Take hoes to museum and get machines to farm

A Woman heads home after working on her farm. [Getty Images]

There used to be this small jembe with a pointed blade people would use during planting. Different ones with wider tips would suffice during tilling and weeding.

They still hang in a store that shares a wall with our suit-coated kitchen in the village. My long deceased grandparents used such hoes. Decades later, things remain the same, except that the amount of produce harvested per acre has diminished owing to worsening soil quality and effects of climate change. Another change is in number of mouths fed, while a lot of what was initially agricultural land is now residential. A lot of problems bedeviling Africa, including climate change, affect food systems. Increased temperatures causing deaths of humans and livestock with prolonged droughts and heat waves have dire effects on production of crops such as maize, millet, wheat, rice and sorghum, and other foods the continent relies on. Livestock rearing for pastoralist communities and fish farming are also at the mercy of climate change.