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Orphan Children, Dilapidated Farms By Mercedes Sayagues PRETORIA - Drive around Masaka and Rakai districts, along the shores of Lake Victoria, in Uganda, and quickly you see the effects of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) on agriculture: overgrown coffee, dilapidated banana plantations, and empty plots the bush has reclaimed. Around
Mulanje district in southern Malawi, collapsed homesteads tell the
same story. AIDS killed the parents, the children scattered, and
now the family home is a pile of rubble. African peasant agriculture will never be the same after the AIDS pandemic. But it is taking too long for ministries of agriculture, donors and NGOs to adapt to the grim reality. More than one decade into the epidemic, there is still insufficient insight into how to tackle the socio-economic effects of HIV/AIDS in rural Africa. AIDS is generally seen as a public health issue. Or, the private sector moans the loss of skilled staff and workdays taken by employees to care for the sick and bury the dead. Little is said about the changing rural environment, about what AIDS is doing to smallholder agriculture -the mainstay of food security for the rural poor in Eastern and Southern Africa. For example, in the Southern African nation of Zimbabwe, AIDS widows in the communal areas are growing less food, because they lack money to hire a tractor, a plough and casual labour. Their savings, tools and farm animals paid for medical and burial expenses for their AIDS-stricken husbands. "From the time one adult family member is bed-ridden, AIDS compromises the nutrition and food security of the family", says Godfrey Ssewankambo, deputy director of Uganda's Women's Effort for Orphans, an NGO that gives loans for small business to foster parents and skills training to orphans. Cash crops also suffer. In Zimbabwe, for the last two years, the Commercial Farmers Union has posted figures of declining yields by smallholders, hovering around 60% less for maize and just under 50% for cotton and vegetables, due to AIDS-related loss of workers and workdays. The production of coffee, a major cash crop in Uganda, has remained stable since the pandemic began. But replanting old coffee bushes requires lots of labour and this is what Uganda coffee growers, nearly all peasant farmers, sorely lack. Coffee-growing areas along Lake Victoria have the highest AIDS rate. "The bottom line is that AIDS causes an acute shortage of labour and tremendous dependency on female and elderly-headed households," says Gary Howe, director for Africa at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). A new report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that deaths from HIV/AIDS in the ten most affected African countries will reduce the labour force by 26%, seriously undermining food production and security. Since 1985, about seven million agricultural workers died of AIDS in 27 affected African countries, says FAO. Sixteen million deaths due to AIDS are projected in the next two decades. Because adults are dying young, traditional skills are not transmitted. Among the pastoralists in eastern Uganda, herd care is deteriorating. Zoonotic illnesses (transmitted from animals to humans) are rising. For lack of shepherds, the herd cannot travel far or for long, hence overgrazing near water points and homestead increases. As men die, a new clientele - women and youth - is emerging for agricultural schemes and extension services. "It is time that extension workers are trained on the specific impact of HIV/AIDS and they advise women farmers on effective labour and income coping strategies," says a study by Chieza Muchopa, from the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Zimbabwe. These strategies could include changes like the hardy, labour-easy and drought tough cassava, sweet potatoes and sorghum could displace rainfed maize as a staple subsistence crop. New
plant varieties with higher yields and better pest and drought resistance
are needed, perhaps drawing upon local varieties of indigenous grain
crops. "This ought to change. We should look more at indigenous technologies such as mulching, inter-cropping, and seed selection," says Magdalene Nyiranahoro, a researcher at Makerere University in Kampala. Labour-saving practices like zero tillage and capital-saving technology such as high yielding and early maturing varieties that need less fertilizer and pesticides can reduce work and costs. Tools and ploughs should be lighter, hoes stronger. Weeding and harvesting are still done with backbreaking technology, but applied research could devise new, cheap and better tools for local production. As HIV/AIDS changes the agricultural landscape in the rural areas, land rights for women also are crucial. Widows dispossession is common across Southern and Eastern Africa. In patrilineal societies, the husband's family is entitled to his goods. Often widows and children are evicted of the house in town or the homestead. They need security of tenure. In matrilineal and matrilocal societies, such as Malawi and northern Mozambique, a husband moves into the wife's area. If he dies, the wife keeps the land and the children. If the mother dies, the man returns to his home area, frequently takes on another wife and neglects the children. Traditionally, the maternal uncle should care for the orphans, but in practice, he gives advice and little else. In the absence of a grandmother, "death of a mother plunges the family into poverty and leads to the breakup of the family unit," says Oxfam. The combined effects of demographic pressure, economic failure and household dissolution due to AIDS, are creating a generation of uprooted youth. "There are no strategies to deal with orphans," says Kwazi Mazibuko, a development worker in Mdlelanga, in northern KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Just one community of 300 households has 70 orphans. Orphans grow up with little education and job prospects and no parental or official support. They may well join the many militias roaming the region, criminal gangs or the army of street kids in towns. Only clear-sighted national policies can prevent a deepening in the social exclusion and disenfranchisement of rural youth. "It is one of the biggest challenges faced by African governments today'" says Paul Richards an agricultural researcher and professor at Wageningen agricultural university in The Netherlands. When all other assets are gone, only the land remains. Across the region, rural families in customary tenure system appear to resist as much as possible selling the land. But that could change. According to Richards: "If land tenure reform is pursued aggressively in rural regions at high risk of HIV/AIDS, survivors may join the swelling ranks of a landless class, a phenomenon hitherto unknown in Africa." Through
widow dispossession and lack of title deeds, rural women risk becoming
landless. AIDS-devastated communities are evolving their own ways
of coping. Burial societies, customary labour-sharing arrangements for weeding and harvesting, savings clubs and mutual help groups take on new functions. People share farm chores, house repairs and childcare, and change traditional practices such as long mourning periods and expensive funerals. |
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