NAIROBI, Kenya (PAMACC News) - She is a grower and exporter of fresh produce, but Elizabeth Thande is also a champion of an often ignored variety of greens: indigenous vegetables.
Even when she is invited to international meetings like the Agriculture for Food Security, her presentation hardly ends without convincing scientists that switching to traditional greens is the way to go for Kenya to achieve smart food security.
It is for a good reason. As Kenyans grow richer, they are demanding healthier foods from the farm. But the pressures of climate change like prolonged droughts and floods are depleting soils forcing farmers to use fertilizers to increase productivity at their farms.
However, the use of fertilizers at the farm is leading to increased pollution of rivers, lakes, oceans, and even the land itself, warns the Frontiers 2018/19 report, released March, at the United Nations Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi.
“Humans have massively scaled up the manufacture of fertilizers to sustain a growing world population. However, these are leading to pollution, contributing significantly to declines in air quality, deterioration of terrestrial and aquatic environments, exacerbation of climate change and depletion of the ozone layer,” warns the report.
And this is why Thande is doing things differently. At her P.J Flowers farm in Limuru, central Kenya, rows of flowers fruits and exotic vegetables dot a large section of her land.
But she is more attracted to another section, albeit smaller, where a mix of indigenous greens like amaranth, nightshade and spider plant are thriving.
“I grow indigenous vegetables which I sell locally. I am passionate about them because studies have shown these greens are medicinal,” says Thande.
According to her, they also use less water at the farm compared to exotic vegetables, hence they can flourish on land whose soils are facing nutrient and moisture decline.
Thande says exotic vegetables like cabbage require a lot of chemicals to keep off pests and enrich the soil, but they still score low in terms of nutrition when compared to indigenous ones.
However, she says, she does not use chemicals at her farm but uses natural ways to keep off pests while applying organic manure enriches the soil.
“The beauty about indigenous vegetables is that they are short term. Most of them take one month to grow then one can harvest,” says Thande, who is also a member of the African Women in Agribusiness Network (AWAN).
Thande may be trying to feed her community in a small but smart way, but such efforts by farmers are a big subject of discussion at the 2019 UNEA meeting.
According to Mark Sutton, an Environmental Physicist at the Center for Ecology and Hydrology in the UK, her decision not to use chemicals can also feed humanity thousands of kilometers away from her farm.
For instance, Sutton says, when chemicals are washed away from farms, they drain into lakes, rivers, oceans and other aquatic bodies.
In the case of ocean pollution, more nitrogen and phosphorous would make algae to thrive. This, he says, is good for some fish species, but not the wider variety.
“To some degree some fish will like high algae levels. So more nitrogen and phosphorous gives you more algae and more food for the fish. So in a certain way some fish will increase,” he says.
However, after a while the algae will die. And when they do, they start decomposing consuming all the oxygen in the water. When the oxygen levels are depleted, the fish cannot breathe.
“That is when you get dead zones when the fish suddenly die. Very high nutrient loading tends to reduce diversity because of a nutrient invasive system,” says Sutton.
He warns that if Africa were to double farm inputs, the result would be massive increase in pollution in terms of air and water quality deterioration.
“We need a careful approach on how to increase inputs while reducing pollution that seeps into the environment. This is a big challenge for the science of the future because I do not think anybody yet can tell us how we would achieve that,” he says.
BUEA, Cameroon (PAMACC News) - A government programme to provide both private and public radio and TV media houses with up-date meteorology information is seeing a rise in awareness and change of attitude by local farmers as climate change in Cameroon becomes increasingly unpredictable.
Mary Ngule, 44 and farmer normally grows maize, beans and potatoes on her 30-hectare farm Ndop, northwest region of Cameroon. But for the past three years, worsening droughts and early rains destroyed much of her harvest.
"As usual we plant with the first rain signal. But for the past three years planting at the first rain signal has been disastrous. No sooner do we plant than the sun comes drying up everything" she said.
Usually the local farmers could predict rightly the planting season with early rains and appearance of some insects experts say and their early harvest fetched them much income. But that in the past three years has disappeared as climate change brings harsher and unpredictable weather causing great loss to farmers and food supply shortages to the population.
In riposte the ministry of agriculture organized seminars and field trips to caution farmers on the dangers of planting just after the first rain signals but this approach failed as farmers will not heed.
“We tried severally to caution farmers but the failed to heed,” said Ekungwe Christopher regional delegate for agriculture for the Southwest region.
