W is for Water-harvesting
Date: 11 October 2014
The latest in our A to Z of food sovereignty in Africa: Water-havesting
Around one-fifth of the world’s population is affected by water scarcity and in Africa alone around 345 million people lack access to safe drinking water. In some areas this is caused by a physical lack of water. In others, the problem is more to do with ‘economic water scarcity’: a lack of investments in the infrastructure to store and distribute water. Globally there is enough freshwater to go round, but as with many natural resources, it is both unsustainably managed (wasted, polluted) and abundant in some places (floods) while scarce in others (droughts). In many African countries, harvesting and storing rainwater is an important way of ensuring that food production can continue into parts of the dry season.
In Kenya, there is enough rainwater harvest potential to support six to seven times the current population, and in Ethiopia, with its population of almost 100 million, there is potential to harvest enough to over cover the needs of over 500 million people. Across parts of the Sahel, rainwater harvesting is now carried out over hundreds of thousands of hectares, allowing huge areas of land to become agriculturally productive. Rainwater harvesting increases crop yields and ground water levels, as well as helping to develop food systems that are more resilient to climate change.
Farmers who have been able to invest in water harvesting and storage are able to grow more crops during the dry season and earn more money. In a district of central Ethiopia known as Minjar Shenkora, farmers with water harvesting were able to irrigate onions as a cash crop and earn up to $150 USD per hectare. Unfortunately, substantial water harvesting technologies require funding to build and most farmers cannot afford this cost on their own. These start-up costs are one of the main limitations on the wider adoption of this extremely useful technology.
Photo: A water harvesting structure in Ethiopia. Credit: International Livestock Research Institute
The A-Z of Food Sovereignty in Africa shows the positive alternatives to corporate-led agriculture. A new letter was posted each day in the lead up to World Food Day arrived on 16 October 2014.
Africa’s small-scale food producers already know how to produce enough food sustainably to feed themselves but the political and economic rules which govern the food system are set against them. These rules are written by and for multinational companies and political elites, in support of a global food system that benefits them rather than the millions of smallholders and family farmers who produce the food and get little in return.
