HARARE -- When light rain fell for two consecutive days in late October 2010, Gabriel Musonza, a 65-year-old farmer in a village about 70km northwest of Harare thought the main farming season had begun. With the help of his three teenage grandsons, he began tilling his 12-hectare plot. However, two weeks later the rain had stopped and the planted seeds had not germ“Unlike in the past when we knew the middle of September signalled the beginning of serious farming activities, it is now extremely difficult to tell when you should start planting,” Musonza told IRIN.
He has had poor yields in the past three years. The lack of fertilizer and prolonged dry spells have not helped.
In 2009 the rain started in early November in his area and then stopped around mid-December only to return in the second week of January 2010, but it did not develop into a steady downpour.
Musonza is by no means the only farmer struggling to plan – in the face of erratic rain – for the main farming season which runs from September till harvesting time in March.
Most small-scale farmers in Zimbabwe depend on regular rainfall patterns, and this is also true of commercial farmers because much of their irrigation equipment was either vandalized or stolen at the height of the land redistribution programme in 2000.
“It is no longer possible to predict with accuracy when to start planting and in most cases, farmers end up replanting,” Denford Chimbwanda, president of the Grain and Cereal Producers Association (GCPA), told IRIN.
In its report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Zimbabwean government said it expected climate change to affect the main staple crop, maize, cultivation of which might have to be abandoned in some low-lying southern areas.
Washington Zhakata, national coordinator for climate change in the Ministry of Environment, said rainfall had declined in Zimbabwe over the years and was one of the causes of food shortages, while water-related diseases such as malaria and cholera were on the rise.
“Between 1900 and 2000, 51.4 percent of all the rainy seasons experienced below normal rainfall, and natural disasters such as droughts and floods have been on the increase,” he told IRIN.
He said his office was designing a national adaptation framework: Projects had been launched in selected rural areas to assess the level of vulnerability among farmers, and to educate them on how to adapt to climate change. “The level of awareness regarding climate change is still very low.”
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