat furrows, but the farmers who have prepared the fields dare not plant their maize and other cereals until they have had rainfall. It's far too risky.
"We had showers just over a week ago and some people went out and started planting right away," says farm extension advisor Mavuto Kamanga from Self Help Africa. "We told them all to wait - the rains have become unpredictable, and showers like that don't mean the rainy season has arrived. We were right, because seed planted last week won't survive now."
Sowing seeds before the rains arrive - a practice known as ‘dry planting’ - was once common, but is now just too risky. Small-scale farming in Africa is a daily gamble, and climate change means the odds are climbing higher. Without irrigation, a farmer has just one chance to harvest enough food to feed her family. Plant too early, and the seeds germinate and die before the rains arrive. Plant too late, and the crop becomes prey to a variety of other conditions.
So the rains are late again this year in Malawi. In the mud huts of Mabwera village, they say it's climate change. Here there's no talk of who's to blame; only of how to survive. "It wasn't like this," says smallholder farmer Moffat Magombo (35) quietly. "My father and grandfather could read the signs in the weather because they were nearly always the same. The rains started in late September or at the beginning of October, and they could be confident that it would continue until the end of March or early April."
With world leaders gathering 1,500 miles away in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th annual UN Conference of the Parties (COP17) summit, the Government of Malawi sees the current delay in seasonal rains, and an anticipated foreshortening of the rainy season, as compelling evidence of the effects of climate change.
The solution, in large part, is to help farmers adapt to these new climatic conditions. The difficulty rests in finding someone to pay for this. "Finance is not forthcoming as quickly as climate change is happening," says Dr. Aloysius Kamperewera, Malawi's Deputy Director of Environment.
"Smallholder farming communities are particularly vulnerable," he says. "They haven’t caused the problem, yet they are suffering the effects of climate change. In the past year we have seen destructive flooding in the far north of the country, droughts in the south, and have experienced numerous other unpredictable weather events," he adds.
"Nationally we are also seeing evidence of rural farming communities beginning to migrate to urban areas not because of the promise of a better future, but because the land is not able to support them any more."
For the Irish government, helping farmers to cope with climate change has been one of the key focus areas since it established a diplomatic mission in Malawi four years ago."Farming is critical for Malawi, given that it supports up to 85% of the population,most of them on small landholdings," says Adrian Fitzgerald, Irish Aid's head of development for Malawi.
"The challenges that these farming families face is considerable, not least because climate change has shortened the rainy season in which they plant, while the risks of more intense rainfall in the latter months of the season have grown, resulting in increased incidents of flooding, erosion and destruction of crops."
The Irish Aid programme invests €10 million per annum in bi-lateral aid, and also provides backing to the work of a number of development agencies working in the country. The focus for this funding is hunger, food security and nutrition. Two Irish agencies – Self Help Africa and GOAL - are part of a multi-agency consortium that will invest up to €10 million over the next five years to assist 900,000 rural households in Malawi to mitigate the effects of climate change.
The ‘Discover’ project, funded by the British, Irish and Norwegian governments will help communities to respond to climate variability by diversifying household food production, improve access to better quality drought tolerant seed, and help targeted communities to prepare for and respond to climate variability.
Part of this project involves a unique link to the global carbon markets. Wexford-born Conor Fox and Kerry –born John O’Connor head a company called Hestian Innovation providing training and technical support to village groups making fuel-efficient cooking stoves. These stoves - 50,000 of which will be manufactured in association with the Discover project - reduce household fuel consumption by around one tonne of firewood per year.
"That's a carbon saving," says Fox, "and it's one we are now able to take to the global carbon market and sell. We advocate that the revenues raised should be used to make the benefits of cleaner energy accessible to more African households." The potential is enormous, says Fox. "Across Africa, there's a possible saving of 250 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year if we can make it possible for everyone to cook on a stove that's simply more fuel-efficient. The stoves are made locally and cost about $2."
The Irish Government is one investor in Hestian Innovation’s initiative, following former Green Environment Minister John Gormley’s decision to buy Gold Standard carbon credits from his company through the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Programme to offset the carbon footprint of ministerial flights. Irish Aid too, is playing its part in this unique collaboration. It funded the development of new strains of pigeon pea, a cash crop whose stalks are used by Malawian villagers as a firewood substitute.
In Africa, the climate is changing. In Africa, people are changing too.
Malawi's rural poor face enormous challenges as they seed to adapt to climate change.
But they are working on strategies that will help them to cope - including crop diversification, irrigated horticulture, soil and land fertility, fuel efficiency measures, and wider management of their natural resources.
And the people are seeking to raise awareness of the challenge - all activities that can be seen in this short promotional clip, filmed in and around Masumbankhunda in Southern Malawi, in November 2011.
Memory Mogombo "Some years ago the rains starts in October. Now it could be November or December before we get the rain that we need to plant our crops. Sometimes too it ends very early, before the crops are really mature."
Haston Bybro "I have been chief of this village for 35 years. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s we had regular rain, but the abundant and reliable rain, but the pattern has changed over the years.
Now it is not dependable, and has affected our productivity. In terms of food production we do not have enough food at household level."
Boston Bisanconi "We cannot rely on the uplands anymore. We must plant crops also in the dambo (wetland) if we are to be sure that we have enough food to eat."
