Meet the Climate Hackers of Malawi

When it comes to growing food, some of the world’s smallest farmers are some of the world’s most creative farmers. Like Judith Harry and her neighbors, she sows pigeon peas to shade the soil from the hotter and hotter sun. They planted vetiver grass to prevent flooding.

They are reviving old crops, like finger millet and forgotten yams, and planting trees that naturally fertilize the soil. Few have avoided one legacy of European colonialism, the practice of planting rows and rows of corn, or maize, and saturating fields with chemical fertilizers.

“One crop may fail. Another crop may do well,” said Ms. Harry, who has abandoned her parents’ tradition of growing only corn and tobacco and has added peanuts, sunflowers, and soybeans to her fields. “That could save your season.”

It’s not just Ms. Harry and her neighbors in Malawi, a largely agrarian country of 19 million people who are on the front lines of climate danger. These brilliant, throw-it-all-at-the-wall innovations are multiplied by small farmers who can survive elsewhere in the world.

This is out of necessity.

It is because they depend on the weather to feed themselves, and the weather has been upended by 150 years of greenhouse gas emissions produced mainly by the industrialized countries of the world.

The drought destroyed the land. The storm came upon them with a vengeance. Cyclones, once rare, are now commonplace. Add to that the lack of chemical fertilizers, which most African countries import from Russia, now the war. Also the value of the national currency has depreciated.

All things, all together. Farmers in Malawi are left to fend for themselves from starvation.

Maize, the region’s main source of calories, is a problem.

In Malawi, maize production has been overwhelmed by drought, cyclones, rising temperatures and erratic rainfall. In southern Africa, climate shocks have reduced maize yields, and if temperatures continue to rise, yields will decline further.

“The ground is cold,” said Ms. Harry.

Giving up is not an option. No insurance to fall back on, no irrigation when the rains fail.

So you do what you can. You experiment. You take a hoe and try to build different ridges to save the banana plantation. You share the manure with your neighbors who have to sell their goats in times of trouble. You switched to eating soybean porridge for breakfast, instead of eating the usual corn.

There is no guarantee these hacks will be enough. That was especially clear when, in March, Cyclone Freddy barreled into southern Malawi, dumping six months’ worth of rain in six days. It washed away crops, houses, people, livestock.

Still, you keep going.

“Giving up means you don’t have food,” said Chikondi Chabvuta, a farmer’s grandson who is now a regional adviser with the international aid group CARE. “You just have to adapt.”

And now, you have to do it without much help. Global funding to help poor countries adapt to climate hazards is a small part of what is needed, the United Nations says.

Alexander Mponda’s parents grow maize. Everyone did – even Malawi’s founding president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, an authoritarian leader who ruled for almost 30 years. He called on Malawi to modernize agriculture, and maize was considered modern. Millet, no.

Hybrid seeds grow. Chemical fertilizers are subsidized.

Maize had been promoted by the British colonialists before. It was an easy source of calories for plantation labor. Millet and sorghum, if eaten in large quantities, lose their market. Yams are almost gone.

Tobacco is the main cash crop and maize is the staple grain. Dried, ground and then cooked as cornmeal, in Malawi it is known as nsima, in Kenya as ugali, in Uganda as posho (probably derived from the portion of maize porridge given to prison inmates under colonial rule).

So Mr. Mponda, 26, planted corn. But he no longer counted the corn. The soil has been degraded from decades of monoculture. The rain did not come in time. This year, there is no fertilizer either.

“We are forced to change,” said Mr Mponda. “Just staying in one piece is pointless.”

The number of hectares devoted to maize in Mchinji District, in central Malawi, has dropped by about 12 percent this year, compared to last year, according to the local agricultural office, mainly due to a lack of chemical fertilizers.

Mr. Mponda is part of a local group called Farmer Field Business School that runs experiments on small plots of land. At one peak, he planted two soybean seedlings. Next, one. Some ridges were treated with manure; others do not. Two types of nuts were tested.

The goal: to see for yourself what works, what doesn’t.

Mr. Mponda has planted beans, a cash crop that is also good for the soil. This year, he planted soybeans. As for one hectare of corn, the yield is usually half.