So last year, for the first time, the government in collaboration with some telecommunications enterprises in the country started a meteorology information safety net programme that provides daily weather information for broadcast to better sensitize farmers.
Over 200 community radios, 60 commercial radios and 15 television enterprises across the country now receive daily meteorological content in the form of SMS from the National Meteorological Centre for broadcast.
"We now broadcast early morning weather programmes and farmer related information from the ministry of agriculture,” say Koum Leonard, station manager of Royal FM radio station in Yaounde.
Farmers attest the climate information has been of great help to them.
“Last year thanks to daily information from the state television channel CRTV I waited till the rains were consistent before planting and my harvest was far better that the last two years,” said Helen Njume a maize farmer in Yaounde
As harsher droughts and hotter weather linked to climate change ruin crops more frequently in Cameroon, the country is facing a new challenge: growing demand for climate information programmes.
Cameroon just like many African countries today suffer from the effects of climate change with many economic and social sectors increasingly vulnerable to floods, droughts, heavy winds among other calamities.
Environment experts say the dissemination of climate information services by the media for the benefit of specific users remains essential to support Africa's response to climate change.
It is against this backdrop that the African Policy Centre (ACPC ) at UNECA has hooked up with media partner networks to assist with continental dissemination of Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER) key messages and knowledge products to help farmers and other stakeholders cope with climate change challenges.
According to Charles Muraya of UNECA,the Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER) was conceived in 2015 to stimulate the uptake of climate information by policy makers and vulnerable groups including the youth , women and especially farmers feeding the population in the continent.
« There is need for the media to play a great role in informing the population about climate change challenges, » he said at a media training workshop in Yaounde in 2018.
Accordingly, Africa’s increasingly variable weather and climate threatens development. So too has agriculture and food security, water, energy, infrastructure, and health are already sensitive to weather related shocks.
Rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and climate-related disasters (especially floods and droughts) will erode gains in poverty reduction and set back economic development it not checked experts say.
According to Cameroon’s minister of environment Hélé Pierre,the government created the National climate Observatory, a body that is hoped to provide unprecedented data and information for more improved climate change mitigation and adaptation action.
The country has been faced with rising temperatures and advancing desert in the north and disastrous flooding in the south, wrecking havoc on persons and property.
OPINION
NAIROBI, Kenya (PAMACC News) - When you move into gender people ask you what’s the business case, why does it matter? The truth is, for a long time gender equality has been viewed as just a human rights imperative, but latterly women’s contribution to the global economy has been under scrutiny.
In 2015 the McKinsey Global Institute came out with a report that looked at what would happen if we started to close the gender gap and gave women the same opportunities as men. They used a ‘best in region’ scenario, where all countries match the rate of improvement of the fastest improving country in their region. They found that $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025.
Nowhere is the gender gap more striking than in African agriculture. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) did some analysis that showed because women have lower access to land, seed, fertiliser and mechanisation: married women receive 2% of extension services and as head of households this figure rises to 5%. Just from closing these input gaps productivity in women’s fields could be increased by 20 to 30%. That would immediately lift 180 million people out of hunger.
So now there are numbers next to it, there is a compelling business case for female focussed programmes. But directing that focus is important. AGRA’s women in agriculture strategy aims to unlock farming as a business for women. In the run-up to World Women’s Day on 8 March I want to look at how that differs from how we do it for men.
The end goal is the same – lift people out of poverty and give them a better life– but the pathway to doing it for women and men can be very different.Because we live in a gendered society a woman faces a different set of challenges as she goes about her daily business: she may not have the same mobility, sometimes a woman might not even be able to leave her home without permission from a man;she has huge time constraints, performing as much as four to six hours of extra work every day cooking, cleaning and looking after the children;she doesn’t have access to assets, she doesn’t own the land that she farms, so she can’t get credit and she doesn’t want to invest in the land because she doesn’t own it -why add nutrients to the soil when it’s not her land and could be taken off her at any time? These are a whole different set of challenges often not faced by men.
Women account for about 5-10% of business owners in cash value chains, mainly their participation is limited to working in the fields and they are often absent when the family’s farming produce is sold. More female-owned land may counter this, but land ownership is a complex issue to tackle.Concentrating on agri-businesses, higher up the value chain,is one pathway to women’s empowerment; if the business is off farm we avoid many of the gendered barriers at the household level. We’re trying to impact 30 million farmers and it is resource intensive to change the gender dynamics of millions of households,but if we can build agribusinesses owned by women, who in turn buy from other woman, we are going to see the benefits and opportunities. For this reason, AGRA’s women in agriculture strategy focusses on off-farm agribusinesses, as well as farming, interventions.
