The Impact of Climate Change on Food Security

Gabriel Manyangadze

Caring for Living Earth

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INTRODUCTION

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• Southern African Faith Communities’ Environmental Institute (SAFCEI) is a multi-faith organisation that supports Southern African faith leaders and communities in growing awareness of and acting on eco-justice, sustainable living and climate change.

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• Location: Based in Cape Town, South Africa with activities undertaken in Angola, Kenya, the Kingdom of eSwatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

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• SAFCEI, established in 2005, works with a broad diversity of faiths, including African Traditional Healers, Baha’i, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Quaker communities, and a wide range of Christian denominations. Our members also include indigenous knowledge holders who identify as Khoi and San Traditionalists. We speak out on issues of eco-justice, encourage ethical action in this regard, and call on those in positions of authority to govern ethically on matters concerning our common home.

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• www.safcei.org I https://www.facebook.com/SAFCEI I https://www.instagram.com/ I https://twitter.com/SAFCEI

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• In sub-Saharan Africa, climate change is affecting and will increasingly affect the ability of both commercial and smallholder farmers to grow food. Droughts and floods will devastate homes, public infrastructure and agricultural production.
• The increase in average temperature, faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world, is already reducing yields. In particular, the poor and most vulnerable will have even less access to nutritious food than they do now.
• This will perpetuate the cycle of poverty and malnutrition. Less food in the market will drive prices up making it even more unaffordable for the economically marginalised. This will deepen the food and nutrition crisis on the continent.

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Food security and Sovereignty

• Jennifer M. Fitchett -School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
• Following this late emergence, in the period 1990-2000, eight CAT5 tropical cyclones were recorded for the South Indian Ocean. A further four have been recorded for the period 2010-2015.
• This recent emergence of tropical cyclones attaining category five intensity in the South Indian Ocean is of significance for the forecasting of tropical cyclone landfall and the anticipation of storm damage for the developing economies that characterise the region.

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Significance:�

• Category 5 tropical cyclones, the strongest category of storms, have only recently emerged in the South Indian Ocean. Since 1989, their frequency of occurrence has increased.
• This increase poses a heightened risk of storm damage for the South Indian Ocean Island States and the countries of the southern African subcontinent as a result of the strong winds, heavy rainfall and storm surges associated with these storms, and the large radial extent at category 5 strength.

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The impact of the Climate Change focused on the

• Timing of the cyclones is such that the crops will be at a point when the damage to the crops will be at its greatest
• The surface will be softened by the earlier rains
• Cyclones damages the infrastructure such that it cuts off the most vulnerable groups, making the places inaccessible and unreachable
• It scars the land making subsequent attempts to farming futile exercises
• It hits when the people are low on the provisions from the previous season and makes the loss complete

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What Remains

The storm affected more than 270 000 people leaving 341 dead and many others missing. 17 608 households were left homeless, 12 health facilities damaged, water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure were damaged, 139 schools were affected, 33 primary schools and 10 secondary schools were temporarily closed, and 9 084 learners were affected. In agriculture, more than 50% land under maize crop, banana plantation and tubers like yams was wiped away, 18 irrigation schemes affected, at least 362 cattle and 514 goats and sheep, 17000 chicken were lost whilst 86 dipping facilities were damaged. Road infrastructure was grossly damaged with above 90% of road networks in Chimanimani and Chipinge damaged and 584 km of roads being damaged by landslides. Bridges were also swept away.

https://reliefweb.int/report/zimbabwe/zimbabwe-tropical-cyclone-idai-final-report-dref-operation-n-mdrzw014

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What are we doing as SAFCEI

Awareness building that when we tampering with nature it hits back and does so like an avenging spirit that targets the weakest and most vulnerable

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Unpacking food justice and climate change

Food customs and practices are deeply embedded in communities as cultural and ritual practices and are linked to faith traditions and cultural identity.

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Faith communities uphold the wholeness, divinity and sanctity of food and life, remembering that the physical intake of food has a spiritual dimension. SAFCEI recognises that the right to food is a human right, enabled through the ability to produce or to buy food.

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The right to food is inextricably linked to the right to life and dignity. Food should therefore be available, accessible and adequate to all without discrimination. Climate change comprises this already unmet or fragile right.

