Catching up is easy when other people too have been taking things easy. I missed this account of the possibly misplaced importance of maize in African life when it first appeared at the Climate Change Media Partnership in the wake of the Cancun meeting, but luckily a scraper site only got around to it yesterday. What is so interesting about this insistence that maize be Africa’s main staple is how ahistorical it is. Corn and Capitalism, Arturo Warman’s wonderful social history of maize, teases out the many factors that made maize Africa’s darling, often in the space of a couple of generations or less. But as Mclay Kanyangarara, climate change advisor for the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, apparently told the side event at Cancun:
“[W]e have always had an option. … Maize is an introduced crop and the small grains have always been our traditional indigenous crops, which are better suited to our climate.”
Why, then, is it proving so hard to break maize’s stranglehold, a scant 500 years later?
And in other climate-change news, a cold winter comes as something of a surprise to the globe-trotting locavore in Guatemala. And another missed post that lives again thanks to a scraper offers first hand experience of climate change in Ethiopia.
“I remember misty mornings, with the sky full of clouds. Even ten years ago there would be regular rainfall six months of the year. This year we had only two and a half. We’ve had to reduce what we grow. No more peppers or vegetables – now it’s just the basics like corn and sorghum.”
Corn, again! The post goes on anecdotally to distinguish past weather patterns — an occasional bad year among the good — from today’s unremittingly bad years. It also talks a bit about how farmers are trying to diversify, for example by growing grass pea (Lathyrus sativus) instead of normal peas (Pisum sativum), noting that grass pea can cause paralysis.
“It’s a big worry for me,” says Lekea, a 50-year-old mother of nine children. “But the alternative is for us to go hungry.”
Another alternative would be for Lekea and other farmers in the area to trial some of the low-neurotoxin Lathyrus varieties that have been under development at ICARDA and elsewhere since the late 1990s. Maybe someone suggested that at the big “climate hearing” that Lekea was scheduled to address. Or maybe nobody in Ethiopia — including Oxfam’s blogger — knew anything about these varieties. That seems unlikely, given that Ethiopia has the varieties, which continue to be improved. So what’s the story?
There always are alternatives. Even to maize.