“The ruin of a nation begins in the home of its people” – African Proverb
Now that I have established different methods of irrigation that African countries are adopting, I acknowledge that there is this overall sense of urgency regarding food security and introducing more farm savvy technologies to African countries. I ask myself if there are other variables adding to this imperativeness of irrigating farmlands. While researching this, overwhelmingly there is a consensus that climate change is significantly affecting farmland through the increase in the number of droughts. With this anthropogenic change occurring in past decades, droughts have caused much harm to farmers and is therefore another reason for introduction of irrigation methods in Africa. This blog post will address the overall increase of droughts and then will analyze what it means for the farming industry and the livelihood of the farmers.
Picture of a drought in East Africa (Source)
As climate change threatens all humans, it does not affect everyone equally. This is the case in the continent of Africa, where climate change is already hurting people’s everyday lives because of the significant increase in droughts. Here with extreme differences in seasons regarding rainfall, and the reliance of flood water from the shift of the ITCZ, a change in this weather pattern will be devastating to African agriculture. This change in seasonal rainfall is now seen returning yearly, providing an increase in droughts. In East Africa specifically, drought frequency has doubled from one every six years to one every three years, and from 2008-2010 drought affected over 13 million people in East Africa (Haile, 2019). Most notably changed is the decline of rains in the boreal spring, which is usually the long rainy season. In addition, in the boreal summer a decrease in rainfall also has been occuring. Whereas, in the boreal autumn, usually with short rains, there is a general increase in rainfall (Haile, 2019). This mirrors the increase or decrease in droughts, where in the summer and spring droughts are more frequent, severe and last longer, whereas in autumn droughts decrease. In South Africa, drought has also been prominent where between the years of 2014 to 2016, each new year was consecutively drier. Regarding the entirety of Africa, the Royal Meteorological Society has been tracking droughts since the 1970s worldwide and Africa has perpetually been on the list of hotspots for drought up to present day (Spinoni, 2013). This is seen in figure 1 showing the drought hotspots of the world increasing over time, and specifically in Africa.
Figure1: Map depicting drought hotspots from 1951-2010 (Source)
With the establishment that droughts have become more frequent in Africa, I will answer the question as to why this matters so profoundly to Africa. One of the biggest proponents for droughts being a hindrance is that Africa is still primarily reliant on traditional means of using the seasonality of water and dependence of flooding to grow crops. As Kreike says, “A key factor in identifying Africa as the most vulnerable continent is the very perception that African societies are directly dependent on their fickle environment” (Kreike, 2019). The most visible way of quantifying this is the stark decrease in food crop yield when there is a drought. During a 2011 drought in Kenya the entire agriculture sector produced 20% of its normal yields, in Somalia there was the lowest yield of sorghum and maize in 15 years, and in Northern Kenya 70-80% of the livestock had to migrate out of the region (Perez, 2019). With the 11 countries that are members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the constituents reported that in the dry season of 2017 to 2018, food insecurity increased 28%. The countries only harvested 37.5 million tons of grains in the growing season, which is 5.4 million tones fewer than the amount needed for consumption (Mpofu, 2019). In figure 2, the graph shows the abundance of food insecure areas for East Africa that are predicted becuase of increase in droughts. This devastating pattern continues throughout the various countries of Africa affected by drought, where drought profusely affects food crop yield, adding to food insecurity in these already fragile conditions.
This obvious concern for droughts increasing food insecurity is part for the call to irrigate lands. If continuously farmers are unable to provide food this is a major problem for other Africans but also for the livelihood of the farmers. When the farmers cannot provide food, it is the main reason for food price increase, migration, hunger and unemployment (Haile, 2019). Some of these variables are shown in figure 3. In South Africa in the 2017-2018 drought, 25,000 jobs were lost from the agricultural sector, and in the country itself R 5 billion was lost to the economy because of the drought (Kalaba, 2019). In most cases, farmers are the first to not have food themselves if there is a drought, and in Somalia this was related to an increase in food conflict defined as,“ damaged infrastructure and outbreaks of violence can reduce access to markets and agricultural lands” (Perez, 2019). Overall, there is an imbalance in the countries of Africa as most of the people who will be affected by droughts themselves are farmers. In this situation, the poverty and socio-economic statuses of farmers will inequitably decrease.
This problem of climate change and droughts, and the power it has to increase food insecurity, in a continent that already struggles immensely with food yields, adds another call to introduce irrigation, and new farming techniques. With irrigation methods in place farmers will become more resilient to droughts and will be able to battle future food insecurity. Therefore, energy should be focused to invigorating farming methods to prepare for drought, where irrigation could be one of the main methods to do so. Although, as researched before, irrigation alone will not be the sole answer to solving this problem of food insecurity.
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