African Farmers Hit by Climate Change

Zambian women sell sweet potatoes from the side of the road near Monze, Zambia, Thursday June 7, 2007. Farmers have changed from Maize to farming sweet potatoes as the rainy season in this largely poor southern African nation has been getting shorter, more intense and more erratic due to climate change. (AP Photo/Joseph Schatz) (Joseph Schatz - AP)

Some have switched to crops such as sweet potatoes which mature earlier and need less water. But governments have long supported corn-growing and it's the basis of nshima, the Zambian daily staple. So farmers are reluctant to stop growing it.

"It's harder to convince these guys to stop growing maize than to convince these G-8 countries to stop climate change," said Gilbert Vlahakis, a Zambian seed distributor.

While wealthy donor nations, as well as some government officials in Zambia and other African nations, focus on climate change, farming in southern Africa faces other threats. At the Conservation Farming Unit, a part of the Zambia National Farmers' Union that is teaching farmers conservation-friendly planting techniques, officials say government policies are inefficient and fixated on maize.

Last year's South African study advises the Zambian government to stop subsidizing crops that do poorly in a changing climate, and to invest in climate data collection and weather forecasting.

The Zambian government is trying to attract foreign investment in hydroelectric dams. Francis Yamba, an engineer who runs the Center for Energy, Environment and Engineering in Lusaka, said another idea is to channel water from the Congo River to the Zambezi. Yamba also says farmers should turn their agricultural waste into energy.

Nations in the region lack cash and expertise for grand engineering schemes. But not all solutions have to rely on advanced technology.

Every summer in Zambia's Western province, when flood waters move in, the king of the Lozi tribe leads his people from the flood plains to higher ground, near his summer palace.

Environmental experts are wondering whether it could work elsewhere.

"They're indigenous coping measures," Yamba says. "They've been doing that for hundreds and hundreds of years. Why not use traditional Lozi culture?"