I
t is seven months since flooding from the Shire River buried Joseph Yona’s one-acre crop field in silt.
Hundreds of farmers in Kamoga Village, Traditional Authority Ngabu in Chikwawa, lost mature crops to the flood yet to recede.
He recalls: “We were about to harvest when the floods struck. We cannot embark on winter cropping because our farmland is still underwater,” says Yona.
The sole outlet of the rising Lake Malawi was already swelling when torrents battered the Shire Valley community, forcing the river to burst its banks and flood crop fields along its banks.
The rising lake levels have damaged property and crops in the Lower Shire as well as shoreline districts of Mangochi, Nkhata Bay, Nkhotakota and Salima.
Malawi is susceptible to climate shocks, especially cyclones, flooding and drought.
Chikwawa was among the worst-hit districts during Cyclone Idai in 2019, Ana in 2022 and Freddy last year.
According to the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (Dodma), Cyclone Freddy displaced more than 657 278 of over 2.2 million people affected across the Southern Region, with 679 deaths, 537 missing, and 2 186 injured.
“There is an increase in the occurrence of disasters even in areas where we were normally not experiencing them. The agriculture sector has been the worst hit with droughts, dry spells and floods, leading to perennial hunger in the country as farmers fail to produce enough food,” says Dodma chief disaster response officer Madalitso Mwale.
Just a year after the devastating floods and mudslides induced by Freddy, drought induced by El Nino weather pattern scorched crops across the region, leaving about 5.7 million Malawians in need of food aid.
Meanwhile, heavy rains in the country’s Northern Region and south western parts of Tanzania flooded the continent’s third-largest freshwater lake, which pours in the Shire.
Yona, now group village head Kamoga, says the swelling river denied his community a second harvest from winter cropping which occurs from April to November.
“We could have harvested twice this year, but we’ve lost their arable land to the water,” he says.
Since September, about 315 households in the area are surviving on boiled mangoes.
They risk their lives by climbing the trees in their submerged crop fields infested with crocodiles.
So far, the predators have killed two: a 15-year-old Lemani Mussa and Musa Mchochombe.
“We are pressed between a rock and a hard place,” says Jussa Levison, who has survived two crocodile attacks. “We have no choice, but to go into the water to get the mangoes. I don’t want my two children to starve to death.”
Levison’s right leg bears scars from the crocodile attacks.
“If not for my friends who rushed to beat the crocodile, I could have been dead.”
With the mangoes vanishing in December, the family banks their hopes of survival on nyika, water lilies.
Musamude Binzi says the search for the wild tubers puts them at a greater risk of being mauled by the crocodiles.
“Searching for nyika will get more of us killed by the crocodiles,” laments the survivor
Yvonne Zozo, 36, a mother of seven, says the situation also affects children’s rights to education and well-being.
“We are forced to go along with our children to get mangoes at the expense of sending them to school. If not, they would die of worsening malnutrition due to lack of nutritious meals,” she says.
With the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, Yona asks world leaders, especially from developed nations, to increase funding for developing countries like Malawi to tackle the harsh effects of climate change.
He says increased financial contributions towards adaptation efforts as well as the loss and damage fund would strengthen Africa’s resilience to the climate crisis.
He says: “Climate change is ravaging our lives.
“We need both short and long-term plans to cope with the intensifying climate impacts that are thwarting our crop production efforts and damaging our property,” he says.
