Water and Food: African realities

Tropical Africa’s complexities of water and food are not self-confined, nor are they purely a side effect of climate change but also of geopolitical circumstances and actions. Countries which rely on wheat and sunflower imports from Russia and Ukraine are experiencing unfeasable rise in prices. Having made the link between water and food clear throughout the blog, for this concluding entry I would like to provide a more personal, direct perspective on life from some of the  140 million people in Africa  facing food insecurity, through interviews from a  recent World Bank article .        Greenhouse cultivation on Panuka Farms; Source : World Bank. Maybe it's money, not water   The  Baxnaano  programme is a first state-led social protection system in Somalia for households facing  ‘chronic poverty and the aggravating impacts of multiple climate-related shocks’.   Ms. Nishey Mohamed Kheyre, a mother of eight, suffered a locust infestation in 2020 and several years of poor harvest on

Global climate change influences freshwater availability and demand in Africa. This short entry briefly summarises the  African realities  of food systems as described in a  UNFCC report  prepared for Conference of Parties (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with author list featuring prominent African experts.       COP 27 sign; Source : Scientific American Cry me a river - would water solve all problems? The report critiques the preoccupation with food production, as has also been my own focus in this blog, and calls for close consideration of other aspects of food security such as storage, processing, distribution and consumption. Rapid population growth and increasing urbanisation across the continent will also have collateral impacts on water in food systems and hence food security.  The previous entry already outlines the nexus of climate change, water, and food production, largely citing this report.  What do Africans think they need in this predicament in terms of ‘adaptive c

' Water is both an indispensable input and a key constraint ' .   As illustrated in previous entries, the current water condition in Africa, as it pertains to food production, needs more efficacy in water management, and increasingly so, due to climate change effects on hydrology. Expansion of irrigation, particularly groundwater, could be an effective adaptive strategy for the growing population. However, inherent hydrological inequalities pose great challenges and droughts threaten rain-fed livelihoods where potential for irrigation is limited. There exist methods of enhancing rain- fed productivity but they employ temporally and water quality sensitive approaches which are difficult to maintain.          (top)  Farming in Western Sahara; Source : Getty Images; (bottom) half-moon dam/swales in a field, used to save water during rainfall, Burkina Faso; Source : FAO. What’s the matter (and why does it matter)? Drylands of tropical Africa contain 50% of the region’s population,

Anthropogenic climate change exacerbates an unequal range of hydrological variability worldwide. It is difficult to declare with certainty how rainfall patterns (how much, when, and where) will look under any given climate change scenario. An element that scientists can agree on is that since the 1960s precipitation globally is becoming more intense but more temporally sparse ( Myhre, et al., 2019 ). This variability is quantified and discussed in terms of ‘coefficient of variation’ which tells us within how many percent above or below the mean annual rainfall an area can expect to receive. As an illustrative example, in the UK the median figure is between 5-20%, globally, 31%, while in Africa it is 82%  ( McMahon et al, 2007 ).              Sprinkler irrigation in Ghana;  Source : CGIAR Location, location, location… Tropical Africa as a climatic region and a population, is inherently disproportionately impacted by the changes to rainfall. More sporadic precipitation leads to more dryi