Of course, many of AGRA’s non female-focussed projects benefit women. Ghana’s TROTRO Tractor is a powerful platform that connects smallholder farmers and tractor operators. A bit like a tractor Uber service, when a smallholder farmer needs to plough they can summon a local tractor owner to come and do the job. The farmer gets the mechanisation when needed and the tractor owner makes full use of their asset. The interesting thing about this programme is that in a country where rural female land ownership is rare, nearly 25% of TROTRO Tractor users are women – a significantly higher uptake than would be expected considering the gender gap not just in land ownership, but also mobile phone access.
Policy also needs to play a role; almost all policy dialogue is between men. So, it’s important to get women into apex organisations who can represent the voice of women. But for them to be able to do that they need to be taught how. You can’t just drag any women off the farm and put her in a policy dialogue, she needs coaching; taught how to be an advocate, how to use evidence-based lobbying, how to be persuasive, and the confidence to conduct policy dialogue. It doesn’t happen overnight, but once you have her and she can say “I represent 500,000 women smallholder farmers”, or “I represent most of the women doing cross-border trade in East Africa”, then they’ll give her a seat at the table.
So back to the McKinsey report and closing the gender gap. Using their ‘best in region’ scenario the uplift in GDP for sub-Saharan Africa is $300 billion by 2025. If you still need a reason for women inclusive projects, it’s right there.
END...................
Amanda Satterly, is the Head of Gender at Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)
Yaoundé, Cameroon (PAMACC) Deux personnes se livrant au trafic d'écailles de pangolin ont été arrêtées à Yaoundé au cours d'une opération coup de poings menée par la Délégation Régionale de la Forêt et de la Faune du Centre et de policiers du commissariat de 10ème arrondissement de Bastos à Yaoundé.
Au cours de l’opération menée avec l'assistance technique d'une organisation non gouvernementale appelée LAGA, ils ont été attrapés en possession de 42 kg d'écailles de pangolin, ce qui est totalement interdit par la loi. Les deux sont des trafiquants spécialisés qui, depuis plusieurs années font dans le trafic d’écailles de pangolin. Ils transportaient le chargement dans un taxi quand l'un d'eux s'est rendu compte que la police se dirigeait vers eux, et a tenté de s'échapper mais a été poursuivi et arrêté par des agents de la faune. Le deuxième trafiquant profitant de la confusion, s’est enfuit dans un hôtel à proximité, mais a été arrêté.
Selon des sources proches du dossier qui ont requis l'anonymat, les deux trafiquants qui mènent leurs opérations depuis leur base située dans le quartier de Nkolndongo depuis plusieurs années sont populaires auprès des vendeurs de viande de brousse du quartier. Ils ont contacté plusieurs petits braconniers et trafiquants à Nanga Eboko et dans des villages environnants, où ils se sont régulièrement rendus pour acheter des écailles de pangolin. Des enquêtes sur leurs activités illégales ont été entamées avant qu’ils ne se déplacent à Yaoundé, ont indiqué des sources.
Le quartier Nkolndongo à Yaoundé acquiert rapidement la réputation de plaque tournante du trafic de pangolins, à la fois de viande et d’écailles. Ceux qui visitent fréquemment la zone, disent que des pangolins entiers accompagnés d’écailles pourraient être achetés auprès de vendeurs de viande de brousse. Bien que les pangolins soient des espèces totalement protégées, ils sont parfaitement exposés dans le quartier, ce qui est notoirement difficile à gérer pour les responsables de la faune.
Les deux hommes ont été présentés au Procureur de la République L’arrestation et les poursuites contre les trafiquants devraient jouer un rôle dissuasif dans le trafic de viande et d’écailles de pangolin, en particulier dans le quartier de Nkolndongo.
Jusqu'à sept trafiquants ont été arrêtés cette année pour trafic d'écailles de pangolin au cours d’opérations menées dans le cadre d'une collaboration entre le Ministère des Forêts et de la Faune et LAGA. L’intensification des opérations résulte directement de l’amélioration des mesures d’application de la loi sous l’égide du Ministre des Forêts et de la Faune, Jules Doret Ndongo, qui a supervisé l’amélioration des performances de son personnel. Cette situation est une évolution de bon augure en matière de conservation dans le pays.
Photo : Un trafiquant transportant des sacs d'écailles de pangolin peu après son arrestation à Yaoundé.
