DEVELOPMENT-SWAZILAND: Summer Deluge Brings more Misery

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MBABANE, Feb 7 2002 (IPS) - The skies opened this week, releasing a long-overdue summer deluge, but the “too late” water, as the Swazis say, not only failed to undo the damage of a recent dry spell, but brought some additional misery.

From the capital Mbabane to the main commercial town Manzini, and its surrounding farmland, large hailstones accompanied showers.

Evah Kunene watched the hard ice pellets slam into her garden, which through the duration of the dry spell she had kept green through meticulous and expensive watering from a hose, and she lamented, “There goes my pumpkins. The hail is destroying the crop just as the pumpkins are growing large.”

Ironically, Swaziland’s meteorologists say this year will bring normal rainfall. But as farmers can testify, it is not the amount, but the time of delivery that determines whether water will nourish, flood or bypass their crops at critical times.

Just as this week’s hailstorm descended when the summer pumpkin crop was maturing, so too did the skies withdraw rain when the maize fields, bearing Swazis’s staple food, required water during plant growth.

The result has been widespread stunting of maize plants. Issuing a drought warning last week, the Ministry of Agriculture noted, “The worst effected crop is the early planted maize that is already flowering, and in addition to the dry conditions other major adverse factors reported are stalk borer damage, too many weeds, cutworm damage and hailstorm.”

The proliferation of weeds and parasites like cutworm and the stalk borer are indications of poor farm management, and raise questions about traditional farming techniques in a country that annually suffers a famine threat, despite ample streams and rivers for irrigation.

“Peasant farmers depend on rains. When these fall, there is food; but when they fail, there is famine,” says Richard Simelane, an agriculture field officer in the usually dry Lubombo region. “Such dependency on rain-fed crops is ridiculous, because a simple foot-operated pump can bring water from a nearby stream to many fields.”

Swazi farmers had reason to believe this year’s water supply would be sufficient.

Meteorologists predicted normal rainfall, and with expected rains through April, this will likely occur statistically, if too late for crops that shrivelled in January. November saw daily rainfall, encouraging farmers to plant more maize than usual. Mid- December, however, the rains stopped, and did not resume until the last day of January, over a month past the Southern Hemisphere’s summer solstice and after weeks of withering heat.

“Meteorologically, there is no drought this year,” said Mandla Dlamini, a department officer with the national weather service.

Farmers would disagree, as would government’s National Disaster Task Force. Ben Nsibandze, the task force’s director, said “from the year 2000 floods to the year 2001 hailstorm and heat wave, cholera, and foot and mouth outbreak, the current hail and windstorms as well as the present scorching heat which has already destroyed large areas of maize.”

The task force has again this year put out bulletins announcing probable pockets of imminent famine, and formally requested food assistance from international donors.

Among the first to respond was the government of Japan. A two- million-U.S.-dollar grant aid programme is earmarked exclusively for food production.

“This assistance comes in the form of fertiliser and agricultural equipment,” says Prince Guduza Dlamini, minister of Economic Planning and Development, which is working with the agriculture ministry to improve the business of small-scale farming.

“In today’s world, famine is no longer a natural disaster, it is a man-made calamity,” says agricultural field officer Simelane. “Food surpluses from anywhere in the world should go where they are needed, and if they do not there is a transportation or communication breakdown.”

Revealing some of the frustration he feels dealing with tradition-minded farmers who are reluctant to modernise their operations, he adds, “Ignorance is a man-made problem, which can lead to calamity.”

This year’s “drought” – though not drought technically, according to meteorologists, because of anticipated normal seasonal rainfall eventually – has accounted for crop failure but may be a blessing in deep disguise for Simelane and other advocates for better utilisation of agriculture land.

Many Swazi peasant farmers, who reside on multi-generational homesteads under local chiefs, are content to be subsistence farmers, to the dismay of agriculture minister Roy Fanourakis, who wants small holding farmers to be run as moneymaking businesses.

But this year, achieving even subsistence is proving difficult. For sheer survival, some traditionalists may have to take an active row in bringing irrigation water to their fields, instead of passively waiting for rains to fall.

“One complaint from smallholding farmers is the lack of capital to invest in pumps and machinery to dig irrigation ditches,” says Fanourakis. “But His Majesty has initiated funds to finance cooperative schemes.”

King Mswati’s poverty alleviation efforts include grant money to encourage peasant farmers to band together to grow crops for the export market. Some of the water from the new Maguga Dam, a South Africa-Swaziland co-venture, is earmarked for the irrigation of agricultural schemes of cooperatives founded by small landholder farmers.

If drought is a natural phenomenon historically followed by famine, and this cycle can be broken in Swaziland by the application of 21st century technology and marketing, then it is good news for Swazi farmers.

This year’s drought has shown them there is no alternative to changing discredited old ways.

The quarterly bulletin of the 14-member state Southern African Development Community says the region faces a serious shortage of grain, 862,000 million tonnes. Malawi, Zimbabwe and Angola will be importing extensively.

Swaziland faces a maize deficit of 134,000 tonnes. Zimbabwe’s deficit is 821,000 tonnes, and the total maize shortage throughout SADC is 1,103 million tonnes.