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As crop failures persist, scientists turn to rainmakers

Sunday May 17 2009
Failed harvest

A boy looks at failed crops in a farm in Ruiru, Central Kenya. / Picture: Anthony Kamau

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.

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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.

For Mama Kanario, that grim future may already be here, although this proud woman hesitates to admit that she is now unable to feed her large family.

Although adaptation to climate change is one of the hottest topics at global climate forums, millions of smallholders in developing countries do not have the wherewithal to mitigate against its gravest effects.

“The crops you see are all I have. Farming is all I know,” Mama Kanario says brusquely. Deeply religious, she hopes for divine intervention: “I know God cannot let us die… He will do something.”

The farmers have also realised the strength of forging a common front against recurrent droughts, with most joining informal savings schemes. Mama Kanario is a member of Kibureni Women’s Group and has been saving what she can spare with an informal microfinance institution run by the local Methodist church, which she attends.

“It is now possible for me to borrow as much as Ksh20,000 ($250),” she says, her face lighting up for the first time during the interview. With the soft loans she buys food and seeds.

She could tap water from the Kathita, one of the many tributaries of Kenya’s biggest river, the Tana, to raise crops. But although the river marks one boundary of her farm, she has been unable to buy a water pump, which is necessary for a micro-irrigation scheme.

But could relief from the gravest consequences of climate change be found in African traditions? My question takes Mama Kanario aback; maybe it’s too much to ask a woman who was taught all her life that embracing “modernity” and adopting Christianity meant, among other things, regarding rainmaking as “backward” and bordering on black magic or mysticism.

However, the practice is yet to die among some communities, where it continues to be held in high esteem.

The rainmakers are said to possess a special ability to perceive and feel forthcoming changes in the atmosphere.

And now, a study by researchers from local universities, the Kenya Meteorological Department, the Kenya Industrial Property Institute and the National Museums of Kenya is under way to record and interpret scientifically how traditional weather and climate prediction systems operated.

The researchers are working with the legendary rainmaking Nganyi people of western Kenya to record how they predict the weather by observing changes in air currents, the flowering and shedding of leaves of certain trees, and changes in the behaviour of safari ants and listening to bird songs and the croaking of frogs and toads.

The two-year, Ksh18.8 million ($235,000) venture is funded by the International Development Research Centre and will result in the setting up of a disaster management institution and a museum.

Science, it seems, is ready to embrace rainmakers. Dr Anthony Nyong, of the International Development Research Centre, told the media last year that the project would help shatter the myth that everything from traditional Africa was bad and improve local communities’ disaster preparedness. He hoped the project would be rolled out all over the continent.

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