Magic of farm technology

On Wednesday afternoon in December, Rose Mponda wiped her forehead as she stood at the foot of a hill in the Thyolo escarpments. Below her, lies Nkhate Irrigation Scheme in Chikhwawa.

Mponda is worried that rains have delayed again. The water supplying the scheme from the Thyolo escarpments has drastically dwindled affecting crop production in the scheme, the source of livelihoods for many farmers in Traditional Authority Makhuwira, in the face of climate change.

Water resources has been the epicentre of climate change impact which has been characterised by extreme devastating events in the form of floods and droughts leading to food insecurity, poor health conditions, loss of dependable shelter and even loss of life.

Many households in Malawi do not have enough to eat as a result of poor harvest caused by bad weather. The high price of maize, the nation’s staple, is also putting pressure on food-insecure families.

The full extent of the situation has recently been confirmed by an updated report from the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (Mvac) which found that more than 1.85 million people in the country will need food assistance between now and March 2014.

Mponda, who is working in the scheme with scores of other farmers, fears that the worst is yet to come if there is no strategy of water management, and pest and disease control as key building blocks to develop climate resilience of the farmers.

“We might work hard in the scheme but those efforts are facing a lot of challenges which are eroding the investments. The water flow is slow and the sun beats the area very hard which is also affecting crop production,” she said.

The harvest is also extensively affected, she added. “There are too many diseases even while the crop is in the garden. It is also affecting the yield. There is increased number of pests attacking the harvest,” lamented Mponda referring to her recent maize harvest of six bags each weighing 50kgs.

“I did not expect such a low yield from a half acre plot. But pests and diseases attached my crop,” she said. The proliferation of pests control on the market has not salvaged the situation either.

Now Mponda is applying some indigenous knowledge and hopes to build on that to save the harvest.

Her efforts of applying indigenous knowledge to save the harvest from further depreciation will soon receive a boost from a Food and Agriculture (FAO) coordinated project titled ‘Supporting smallholder farmers in southern Africa to better manage climate-related risks to crop production and harvesting handling’.

The project which was signed by the European Union on behalf of six partners in December 2012 is for three years and is currently starting to be implemented.

Activities of the project will be undertaken in Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Madagascar.

In Malawi, FAO is working with lead partners from the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (Luanar) on production, Chitedze Research Station on post harvest loses and the research activities that will follow the profiling activity and the Civil Society Agriculture Network (Cisanet) on policy issues.

The target group is low income smallholder farmers such as Mponda in disaster prone areas in Lower Shire Valley around Nkhate Irrigation Scheme.

FAO representative for the project, Rosebell Mbamba, at a stakeholders meeting in Chikhwawa said climatic hazards such as droughts and floods, interacting with other factors such as food insecurity, and high prevalence lead to a situation of high vulnerability.

Rain-fed smallholder agriculture is the backbone of rural household livelihoods and national economies in the southern Africa region, contributing over 90 percent of direct and indirect employment.

“However, crop productivity and production are low and declining, and when combined with high post harvest loses of up to 30 percent, are major contributory factors to food and nutrition insecurity in the region,” said Mbamba.

She added that inherently infertile soils, unreliable rainfall, poor to credit access combine to reduce productivity in the systems.

“The high dependence on rainfall by these smallholder farmers renders them particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of climatic variability. The management of risks related to climatic variability is thus of paramount importance in creating more resilient crop systems in the region, especially semi-arid areas,” she said in her introduction to the project.

Mbamba acknowledged that through centuries of experience, combined with knowledge from formal research, farmers have developed strategies to mitigate climatic risks, but she was quick to point out that these strategies, such as Mponda’s, are not always adequate in the face of such rapid climate change and increasing climate variability.

She observed that creative learning processes can support farmers and key stakeholders to co-develop and to continue to develop practical strategies for farming in increasingly risky climatic situations.

The challenges, said Mbamba, are compounded by low productivity which has stagnated for the past 40 years with yields of cereals of less than one tonne per hectare.

Mbamba added that food loss in sub-Saharan Africa is very high. She attributed the losses to inappropriate management techniques at farm and off-farm level; lack of markets for produce and non existing policy and regulatory frameworks.

The outcome of the project, targeting 500 farmers in the Lower Shire, is expected to contribute to improved and sustained household and national food and nutrition security through better management of climatic risks by smallholder farmers such as Mponda.