56 Middle East & Africa The EconomistSeptember 21st 2019
2 trend is that although there may be fewer
rainy days in future, when it does rain, it is
more likely to pour. This is a recipe for
floods, droughts and shorter rainy seasons.
In 2015 both drought and floods oc-
curred, and a year later further drought.
Maize production fell by 30% in 2015, then
by another 12% in 2016, when 6.7m people
(in a country of 18.1m) needed food aid. In
2018 Lake Chilwa, in south-east Malawi,
dried up completely. Residents of Chisi Is-
land, in the middle of the lake, which was
once the country’s second-largest body of
water, no longer needed to use canoes to
reach the mainland.
In Zomba district, the region that in-
cludes the lake and Kamwendo village, cli-
mate change has had profound effects on
the economy. Maize yields have slumped as
the onset of the rainy season has moved
from early October to mid-November. Rice
fields near Lake Chilwa have flooded. Live-
stock farming has become harder with less
water and feed. Around Lake Chilwa, the
drying of the lake forced 7,000 fishermen
to seek work elsewhere, mostly on Lake
Malawi, which covers a fifth of the country.
It is not just climate change that is hurt-
ing farming. A growing population has
meant dwindling farm sizes; today the av-
erage plot is 0.8 hectares, less than the area
of a football pitch. Soils are being degraded
because they are farmed too intensively
and often by using damaging practices.
Nearly 40% of agricultural land has soil
that is too acidic for decent yields. Malawi-
an maize farmers get only 11-28% of the po-tential yield from the crop, according to the
World Bank. Widespread deforestation, of-
ten by desperate farmers who need to sell
wood for extra income, has made it harder
to manage water flows.
Some efforts are afoot to adapt to cli-
mate change while improving land man-
agement. In Kamwendo, Ms Kaloti is part
of a “farmer field school” supported by the
Food and Agriculture Organisation, a un
agency. Farmers like her are experimenting
with faster-growing varieties of maize and
growing banana trees in gullies to lessen
the effects of floods.
At Lake Chilwa, Sosten Chiotha of theUniversity of Malawi has been leading a
similar project. Farmers have doubled
yields by improving the soil through
mulching and using seeds that can grow in
a shorter rainy season. Tree-planting has
helped to protect rice fields from drown-
ing. Solar-powered fish-dryers have speed-
ed the process of preparing the catch for
market. Mr Chiotha has set up a “weather
chasers” WhatsApp group to raise aware-
ness of incoming storms.
There is, however, a danger that adapta-
tion schemes will never be enough to help
Malawian farmers escape poverty. “Ulti-
mately there are too many small-scale
farmers,” says Pamela Kuwali of the Civil
Society Agriculture Network, an ngo. She
argues that the government—and aid do-
nors who account for the bulk of public
spending in many areas—need to do more
to increase the 4% of farmland that is irri-
gated for commercial use. Instead, policy is
a mess. A ban on exporting maize hinders
trade in the crop. A fertiliser subsidy
scheme takes up most of the spending on
agriculture.
Irrigation would leave Malawi’s farmers
less at the mercy of the rains. But it has its
own problems. Lake Malawi feeds the hy-
dro-power stations that provide more than
90% of the country’s electricity. In 2015
these stations lost two-thirds of their ca-
pacity because of droughts, leading to
widespread blackouts. This hampered irri-
gation schemes as well as affecting busi-
nesses in the cities of Lilongwe and Blan-
tyre. Malawi’s power sector is “massively
exposed to fluctuations in the lake level,”
says Declan Conway of the London School
of Economics.
Mr Conway is one of the academics in
the Future Climate for Africa project. It is
trying to produce more accurate modelling
of Malawi’s climate, with the hope that it
will help policymakers plan. But Mr Con-
way acknowledges it can be hard to get pol-
iticians to see climate change as an imme-
diate threat.
One hope is that voters may push them
to stop ignoring it. Afrobarometer, a pan-
African outfit, says that the share of Mala-
wians who are aware of climate change
(78%) is the joint second-highest of the 34
African countries it has polled. A separate
survey by Afrobarometer in 2018 found that
81% of Malawians said conditions for agri-
cultural production were getting worse.
Such views seem to correlate with poor
opinions of the government.
Yet Malawians are not just angry at their
government. “There is so much hypocrisy
around climate change,” says Isaac Ali, an
official in Zomba. “Donor countries give us
money to plant some trees, but they keep
polluting.” It is too much to expect Malawi
to carry the burden for changes it did not
cause, he argues. “They’re using poor coun-
Where the fish once swam tries to cleanse their own sins.” 7TANZANIAMOZAMBIQUE
MALAWIZAMBIALilongweLake
ChilwaZombaLake
MalawiKamwendoBlantyreRelative susceptibilityto
climate changeClimate vulnerability index*LowSource: Fraym*27 climate-related
indicators, 2017Medium High150 km