Harsh weather: Our farmers need answers

Watching on TV the suffering livestock keepers went through as floods wreaked havoc, I was really moved. As an expert, my concern is how can our farmers be assisted to overcome the drought/floods challenges using the knowledge obtained from researchers.

Information search indicates that many organisations — governmental and NGOs are involved in search of solutions and different options have been proposed and tested with varying degrees of success.

Insurance

Insurance cover targeting pastoral livestock keepers has been proposed and tested in Kenya. Meat marketing organisations targeting the arid and semi-arid (ASALs) production zones have been set up. Trainings targeting producers from areas heavily impacted have been carried out to sensitise livestock keepers on climate risk coping mechanisms.

Despite all these efforts, images of hopelessness are common during the drought or floods.

The county governments in the affected areas and national government have invested heavily to respond to the climatic calamities risk. The question that begs is “what are we doing right and what do we need to adjust to increase dryland grazing system resistance and resilience to climate change?”

To address the climate-related threats there is need to invoke academic and practice approaches.

Academic because, there is a huge volume of scientific information relating to rangelands where much of the dryland grazing production systems occur which can be integrated in design of decision making platform.

The academic approach should complement the practice among the livestock keepers who have lived in the ASALs over long periods of time and have thus mustered enough experience which they have traditionally used to respond to climatic distresses.

We must avoid being too much strategic in planning climate risk responses as they result in reactions rather than well planned actions. We should treat the climate and climatic variability as having negative and positive impact. This way, we will develop coping mechanisms that integrate tactical responses to the threat prior to the occurrence (last phase in response).

We must come up with production and marketing intervention systems that have continuum as the climate change and the subsequent increase in climatic variability are processes rather than activities. In summary, we must look for ways to simplify complex solution to complex situations. Climate change is a complex phenomenon and cannot be responded to through design of simple solutions.

It would be impossible to design and implement sustainable responses to a threat without thorough knowledge of a system. The first step to preparing to respond to climate challenges would be to fully understand the environment in which (agro)pastoralism occurs and not just in terms of the weather data but the system in entirety.

This information can be aggregated to design a decision support system whose trigger for action would be easily detectable and communicable. The insurance platform would be integrated on such system.

[Dr Mathew Gicheha, Lectures in the Department of Animal Sciences at JKUAT.

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