Western Producer reporter Barry Wilson visited parts of Africa to report on how people are dealing with the food crisis.
KAMPALA, Uganda – African leaders are prone to complain that the emerging devastating effects of climate change are yet another plague being visited upon Africa by the white industrialized world.
They note that Africa contributes only a few percentage points of carbon emissions but are suffering disproportionately because of negative impacts on the agriculture and rain-dependent continent.
“Africa is responsible for less than three or four percent of greenhouse gases but is paying the price of emissions elsewhere,” said International Federation of Agricultural Producers president and southern Africa farm leader Ajay Vashee. “No one is talking about that or talking about remunerating Africa for the damage pollution from elsewhere is causing.”
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Actually, Ugandan water and environment minister Mary Lubego Mutagamba was talking about it in early June when she addressed a Rome summit on high food prices and food instability.
“Having overcome slavery and colonialism, a new form of aggression that has beset Africa is in the form of greenhouse gas emissions from the industrial world,” she said in a fiery speech. “Global warming threatens to wipe out all development initiatives of poor countries. We all know Africa contributes less than one percent of the total global emissions but it already is hit most and will suffer the most due to global warming.”
But that is not a universal view in Africa.
There is an argument that while industrialized country pollution has created a problem, African practices of soil abuse and deforestation have worsened it.
In Kenya, a forest cover that once totalled more than 40 percent has been reduced to less than two percent.
In Uganda, deforestation has changed weather patterns, undermined a natural carbon sink and made soils more vulnerable to erosion.
As well, throughout Africa intensive cultivation on small-scale farms without crop rotation has reduced soil fertility, adding to the problem of productivity.
“The culprits and victims of this environmental catastrophe are largely the farmers who interact with the environment on a daily basis,” Uganda National Farmers’ Federation policy, research and advocacy manager Rwakakamba Morrison wrote in a recent critique of climate change consequences.
Uganda’s “natural resources continue to dwindle and deplete at an alarming rate and as a result, the country stands at the brink of a severe food, environmental and deepening water catastrophe and subsequent related conflicts.”
Kampala academic and Uganda Renewal food stability research co-ordinator Peter Atekyereza agreed that Africa cannot blame all its environmental problems on others.
“We have cut down our forests and the government is proposing to give away another of our forest reserves,” he said. “We can’t just look at global polluters. We have to look at what we are doing here and we are contributing to the problem. We can’t just blame others.”
In recognition of the damage from deforestation in developing countries, the World Food Program is to have organized the planting of more than six billion trees worldwide in recent years.
