David Herbert
20 July 2007
Travel to Busaanyi Farm, a 26,000-tree coffee plantation in Muduuma sub-county, Mityana District and the first thing General Manager Badru Kiryowa will show you is an album filled with photos of his 'baby' - the farm.
The opening page is carefully filled out: his 'baby's' eyes are listed as red, its hair green, its length seven acres. The album is filled with photos of the plantation's earliest days, and Mr Kiryowa proudly points to pictures of smiling farmers and seedlings.
But steer the conversation towards global warming and Mr Kiryowa has less to say. He has heard of climate change, and that is more than he can say for his neighbours - yeomen who help make up the vast majority of the nation's coffee farmers.
"The people don't know about global warming," Mr Kiryowa said last week. "They know about today."
A United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) study recently reported that a temperature increase of two degrees would render most of Uganda unable to grow coffee, a scenario that scientists consider increasingly likely.
But at a time when Western environmentalists are campaigning to spread awareness about global warming - last week's Live Earth concerts were some of the biggest efforts to date - farmers, scientists and businessmen agree that too little information has trickled down to those who stand to be most affected.
Little effect
"This is where I feel guilty," says Philip Gwage, the assistant commissioner at the Department of Meteorology. "We have tried to raise awareness. We produce reports. But people don't have time for 50-page reports. We have discovered that people in the districts don't read what we are sending."
Dr Gwage says a limited budget, small staff and lack of time prevent more outreach efforts. But he adds that despite the lack of official information coming out of his office, farmers have begun to see the changes themselves. He points to the last few months, which saw an unusually dry April and wet June.
"I can't say it is a 20-year problem or 10-year problem or a two-year problem," he says. "It is already with us."
But farmers have not realised the long-term implications of these changes, says Paul Mugambwa, chairman of the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA).
"Most of them, I believe, are not aware of the coming problem," he says. Mr Mugambwa admits that the UCDA does not know much about climate change, which limits its ability to provide information to farmers.
For now, global warming has not affected coffee harvests on a nationwide level. Ugandan coffee farmers have been reaping the benefits of a political crisis in the Ivory Coast that has cut production there. The Ivory Coast is one of Uganda's biggest competitors in the international coffee market. Thanks to high prices and a 30 per cent rise in bags sold, the UCDA reported $24.32 million in earnings for June, a 60 per cent jump over the same month last year.
But the real importance of coffee is found in half-acre plots around the country.
Mr Kiryowa recalls selling 50 seedlings to a skeptical neighbour, and then, one harvest later, being invited to the man's house. "He told me, 'You see, now I have electric power because you gave us the coffee,'" Mr Kiryowa says.
He hopes to harness the manpower and agricultural potential of the region to create a coffee village, educate farmers and help them sell their beans at the best possible prices. But Mr Kiryowa acknowledges that global warming threatens that dream. With the possibility of rising temperatures and erratic rainfall, irrigation is an option, but a "damn expensive" one. As for ways to halt global warming, Uganda cannot do much to cut its emissions - the country is near the bottom of the list of polluters.
However, Dr Gwage says farmers could partially insulate themselves from global warming by keeping surrounding forests intact and manually watering plants.
But whether small-scale planters will be willing to take the necessary steps to adapt is another matter. Mr Kiryowa is not optimistic. On the drive to Busaanyi, he points to vast tracks of deforested land where his neighbours have replaced rainforests with thirsty eucalyptus trees. And the way farmers have reacted to coffee wilt disease, a fungus that attacks Robusta coffee plants, does not encourage Mr Kiryowa either. When the disease attacked the area, he warned farmers to pull out infected plants and not replant there, but few listened and entire harvests were lost.
The future of Ugandan coffee may not be bright, but Mr Kiryowa is determined to weather the storm. Walking around the fertile soil of his farm, he stops to consider a day when coffee springs less easily from the earth.
"I could grow anything," Mr Kiryowa says. "But I can't leave coffee."
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