As crop failures persist, scientists turn to rainmakers

Joyce Kanario Marete is a wid-owed farmer. Her modest home is located in the once lush expanse of the Meru country in eastern Kenya. Falling towards the extreme end of the rain shadow of Africa’s second highest mountain, Mount Kenya, is her four-acre farm. It is all she has.

Since her husband died in 1990, Mama Kanario’s life has revolved around scratching the earth to sustain her large family and leave something to sell. She lives on the farm with the families of her four grown-up sons, one of whom died of tuberculosis two years ago.

“Life is tough for us farmers,” she says.

The 66-year-old woman adds that, although she has been feeding the soil with fertilisers each season, the land has grown tired and will not produce what it did a few years back. She is, however, able to harvest if the rains come in time.

But, like her fellow smallholders, Mama Kanario no longer knows when the next season will begin.

“For the third time in the past six years, we lost the entire crop and were forced to replant after the rains failed,” she says sadly.

All her life, Mama Kanario has relied on “traditional” knowledge of the cyclical weather patterns to decide when to prepare her farm, and when and what to plant. The long rainy season here in the Giaki area always began in mid-March and lasted until May, while the short rains fell in October and November.

“We have always expected a good harvest during the long rains and at least something to eat during the short rains season,” she says, adding that, unlike until about 20 years ago, when she could time the planting to coincide with the onset of the rains, “This is no longer possible.”

Mama Kanario is among millions of farmers in Kenya who depend on rain-fed agriculture and who base their decisions on long-held traditions. But over the past few years, they have not been able to predict the rains. This seems to have confused them: Many times they have planted only for the crops to fail because the rains do not come.

Mama Kanario has kept “hoping that God will send the rains in time.” But in three of the 10 seasons over the past five years, she was forced to uproot withered shoots of immature crops because the rains fell for only a few days and then disappeared for a month. She says she lost as much as Ksh12,500 ($156) in seed and fertiliser each season.

For Mama Kanario, the risks associated with climate change are real and already affecting her family’s only source of livelihood.

Last year, it was a double tragedy for Mama Kanario and her smallholder counterparts because the post-election violence that engulfed Kenya gave way to a prolonged drought well into the first three months of 2009.

Nor does science offer much consolation to the farmers. For instance, the United Nations Environment Programme puts the temperatures over East Africa at between 1.2 and 1.6 degrees Celsius, higher than between 1951 and 1980.

Glaciers on Mt Kenya, Mt Kilimanjaro and the Rwenzori range have lost 82 per cent of their area in the past century, and fires in high-altitude forests no longer draw moisture from water-laden clouds.

Tea farmers face a bleak future. UN predicts that if the trend continues, it will be a matter of a few years before many of the tea-growing areas around the Aberdare Ranges, Mt Kenya and Nandi Hills become unsuitable for tea production. This would greatly affect Kenya’s Ksh19 billion-a-year ($238 million) tea sector.