By NICOLE JOHNSTON
Vast swaths of a once-fertile country have become wastelands and life for rural Malawians is now even tougher, reports Nicole Johnston
Malawi’s rural poor don’t know much about the science of climate change, but they know how it is affecting them: a slow slide deeper into poverty in an inexorable cycle of heat, hunger and HIV/Aids.
Farmers tell tales of once-fertile soil that now yields very little; of rains that don’t come on time or arrive in floods; and of rivers once rich in fish now too shallow and hot to provide this valuable source of protein.
In Balaka, in the south, the elders notice the changes most. Manesi David doesn’t know how old she is but grown men call her gogo.
“For six years I’ve noticed this change in the weather. The rains have changed; now we have hunger every year. In the past, the sun was not so hot,” David says. “Malaria is increasing and because the temperature is rising people get tired more easily. People are getting old very quickly nowadays because they work so hard.”
David is part of a new irrigation project run by the Balaka Livelihood Security programme, which works with farmers to mitigate the effects of climate change. The programme digs wells and uses treadle pumps to irrigate the fields of its 78 members, each of whom has 100m2 under cultivation. The group grows sweet potatoes, pumpkins and maize.
The village headman, Yohane Tsamba, reads a newspaper when he can afford one and avidly listens to the radio. He knows that “many factories overseas use coal and they have destroyed nature because they put fumes into the atmosphere”.
“Most of our mountains no longer have trees because we’ve cut them down. Generations are still coming, and what will they have?”