Rosita’s luck in a continent ravaged by global warming

The birth of young Rosita Mabuiango in 2000 fascinated the world. She’s probably the only child known to have ever being born up in a tree.

On that March day over ten years ago, her mother, Carolina, was heavy with child. And for days on end, the clouds had opened up to pour out torrents of rainwater that flooded many parts of Mozambique. It had rained so heavily that the Limpopo River broke its banks and flooded its entire flood plain. Soon, many homes in Mondiane Village, where Carolina and her husband, Salvador Mabuiango, lived, were washed away. Thousands of people were clinging onto whatever they could to save their lives.

And so, together with several other people, Maria’s mom had climbed up on a tree, hoping that by doing so, she could save herself and her unborn baby. According to media reports then, she was atop the tree for three days. By the third day, her baby would no longer stay in the safe confines of the womb; she wanted out. So on March 1, 2000, Maria’s mother went to labor giving birth to Rosita while still up in the tree.

The two were saved by a paramedic who, with the full glare of TV cameras, was lowered from a South African helicopter. He managed to cut the umbilical cord, thus separating the mother from the child and later taking the two to safety.

Soon, there was outpouring of emotions as the story was told and re-told all over the world. Rosita and other members of her family were to receive more gifts than they could handle -including a fully paid trip to the US and Britain. Mozambique too, ended up benefitting from more than 22 million pounds raised in UK alone. A further $350 million was given to the country to deal with the flooding.

Rosita’s was a dramatic story with a happy ending. However, the story of 700 fellow Mozambiquans was not so dramatic. Neither were they so lucky. All of them were killed by the same floods. In addition, more than 200,000 cattle died; which was such a devastating blow to local livelihoods that 140,000 people in the country had to rely on food handouts from the World Food Program.

In recent years, widespread flooding, which alternate with equally destructive droughts, has become part and parcel of the African experience. But unlike Rosita, most of the victims die in less dramatic scenes. Their plight neither attracts any significant global empathy nor do they attract more than one-off coverage in major global media outlets.

Even during the once-a-year global climate change meetings held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Africa’s vulnerability to negative consequences of climate change hardly captures much more, than ‘side’ discussions which are often attended by African delegates themselves and some NGO noisemakers. Indeed, the immediacy of the continent’s climate-induced plight, as well as that of small island states, appears lost to a world plagued by disagreements and inexplicable refusal to agree on a collective course of action against global warming.

Five months are gone since the Copenhagen climate conference failed to come up with a binding treaty that would have spelt out concrete actions on how to cut greenhouse gases as well as the means for dealing with the worst consequences of global warming. The wishy-washy agreement made merely called upon the world to prevent global temperatures from rising by 2 degrees centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the level experienced before the industrial revolution. It also called on developed countries to spend billions to help poor nations develop cleaner energy and to cushion them from ravages of droughts and flooding. But the agreement is not binding and so there is a nagging belief that it will be years before any action is collectively agreed upon, embraced and implemented. Nevertheless, Mexico and Germany have been trying to push the talks ahead.

That people in poor countries have been on the receiving end needs no gain saying. But probably what appears to have escaped the attention of a world that got used to ‘conferencing’ as an end in itself, is that climate change is not about endless global talk shows. It has created another real-life predicament in the same parts of the world known to be plagued by many other crises.

But away from the drama accompanying global warming meetings, millions of farmers in rural Africa continued with their lives as if nothing was taking place thousands of miles away. Like billions of their counterparts in other developing countries, these are the people who live with the gravest consequences of global warming. They might have no voice in global climate meets; indeed, their wishes might be ignored even by local village governments, but they -and probably they alone- know what it means to lose their loved ones and livelihoods from droughts, floods or too little rain falling at the wrong time.

The biggest percentage of smallholder farmers in Africa depends on rain-fed agriculture. Here, the very decision on what farmers produce, when to put the seed on the ground, including whether there would be any outcome from such a production endeavor, are increasingly becoming dictated, not by traditions or individual farmer’s investments and effort, but by erratic and ‘surprising’ changes in weather patterns.

For instance, in Kenya farmers have always known that the long rains started in mid-March and went on for about three months. This is the season they planted crops that took longer to mature. Farmers have also known that the beginning of September commenced the short rainy season and so, this is the time they went back to the farm to plant fast-maturing crops like millets, sorghum and so on.

Growing up in a predominantly smallholder farming community in rural Kenya, we knew that rains were around the corner when certain rare birds started singing at night and frogs started hopping from their hibernating grounds becoming quite common along village foot paths. With this came a strange excitement shared by most farmers who often took to the farm accompanied by their children.

However, we all started experiencing interruption of this cycle in late 1980s. Farmers also became increasingly anxious with most complaining that not only had the soils become tired, but that they were losing entire crops because the rains were either late or they came too early. This complaint intensified and widespread particularly in the late 1980s and well into the 1990s as weather patterns became increasingly erratic. Farmers soon realized that they could no longer rely on traditions to make farming decisions.

But traditions, like bad habits, die hard. Many farmers had little else to rely on. They kept on planting, -like they had always done- around mid-March. But many are the seasons when the rainy period would fail to start as expected or would commence as expected, continue for a week or couple of weeks, and then stop altogether -just when the seedlings had sprouted and needed water most. And then, a long dry spell would follow with the hot tropical sun killing off the young seedlings. And farmers would then lose out on their meager investments.

Some times, weeks after the crops had withered, the rains would start all over again. But by then, the relevant farmers –being people of humble means- would have exhausted their cash resources. Consequently, a significant number of them would either fail to plant or would borrow cash to buy seed and fertilizer. According to some studies, this scenario contributed greatly to the infamous famines that have gripped many parts of Africa over the last two decades.

I have described this scenario through a narration of the life of a typical farmer in Eastern Kenya in a story featured in http://www.panos.org.uk/?lid=27673. For me, it appears that organized society –civil society bodies, governments and the UN system- have either little to offer in solving this crisis or are not politically inclined to act for the benefit of those global warming continues to hit hardest.

Neither is consolation coming from science. Experts with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) say that temperatures over East Africa are now between 1.2 and 1.6 C higher than they were between 1951 and 1980. As a result, glaciers on Mounts Kenya, Kilimanjaro (in Tanzania) and Ruwenzori (in Uganda) have lost 82 per cent of their area over the last century. High-altitude forests are no longer getting moisture from water-laden clouds -through fog interruption – and so forest fires have become more frequent causing extensive damage. On their part, tea farmers in highlands of East Africa, now face a bleak future since rising temperature are making tea-growing areas unsuitable for the crop –thus threatening Kenya's $234-million tea sector. Further, global warming is expanding the range of pathogens causing malaria and other diseases.

For Africa, the reality of global warming is here and now. Africa is now looking at a retinue of possible action –big and small- that would lessen the impacts and make its people more adaptive to the consequences. Interestingly, some parts of Africa are exploring the possibility of embracing the long-forgotten traditional art of rain-making in lessening the impacts.