Many neighbors grow yams. Similar farmer-led experiments have started across the country.

Malawi has experienced persistent drought in some places, extreme rainfall in others, rising temperatures and four cyclones in three years. As in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, climate change has reduced agricultural productivity, with a new World Bank study warning that climate shocks could reduce the region’s already fragile economy by 3 percent to 9 percent by 2030. Already, half of people live in below. poverty line.

Eighty percent have no access to electricity. He doesn’t own a car or a motorcycle. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for almost 3 percent of the planet’s warming gases that accumulate in the atmosphere.

That is, they are not responsible for the problem of climate change.

Only small farmers in small countries can do it, if the world’s biggest climate polluters, led by the United States and China, fail to reduce emissions.

“In some parts of the world we can’t grow food, or raise animals,” said Rachel Bezner Kerr, a Cornell University professor who has worked with Malawian farmers for more than 20 years. “That’s if we continue on our current trajectory.”

Heirloom Seeds

At the age of 74, Wackson Maona, is old enough to remember that in the north, where he lives, near the border of Tanzania, there were three bursts of rain before the rainy season. The first is known as the rain that washes the ashes from the fields that are cleaned after the harvest.

The rains have disappeared.

Now, the rain can start late or end early. Or it may not stop for months. The sky is now a mystery, so Mr. Maona takes better care of the ground.

He refused to buy anything. He planted the seeds he had saved. He Feeds the soil with compost made in the shade of an old mango tree (he calls this “office”) and then manure from his sheep, which helps to retain moisture in the soil.

The field looked like a chaotic garden. Pigeon peas grow thickly under the corn, protecting the soil from the heat. Pumpkin vines crawl on the ground. Soy and cassava are planted together, as well as bananas and peanuts. A climbing yam sends every year. He has tall trees in his fields whose fallen leaves are used as fertilizer. They have short trees whose flowers are natural pesticides.

“Everything is free,” he said. It is the antithesis of industrial agriculture.

Planting multiple trees and crops on one plot of land often requires more time and effort. But it can also be a type of insurance.

“Maize can fail. Cassava can be better. Sweet potatoes can be better,” said Esther Lupafya, a nurse who used to work with malnourished children at a nearby clinic before turning her attention to helping farmers like Mr. Maona grow better food. . “So you can eat anything.”

He has seen his diet improve. Even after several climate shocks – a devastating drought in 2019, persistent rains this year – he has seen farmers keep trying. “You can give up,” Ms. Lupafya said. “He won’t give up.”

Disaster Attack

In the south, in Balaka district, Jafari Black did everything.

When heavy rains started washing topsoil off the ground a few years ago, he and his neighbors dug new channels to release the water. They planted vetiver and elephant grass to hold the river banks.

Last November, Mr. Black spent a good deal of money on hybrid corn seeds. For good measure, next to corn, he also planted sorghum. Rain or no rain, sorghum is usually good.

But then, the rain refused to stop. The corn failed. Sorghum also.

He rushed to plant sweet potatoes. Cyclone Freddy drove them away.

The fields are now just mud and sand. There is a new stream, deep enough for children to wash clothes.

Mr. Black stood in the mud one afternoon in late March and wondered aloud what else he could do. “I can’t just sit idle.”

All he had were cane stalks saved from the previous harvest. That’s why he put it on the ground.

‘We have history here’

The cyclone presented a painful decision for Chabvuta’s own family.

The storm hit the house that her grandfather had built, the house where her mother grew up, where Ms. Chabvuta spent her childhood holidays. It flooded the fields. It washed away six sheep. His uncle, who lives there, was devastated.

It hit me hard because he was always tough. When a previous typhoon destroyed one of the walls of the house, it pushed the family to rebuild. When he lost his cow, he did not worry. “He said that ‘We have history here,'” he recalled. “This year he was like, ‘I’m done.'”

His family is now looking to buy land in a village further away from the river, protected from the next storm, which they know is inevitable.

“We cannot continue to insist that we live there,” said Ms. Chabvuta. “Even though we have all the precious memories, it’s time to let go.”

Golden Matonga contributed reports from Malawi.