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• A drop in calorie availability in Africa – because food is not available or affordable – will result in an estimated 11 million more children being malnourished in the coming decades.
• It will also affect the quantity and quality of food purchased by households, and influence how food is allocated within households, with negative implications for women and children.
• We need sustainable food systems that build resilience to climate change, and that are socially just.

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Care for the Earth

• The destruction of the natural resource base and of the knowledge systems built up over centuries, and held by smallholder farmers and rural communities, is disrupting the fabric of our society and irrevocably damaging Earth’s life support systems.
• Patterns of production and consumption cannot be viewed in isolation. They are driven by a profit-oriented economic system that favours extractive resource use to the detriment of ecological health and social wellbeing and the promotion of a consumerist culture that takes us further away from our spiritual connection to Earth and the web of life it supports.

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Care for the Earth

• The consequences of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption include accelerated climate change, which will further compound issues of poverty, injustice, food and nutrition insecurity, and inequality.
• We work with faith leaders across Southern Africa through our Faith Leaders Environmental Advocacy Training to help them reorient values of consumption within their communities based on our evidence-based understanding of the policy frameworks that determine unsustainable production and consumption.
• One such example is our work to understand the potential within food and climate change policy in the Southern African region to bring about a just food system.

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The importance of enabling policy

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that most people and communities in Africa are directly reliant on the natural environment for survival and livelihoods, and do not have the necessary safety nets to adapt to climate change.

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We undertook an analysis of food and climate change governance structures in South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe to generate evidence to support our campaigns and calls for policy change.

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All four countries have signed the Paris Agreement and submitted nationally determined contributions. They have set up structures to monitor and respond to the impacts of climate change.

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The importance of enabling policy

• A just food system in a context of climate change will produce a range of nutritious foods that are accessible and affordable to even the most vulnerable, farm animals ethically, empower women, and restore the health and diversity of life on Earth.
• While policies are in place, there is little capacity and funding provided for implementation and coordination of food and climate justice concerns.
• The countries are not inclusive of civil society voices and ideas on how to solve the intimidating interlinked challenges of climate change and food and nutritional insecurity.

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The importance of enabling policy

• In addition, there is no focus on dismantling the industrial agricultural model that is driving greenhouse gas emissions, polluting water and air bodies, destroying on-farm and wild biodiversity and marginalising the traditional knowledge that we will need more than ever before to adapt.

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• There is no mention, for example, of agroecology at the governance level or of any alternative approach to food production, distribution, marketing and retail that would support a transition to more sustainable production and consumption patterns

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Link between social infrastructure and sustainable consumption�

• As we care for the earth, understanding the policy landscape is key to understanding the framework in which consumption takes place. Shifts in consumption values towards more Earth-friendly practices that both build social cohesion and the web of life can only take us so far.
• It is often the system itself that prohibits a sustainability transition.
• SAFCEI continues to advocate for policy implementation, policy change or policy intervention in a range of sectors that is both ecologically and socially just, that considers the context in which it will be applied, and that aligns with our ethos of caring for the Earth.

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Elements of sustainable and just food system

Building on this, elements of a sustainable and just food system can be viewed as:

• Availability and use of local and improved crop varieties and livestock breeds. This enhances genetic diversity, which supports adaptation to changing conditions.

• Radical reduction and eventual elimination of agrochemicals in production systems as well as other technologies that pose ecological and human health risks (industrial machinery and genetically modified crops for example).

• A focus on efficient use of resources (recycling nutrients, reducing and reusing water, switching to renewable energy for example). This includes reducing farmers’ dependence on external agricultural inputs and uptake of practices such as biological control of pests and diseases and making functional use of biodiversity to enhance production.

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• The active use of traditional and modern scientific knowledge and skills, as well as of farmer networks and participatory methods to promote innovation
• Reducing the overall footprint of production, distribution and consumption practices, which will reduce GHG emissions and the pollution of soil and water bodies.

• Promotion and uptake of practices the support conservation of biodiversity, soil and water bodies; sequestration of carbon; and that enhance the availability of clean water.

• Strengthening of adaptive capacity within communities.

• Recognising and conserving “agricultural heritage systems that allow social cohesion and a sense of price and promote a sense of belonging.”

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End

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