Eva Krafczyk, dpa -
Cecilia Masina is worried as she eyes her tiny plot of land ahead of the corn planting season; the farmer from a village in southern Malawi can only wonder if the next harvest will be sufficient to feed her family of 12.
While the south-eastern African country does not usually make headlines for its disastrous famines — unlike other regions of the continent — a lack of food is becoming an issue. “Our climate has changed,” Masina says. “And our harvest is not what it used to be.”
In the old days, the yearly harvest consisted of 20 bags of corn, Masina explains. Corn is one of Malawi’s main food resources. That was enough to feed her husband and their 10 children for a year.
“Then, over recent years, the harvest dwindled down to five bags,” Masina frowns. “And last year we only had two bags.” As a result, the family had to change their eating habits to one meal a day.
So what changed?
“The rain,” Masina says, looking wearily at the dry furrows of reddish-brown soil. “It no longer arrives according to the usual pattern. Or it is not enough — it suddenly stops while the plants are young and weak, and we have to plant once more.”
Farmers can no longer rely on the pattern of seasons that have marked their work for generations. A few years ago, Masina first heard the words “climate change” mentioned in her village of Chilamwe.
“But we have seen the changes before we even knew the word,” she says.
Malawi is one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries. This year, the Global Hunger Index ranked the country at 87, of 119.
Malawi is one of 15 hotspots “characterised by a high population growth rate, a high projected decline in agricultural production and low resilience to climate change,” summarises a report by the African Institute for Development Policy, adding the country is “highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change”.
“Our last good harvest was back in 2007,” says Irene Matewi, another farmer. “In the years after, we suffered droughts, and there was not enough maize,” says the 60-year-old.
After 2007, Lake Malawi began to change, Matewi remembers. She walks down to a neighbour’s field, green and fertile. “All this used to be water,” Matewi says. — dpa
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