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Agriculture is a world of contradictions. Certainty, uncertainty, balances, imbalances, progression, retrogression have been part of agriculture for ages, rendering it ‘acceptable’ to embrace years of bumper yields along with those of scanty.
This variation in conditions has, in effect, made it natural to refer to materials used in plant and animal production as ‘variables’.
However, this shadow of positives and negatives, enthuses Peter Mazingaliwa- Acting National Coordinator for Malawi/US Exchange Alumni Association (Museaa) - offers room for improvement.
“We can, through science, devise means aimed at changing the status quo. Through science, we can sustain the positives while taming the negatives,” says Mazingaliwa.
To do this, the world needs such ingredients as favourable policies, unfazed
commitment, continuous research, and responsive communities.
“One of the means to achieve food sustainability, for example, is to promote
permanent agriculture, or permaculture,” says Mazingaliwa.
The term ‘permaculture’ is itself a challenge to agriculture- an area
long-associated with the eternal flux of opposites- because it introduces new approaches to natural systems.
For one, it is premised on the idea that, through paradigm shifts in agricultural systems’ theory and holistic organic ecology, a world balance and, therefore, stability can be achieved.
This is why Museaa, as a platform for Malawians who have learned life’s lessons from the USA, has strengthened the technical;-know-how of communities to address livelihood issues that hinge on agriculture.
“One of the issues is that of climate change. Climate change is contributing towards global food
insecurity. The good news is that permaculture can be used to address climate change issues,” says Mazingaliwa.
Museaa has- with US$23,900 (about K3.8m) funding from the US State Department, Alumni Affairs Division- been running a climate change programme that tools permaculture as a panacea for climate change.
Through it, people have come to understand the concept of climate change, its causes and effects, and human activities that gives it fertile ground. These include deforestation, urbanization and desertification.
Agriculture extension workers, field supervisors, smallholder farmers’, secondary schools’ permaculture clubs have all become part of the stepping stones to food sustainability. It is all because permaculture is an enemy to overdependence on rain-fed agriculture and befriends only water-harvesting methods. Mixed cropping is preferred over mono-cropping, along with the utilization of local materials such as organic manure.
“However, real stability depends on young people, who are better-placed to absorb new
knowledge and change their world.
“For your information, Malawi has not yet attained food security, despite pronunciations to that effect, and this is because we depend on rain-fed agriculture and one type of crop, maize. We are, therefore, more vulnerable to climate change,” he said.
He, however, urges Malawi to continue being part of international community efforts on climate change. Mazingaliwa notes that, so far, Malawi has been a keen participant at international meetings, a process that started some 17 years ago and reached a climax in November 2009- when world leaders met for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climatic Change. In December 2011, leaders met again in South Africa, and the International Conventional Centre in Durban became the focus of world attention on climate change.
Climate change refers to conditions characterized by persistent shifts in the general patterns of the elements of weather. These shifts may be observed as clear trends for some of the elements including temperatures, but may also become random or unpredictable. A good example is that of the onset of rains.
Unpredictable rainfall patterns have spurred Namikasi Secondary School students in Blantyre into action. Students are now planting fruit trees where once bare land lay exposed to the sun and rain water.
“We want to help reduce the impact of climate change. In fact, the best way to encourage people to tame climate change is by encouraging the planting of fruit trees because, apart from anchoring the soil, and absorbing toxic air, people will be able to eat the fruits and boost their immune system,” says Kennedy Lowa, patron of the Permaculture club at Namikasi.
However, Mugove Walter Nyika- one of local climate change experts, and senior official at the local NGO Rescope- notes that climate change is as old as the planet earth itself, but says current climatic changes are uniquely different from anything that has been experienced before.
“In the past, climate changes were associated with natural cycles such as sunspot activity. The sunspot activity is a change that takes place in the chemical activities on the surface of the sun, which determines the amount of energy that the sun sends outwards to us.
“(But) other climatic changes in the past have been less predictable. These include changes caused by the impact of meteorites smashing onto the earth, or the impact of massive volcanic eruptions, both of which sent clouds of dust into the atmosphere which blocked part of the sun’s rays,” says Nyika.
Meteorites are large pieces of rock that are moving in space and which, at times, may collide with the planets. In the past, this blockage of the sun’s rays by dust clouds led to drastic drops in global temperatures.
Nyika is afraid: “Previous climatic changes had a large-scale impact on life. Some changes led to the extinction of some forms of life such as the dinosaurs. Some changes led to the cooling of the planet, resulting in large ice sheets covering the surface of the earth.”
He notes, however, that current changes in climate are due, mainly, to human activities’ impact on the earth. For example, the industrial revolution, fuelled by such fossil fuels as coal and oil, has propelled climate change for ages. Other activities, like deforestation and chemical farming, have also accelerated climatic changes.
But it is the later activities that have started to feature prominently locally. This could be attributed to recent findings by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that, while the main source of global food remains the soil, the climate that influenced rainfall patterns has really changed- the sort of change that honours no human boundaries.
WMO indicates, for instance, that the year 2010 was the warmest on record. It also says that the years between 2000 and 2010 have registered the warmest period in time since records began. Among others, communities from across the globe are experiencing unusual weather patterns and more frequent incidents of extreme weather events.
“All these will impact on agriculture productivity,” he says.
That is where permaculture, as one form of climate smart agriculture, comes in. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, climate smart agriculture entails activities that increase productivity, resilience, removes greenhouse gas emissions, and enhances national food security and development goals.
Among other approaches, this is achieved by revolutionizing the management of soil, water, landscapes, technologies, and genetic resources to ensure higher productivity and resilience, while reducing the greenhouse footprint, according to Bunda College of Agriculture
Environment and Development expert, Dr. David Mkwambisi. Mkwambisi openly hopes for a balanced world that will reduce the trade-off between productivity (output) and emissions per unit of agricultural product.
“Global experts on environment and development have realised that agriculture can be a critical tool to solve problems associated with climate change and weather variability in many countries,” says Dr. Mkwambisi.
What is clear, in the end, is the fact that climate change has sired a son called hope: the hope that, while climatic patterns may change, at least agricultural productivity cannot!
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