South African Drought, Crop Failure and Politics

Unlike other blog posts this one is a bit non-canon but discusses an issue that is currently circulating the "news" portion of Google.

Farmers across South Africa are losing livestock due to drought as well as crop failure (primarily maize). An article by ENCA describes the main issues nicely  and the comments by the public point to the problem being politics rather than lack of rainfall.

"the government have been warned" - said one user called Idi. 

The drought which has significantly reduced arable land in South Africa is forcing the government to import food and this is therefore pushing up food prices. It is interesting because of all the countries in Africa, South Africa would be expected to be the most resilient to a drought.

How is this related to the overarching question of the blog 'Is water use in agriculture inefficient and water are the solutions?'

What I have got from these various articles on Yahoo, Al Jazeera and ENCA and the comments on them is that the government should have been better prepared for droughts. An ineffective government whose limited knowledge of agriculture could exaggerate already inefficient water practices in a way that has put 2.7 million households in danger.

To relate this issue to the purpose of my blog - clearly if better preparation had been taken to make water use in agriculture (and domestically) more efficient then the effects of this drought in South Africa might not be so pronounced.

I think it demonstrates an important point that it is not just the responsibility of the farmers (as suggested in the Wallace article in a previous post) but also the government to improve efficiency of water resources within the sector of agriculture.

In my next post I plan to get back on track and discuss more solutions to inefficiencies in water use within agriculture. Hopefully, I will find a case study to exemplify a success (or failure).

Interdisciplinary Approaches

This blog has focused most of its attention on the issue of inefficient water use within agriculture and then the solutions to this problem (with more solutions still to be talked about) but in this short blog post I want to talk about a reading I did for the first lecture in this course.

The reading in question was by Villholth (2013) and talks about groundwater irrigation for smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and how the use of groundwater for irrigation is growing in extent and importance. It is an incredibly insightful paper reflecting the importance of groundwater resources in the African continent and is good because it focuses on small scale farmers rather than large irrigation schemes.

Among the information I took from this paper was the importance of integrating socio-economic approaches into hydrogeological studies. In other words, bridging the gap between human and physical geography. Often studies into water use in Africa focus on the physical conditions (aquifer recharge, groundwater storage, climatic conditions) or human conditions (urbanization, household composition) and Villholth combines the two successfully to create a robust synthesis of groundwater use within small scale agriculture.
I think it is important (and logical) to combine both human and physical approaches within research into this area because in Africa the natural and the anthropogenic word are so closely interlinked it is often difficult to look at just one. To look at one in isolation limits your ability to pull robust conclusions from a piece of research. Of course, the context and objectives of your research determine your ability to incorporate both human and physical factors.

Solutions to the Inefficient Use of Water in Agricuture

Water is wasted in agriculture. Previous blog posts have already explored this issue and examined the solution of drip irrigation.

In this blog post a range of solutions to inefficiencies in water use within agriculture will be critically examined in the extensive academic literature.

One of the most interesting articles which didn’t just focus on agriculture, came from Abdul-Rahmann et al. (2011) which in summary talked about using water from fisheries to irrigate agricultural land. The use of this water means that water is not wasted and that the water would contain natural fertilizer (from fish excrement). Although this research was not focused on Africa, it is an interesting idea to integrate two different types of agriculture (fish farming and arable farming). However, to be critical not all countries (in Africa) would have developed “modern” fisheries, such as the ones described in the article, that can capture the water and use it for irrigation and a project of this nature (as the article mentions) would be expensive. Landlocked African countries such as Zambia may not be able to afford this or have enough fish farms to make this a viable option.

Small scale fishing in Tanzania (Sand and Land)

Increasing efficiencies in agriculture does not just come in the form of the technology but also in the form of low cost strategies. 

Furthermore, there are other factors that need to be considered as illustrated in Wallace’s (2000) article. The relief and gradient of agricultural land plays an important role in determining the efficiency of water use within both irrigated and non-irrigated farming. Where land is steep surface runoff is high and infiltration into the soil is reduced (so water is not used for plant growth). Runoff of this kind is made up of 25-30% of rainfall in Niger (Rockstrom 1997) and up to 40% in Mali (Stroosnijder and Hoogmeed 1984). It is clear from these studies that reducing the amount of water occurring as surface runoff is important. Extensive work has been done by Lal (1989 and 1991) into such strategies to stop runoff. Adding materials to the land surface such as leaving crop residues or contour hedgerows can reduce runoff by capturing the water and are low cost and accessible to small scale African farmers. Wallace praises the use of mulches to reduce runoff but other studies have suggested that the use of mulches reduce direct soil evaporation (Barros and Hanks 1993). The effects of mulches, and their usefulness, will therefore vary depending on its relative influence on evaporation and infiltration. This would vary with frequency and quantity of rainfall.

Natural and environmentally beneficial, mulches are useful within agriculture (source)

Wallace’s article is extensive in its discussion of inefficiencies in water use within agriculture and provides solutions to problems that I had not considered – I seemed to focus my thoughts on “hard” engineering technologies but clearly low cost solutions such as mulches can be just as effective (and more accessible for small scale farmers).

Inefficiencies in water use within agriculture are huge and the literature and research into them and solutions is even greater and thus future blog posts will continue to explore this issue. 

*please note that Lal 1991 is only available in book form as is Rockstrom 1997.