Only 6% of the continent’s arable land is irrigated
Dozens of small farmers face miles of drying crop fields in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa Africa.
The rain has finally returned to Malawi (East Africa, below the Equator) after weeks and weeks of heavy rain droughtbut it is too little too late for local farmer Saidi Mmadi.
A father of six, he stares at his field, feeling that all his work over the past months has been completely for naught.
“In December we lost everything. So we uprooted what was planted and started all over again, only to be destroyed again by the drought,” he told Deutsche Welle.
His only hope is that the government continues to step in as best it can and help subsidize farmers.
Those assisted by the government amount to about 22% of Malawi’s population (about 20 million people), which is 15% more than the previous year.
UN organizations note that elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, many nations have experienced similar levels of hardship.
Agencies estimate that 27.4 million people in South Africa will face hunger in the next six months due to poor harvests following a series of 14 extreme droughts in the past two decades, far more than on any other continent.
Areas facing immediate threat of famine include Madagascar and Zimbabwe, according to the United Nations.
In an article in NewsDay, a daily newspaper and online news platform in Zimbabwe, a 69-year-old woman with 20 years of farming experience described the unprecedented nature of the situation as “one of the worst droughts I have ever seen”.
“Last season was poor, and now we don’t know what we’re going to eat,” she said.
In neighboring Zambia, up to 70 percent of agricultural fields have also experienced similar dry spells in the country’s eastern province, according to recent estimates.
Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema has declared the drought a national disaster after 84 of 116 districts have been without rain for more than five weeks, saying more than 1 million Zambian farming families will be affected.
According to AGRA, an African-led partnership, although irrigation in Africa has the potential to increase agricultural productivity by 50%, the area currently equipped for irrigation is estimated to be only 13 million hectares, representing just 6% of the total cultivated area on the continent, compared to about 14% of land in Latin America and 37% in Asia.
But is Africa really so vulnerable to change and so dependent on rain that government subsidies are the only lifeline for many farmers?
According to 2022 findings published by WaterAid and the British Geological Survey, many African nations do have abundant groundwater, enough to survive at least five years of drought.
In the case of Malawi, there are also 13 perennial rivers and three lakes, including Lake Malawi, the world’s fourth largest freshwater body by volume. Redirecting these resources hardly figures in any plan to combat drought-induced hunger.
Untapped resources such as groundwater systems and the use of river capillaries could possibly provide relief for millions of people temporarily – especially if government investment is implemented.
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