An excerpt from the Oxfam report “Suffering the Science: Climate Change, People and Poverty”:
Overall, the world’s agricultural potential is less than 60 per cent exploited: there is still enough land to feed everyone, even with population levels at the 9.2 billion currently predicted by the United Nations for 2050.
Investment in agricultural adaptation can clearly have enormous and swift benefits in addressing the impacts of climate change. In developing countries, agriculture is still technologically unsophisticated and land is often under-used. For instance, only 10 per cent of the arable land in Mozambique is currently in productive use, according to the World Bank.
Only 17 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is irrigated – yet that land produces 40 per cent of the world’s food. In Africa, according to a World Bank study, rainwater-fed farms lose $27 annually (which could be a month’s income for the average poor farmer) with every 1°C rise in temperature, while irrigated farms gain $35.70.
African farmers use less than 1 per cent of the artificial fertilisers commonly used in the rich world. Systematic, low-technology irrigation is hardly used in the developing world, except in rice production. Agriculture in Malawi, for example, is 90 per cent rain-fed.
One study estimates that, at little cost, agricultural productivity could be increased by 20 per cent worldwide through education and investment in micro-irrigation and rainwater irrigation techniques.
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There are many existing ideas of sustainable agriculture, such as agro-forestry, that should be developed, and organic farming also holds some answers.
Adapting plant species to changing weather patterns is also fruitful, if expensive. Maize adapts well to breeding techniques: new varieties have at times lifted production in Africa by 5 per cent a year for a number of years…
Changes for the better
Fred Kabambe, of Thyolo, southern Malawi, says that he sometimes used to get only half a 40kg bag of maize from his smallholding. In 2008, he harvested no less than eight bags of maize and this year, even if the rains prove to be not so good, he expects to beat that.
He is growing an early-maturing, high-yielding maize variety, from seed provided to him by a local NGO partner of Oxfam.
He has also been taught a crucial new skill: to prepare compost. He takes the old maize stalks, chops them finely, and puts them in a pit with soil and dung from the goats that he has also received. He mixes it all with water, and in three months’ time the manure is ready and can be used.
