Climate change threatens every person on the planet, but, right now, it threatens no one more catastrophically, or more urgently, than the world’s poorest communities.
This is, in part, due to people in developing countries being more vulnerable to the vagaries of changing weather patterns than those in the developed world. In developing countries, a far higher proportion of people (often between 50% and 90%) are directly engaged in agriculture; and it is this close connection with the land and its yield that puts them on the frontline in the battle against climate change. They are subsistence farmers, with few of the protections of a well-established, high-functioning economy (such as early warning systems, high-tech interventions, or insurance payouts) that tend to make climate change easier to deal with – at least in the short to medium term.
The annual Skoll World Forum (SWF) brings together social entrepreneurs from around the world to discuss a broad range of topics, to help shape their work solving global issues – from climate change to human rights. So just how are these agricultural entrepreneurs collaborating with smallholder farmers to help them to withstand these profound challenges? During a session entitled Farmer-Centred Design: Innovations in Sustainable Agriculture, discussion focused on new developments that could help to ensure farmers had the best chance of thriving.
One of the speakers was Kola Masha, managing director of agricultural franchise and farmers’ support service Babban Gona. It all begins, he said, with the individual small-scale farmer, who is often based in a remote, rural location; working without a backup option in terms of sustaining themselves; and who is entirely dependent on one crucial factor – rainfall. “The issue is that rainfall used to be very predictable: you knew it would start at a certain time and stop at a certain time,” said Masha. “But now it’s far less predictable. That means there’s a much higher risk of drought, and often the farmers have already planted their maize or corn and the crop is doomed. In that scenario, the farmer loses his or her entire investment, which can be disastrous.”
What’s needed, said Masha, is an early warning system. “For the smallholder farmer, the best thing would be to be able to tell them what’s likely to happen, in enough time for them to make decisions about planting accordingly.” To this end, one of the most exciting innovations on Babban Gona’s horizon is a scheme that involves taking satellite photographs of large areas of land, which when analysed can give indications about how conditions are likely to develop in the coming weeks and months.
With this sort of information, the landscape for farmers changes – they have always been up against difficult weather conditions, but it’s the additional unpredictability that’s been the game-changer.
Grassroots information about climate change and its impact is crucial to helping farmers understand some of the new realities of the world’s agricultural systems. For example, said Masha, unpredictable weather produces price fluctuations that can cause farmers to change their methods or behavior – often with adverse effect. “You might get a sudden rise in maize prices, and farmers then go and plant lots of maize, but then there’s a crash in its value. The market is far more volatile, and that has serious implications.”
One of the biggest challenges, said Masha, is the impact on female farmers and their families. “Women farmers are often working on smaller plots of land so they’re even more at risk, and they tend to have the worst soil conditions.” Masha explained how they usually have less capital, less training and less experience, often due to cultural reasons – so they’re more vulnerable on every front.
That was the starting-point for Agnes Leina’s NGO Il’laramatak Community Concerns (the word means ‘caregiver’ in Maasai), which she founded eight years ago in her native Kenya. She spoke at another SWF session, Women and Girls: Catalyzing Change in the Climate Crisis. The focus of Il’laramatak Community Concerns’ work is pastoralists: farmers who care for animals including sheep, cows, goats and camels, moving from place to place in search of water and pasture. “These people are entirely dependent on the rain for their livelihoods. In the past they understood the seasons very well, and they’re extremely resilient people with centuries of traditional knowledge behind them,” Leina said. “But now everything is changing for them. I’d argue that no one in the world is being affected by climate change as much as pastoralists in countries in Africa.”
What can make a difference? It comes down to education and information, Leina said, who runs workshops to encourage awareness around climate change issues. In many of the communities where Leina works, people are unable to read about climate change, due to lack of literacy skills, she said. “But we have to talk to them about it, we have to explain what’s happening, and we have to help them look for alternative livelihoods,” she added.
The cushion that saves so many in the west when all else fails – insurance – has often been unavailable or not an option to smallholder farmers on the same level as in developing countries. It’s not just about the expense of premiums, either: for insurers, the cost of going out to remote areas to assess a claim can be more than the value of the claim itself. One solution is to use technology to make claims easier to assess remotely: that’s the front on which Pula is working. Pula was co-founded by Thomas Njeru in Nairobi; who spoke at the SWF session Farmer-Centred Design: Innovations in Sustainable Agriculture.
Now operating in eight countries across Africa and Asia, Pula uses satellite-generated data to assess farmers’ claims. It is then ploughing the knowledge it gathers back into the community by advising farmers through text message, about how to withstand difficult weather conditions, which crops to plant and which fertilisers to use.
The challenges of dealing with this immense and biting crisis are endless; but across the developing world there’s a burgeoning sector of social entrepreneurs determined to help tackle some of the toughest problems in the history of humanity. What is key is that smallholder farmers and social entrepreneurs work in tandem in order to ensure food sustainability for all.
