AS I write, we haven’t had rain for 10 weeks.
One night earlier this month there was much activity out there: thunder and lightning, black, rolling clouds, the lot, but it was ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’* — we had just under 2mm.
We had not a drop throughout the whole of May. For the year so far we have had a total of 360mm of rain (I speak, of course, of The Hide, and it’s important to note that rainfall varies from street to street, let alone from village to village), when the average should have been in the region of 660, so, we’ve had about 55 percent of what we should have had.
Our local cane farmer says his crop is definitely down on last year’s and that the problem is severe. He notes that weather patterns appear to have changed, when it rains in really rains, but when it’s dry it’s drier for longer – this is of course a sure indicator of global climate change. I’ve had similar personal reports about the state of crops in various other parts of KZN and the Eastern Cape.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) takes it much further, stating that harvests have been badly affected throughout southern Africa, including southern Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe (particularly), Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho and of course South Africa.
The WFP points out that maize crop failure rates are 50 percent in parts of South Africa, which is particularly serious as we grow 40 percent of the region’s maize.
Zimbabwe’s maize crop is estimated to be about 950,000 tons, about 50 percent of the annual average, meaning that the Zimbabwean government will have to import at least 700,000 tons of white maize at a cost of some US$168-million to feed its people.
It has been pointed out that this is unlikely to happen as the Zimbabwean government does not have the funds to pay its civil servants, let alone import maize, so it will have to turn to the international aid agencies.
In the same region, Zambia’s maize crop is down 20 percent and in Malawi at least 600,000 people are in need of urgent food aid.**All in all a fairly depressing situation.
Is there anything we can do about it? Not really, apart from saving water and keeping an eye out for those rain clouds – our local farmer and I agreed, a rain dance may not be a bad idea.
To end on a more cheerful note, there’s still water in the red tin plate in The Hide – our version of a bird bath.
The other day we had the pleasure of watching something of a face-off between a Natal robin and an olive sunbird about who exactly had bathing rights.
The robin is the much bigger bird, but the sunbird is the much noisier, and I have to note that it was noise that won the day, and the bath.
Just in case you were wondering, the tin plate takes very little water. Cheers!
*Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
**News24.com
To receive news links via BBM, add us using the pin 2BABF7D1.
The South Coast Herald is also on Facebook and Twitter – why not join us there?
