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Lloyd Gumbo Senior Reporter
The 34th Sadc Summit will be held next month in Victoria Falls at a time when climate change has wrecked havoc on the region, disrupting seasons and adversely affecting harvests.Agriculture feeds into most of the economic activities of Sadc countries, and failure in the agricultural sector has a downstream effect on most sectors of the economy.

Some countries in the region have experienced unforecast mid-season droughts that have wiped out entire crops, resulting in food shortages.

As the Sadc leaders gather for the Heads of State and Government Summit being hosted by Zimbabwe, they must take into consideration means and ways of how the region can mitigate the effects of climate change to ensure regional peace and stability.

Southern Africa is arguably one of the regions most affected by global warming, considering that agriculture is predominantly the mainstay of its economies.

Analysts argue that Sadc countries contribute less than one percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is the worst victim of climate change, with threats of it getting worse as drought and flooding have continued to plunder local economies, especially smallholder farmers’ crops and livestock.

As a result, the changing climatic conditions have resulted in the agricultural sector in almost all Sadc countries nearly collapsing, in the process posing a serious threat to food security.

“In coming decades, the Southern African Development Community region is expected to experience higher land and ocean surface temperatures than in the past, which will affect rainfall, winds, and the timing and intensity of weather events,” an article recently posted on the Sadc website read.

It is against this background that the forthcoming 34th Sadc Summit must take practical and decisive measures to counter the effects of climate change if peace and security is to be maintained in the region that has so far been generally peaceful.

There is a popular idiom, “A hungry man is an angry man”, and as such any threats to food security will most definitely build up to national security concerns in the whole region.

It is important that climate change adaptation and mitigation tops the list of the Sadc Heads of State and Government’s priorities at each and every meeting, including in Victoria Falls next month.

It is common knowledge that climatic patterns in the region were predictable in the past, but it is increasingly becoming difficult even for meteorological departments to forecast rainfall patterns.

Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Swaziland are some of the countries that were ravaged by unexpected floods this year, while Namibia battled the worst drought in decades in the last farming season.

From the above, it shows that both flooding and drought have debilitating and devastating effects on agricultural crops as livelihoods are disrupted, due to climate change.

It is a fact that access to adequate food, usually from subsistence farming is an elementary requisite for sustainable livelihoods but due to climate change, this has not been achievable in most Sadc countries.

From the foregoing, it is important that Sadc countries come up with ways to adapt to climate change that scientists say is inevitably a continuous process despite mitigatory efforts being employed by the whole world.

Sadc countries have committed themselves to various international conventions on climate change, but has that brought about any change in terms of livelihoods for people in rural areas whose sustenance is from agricultural activities?

Are some of the programmes that the region has adopted to counter the effects of climate change relevant and appropriate to the region or they are imposed from countries that are miles away from Africa?

Or, there is nothing wrong with the programmes, but it is the implementation which is poor?

Some will argue that the region cannot allow donors to drive the development agenda of the regional bloc when the leaders want to maintain some semblance of being in charge.

Countries in Asia have managed to stay afloat in face of the crippling challenges caused by climate change because they have adopted programmes like agricultural intensification and green revolution that have to some extent taken the sting out of the changing climatic patterns.

Failure by the region to come up with a collective position on biotechnology has not helped matters since other countries are reluctant to endorse the practice, with only South Africa commercialising it, while Malawi is running a trial run on the cotton crop.

According to the Sadc website: “The agriculture sector is of major social and economic importance in the Sadc region, contributing in the different Member States between four percent and 27 percent of GDP and approximately 13 percent of overall export earnings.

“About 70 percent of the region’s population depends on agriculture for food, income and employment, hence the performance of this sector has a strong influence on food security, economic growth and social stability in the region.”

Conservation farming and use of appropriate technology are some of the programmes that the region has adopted through a programme called “Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in the Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa-EAC-Sadc)” under the banner of the Sadc secretariat.

A recent Sadc media sensitisation workshop on climate change mitigation and adaptation in the Comesa-EAC-Sadc held in Malawi revealed that there are a number of mitigatory measures that the region could pursue to counter climate change to improve their harvest.

A smallholder farmer in Lilongwe South, Mr Pearson Thangaludzu, told journalists from Sadc countries during a field visit for the workshop that his crop yield had improved since he embraced conservation farming whose thrust is on reducing soil disturbance and maintenance of soil cover to preserve moisture.

Agriculture experts argue that conservation farming would be the best to reduce water requirements by more than 25 percent in a region that is predominantly dry.

Most countries in the Sadc region have adopted the practice, especially in traditionally dry areas, but the major challenge is that it is done at a small scale.

Some farmers have been practising conservation farming for over a decade at small pieces of land with good yields, but continue to practise conventional tillage on mostly big fields, with poor yields.

The reasons behind this development is that the practice is labour intensive in a region that has been ravaged by HIV and Aids and labour migration from rural to urban areas and to neighbouring countries.

For instance, in Zimbabwe the practice is mostly promoted in areas classified as Region Five like the Matabeleland region where little rainfall is received, yet most of the active young labour from the area has migrated to South Africa and Botswana.

As a result, it becomes difficult for the remaining elderly to practise zero tillage when they have alternatives like ox-drawn ploughs.

While innovation is abundant in the region, bureaucracy has been stifling Sadc’s development, as such Sadc countries must promote production of appropriate technology that is affordable to smallholder farmers to attract them from practising conventional farming.

The regional bloc must also promote irrigation development in the region because changes in global climate have made it difficult for countries to bank on rain-fed farming activities.

Water harvesting in the event of flooding is another aspect that should be prioritised by the region to guarantee adequate water supply for domestic use and irrigation activities.

The regional leaders must discuss how best to manage water bodies that cut across borders to achieve the best in irrigated crops and easily manage the merger water resources, thereby mitigating against the effects of climate change like droughts.