Agriculture III - beyond Lake Chad
My last two blog posts described the influence of environmental change on agriculture in the Lake Chad region. I want to expand the scope of my research to a wider, continental scale in order to see if the problems faced in the LCB are mirrored elsewhere. Hence, I want to see if potential solutions to problems caused by environmental change can be transferred between different regions.
South Africa
South Africa
Firstly, I have chosen to show the following video (Figure 1) as a comparison to the video in my last blog post. Figure 1 shows some of the problems being faced in South Africa due to increasing demand for water and dwindling resources. It is clear that this region is affected by low water availability, like in the LCB but the expression of this is very different. This reflects the idea that generalising the water 'crisis' in Africa is often counterproductive as water availability varies dramatically both spatially and temporally.
Figure 1: Water shortages in South Africa.
Source: YouTube
A Sub-Saharan study
Water Footprint Network recently created water footprint profiles for seven Sub-Saharan countries (2016). The study found that agriculture is the greatest consumer of water in Sub-Saharan Africa and also contributes significantly to all seven national economies of countries in the study, including up to 42% of the GDP in Ethiopia. However, this might suggest that the majority of crops are irrigated, which is not the case as most crops in the region are rain-fed. Of the seven countries in this study; Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali and Mozambique were considered to be blue water-scarce for all 12 months of the year. In comparison, Benin, Ghana and Rwanda were 'only' blue water-scarce during their dry seasons. As I have previously discussed, there has been a shift from fishing to agriculture in the LCB. The increasing importance of agriculture to national economies seems to be common in a number of African countries. This is probably due to increased demand for food production as population has increased and climate change is creating a more variable climate to contend with.
Lake Tanganyika
Water Footprint Network recently created water footprint profiles for seven Sub-Saharan countries (2016). The study found that agriculture is the greatest consumer of water in Sub-Saharan Africa and also contributes significantly to all seven national economies of countries in the study, including up to 42% of the GDP in Ethiopia. However, this might suggest that the majority of crops are irrigated, which is not the case as most crops in the region are rain-fed. Of the seven countries in this study; Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali and Mozambique were considered to be blue water-scarce for all 12 months of the year. In comparison, Benin, Ghana and Rwanda were 'only' blue water-scarce during their dry seasons. As I have previously discussed, there has been a shift from fishing to agriculture in the LCB. The increasing importance of agriculture to national economies seems to be common in a number of African countries. This is probably due to increased demand for food production as population has increased and climate change is creating a more variable climate to contend with.
Lake Tanganyika
In 2017, Lake Tanganyika (Figure 2), the second oldest, second deepest and second largest by volume lake in the world was named 'Threatened Lake of 2017' (Cohen 2017). The Lake is located in the Western Branch of the East African Rift System and the main threats include overfishing, deforestation and hydrocarbon exploitation. Scientists began monitoring the surface water temperature of Lake Tanganyika nearly 20 years ago and have since found that the surface waters are warming rapidly. The main implication of warming surface waters is that this water is less likely to mix with cooler, deeper waters, trapping important nutrients at the bottom of the lake. In contrast to Lake Chad, where the main issue is decreasing lake volume and extent, climate change has affected Lake Tanganyika differently, suggesting that even similar climate trends can have very different implications for environmental change in different regions.
Figure 2: Lake Tanganyika.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Burundian fishing in Lake Tanganyika was characterised by the industrial use of steel purse seiners, which are large nets used to trap shoals of pelagic fish (Van der Knaap et al. 2014). Later in the 1990s, artisanal, small-scale fishing emerged and as a result, industrial catches decreased, causing industrial vessels to move their operations southwards. At the end of the 1990s there was no industrial fishing in the north of the Lake and by 2011, industrial fishing also ceased in the south. Population growth in the Lake Tanganyika Basin has increased demand for fish products which make up 25-40% of animal protein intake of populations surrounding the lake (Molsa et al. 1999). However, in 1999 the lake still had an open access fishing regime leaving it exposed to overexploitation. Since then, the Lake Tanganyika management plan has been developed in order to ensure sustainable exploitation (Van der Knaap et al. 2014). In this sense, the management of fishing in Lake Tanganyika could be perceived as more successful than that in Lake Chad where many fishing communities have shifted their focus to farming around the lake.
Water poverty
Moving away from agriculture and looking more generally at water availability on the African continent; The Water Project website describes poverty as an epidemic in Africa and claims that access to clean water is one of the biggest, yet most overlooked causes of poverty across the continent (2018). Although access to clean water is undoubtedly a problem in many regions of Africa, the emotive language on the website seems to be used to encourage donations to the non-profit organisation. In the case of Lake Chad, I think that although there is extensive academic literature describing issues in the region, the 'crisis' is often not publicised in the mainstream media. Although it could be considered common knowledge that there is a lack of access to safe water in Africa, in my opinion, more needs to be done to spread knowledge about threatened lakes such as Chad and Tanganyika which have experienced significant environmental change.
Water poverty
Moving away from agriculture and looking more generally at water availability on the African continent; The Water Project website describes poverty as an epidemic in Africa and claims that access to clean water is one of the biggest, yet most overlooked causes of poverty across the continent (2018). Although access to clean water is undoubtedly a problem in many regions of Africa, the emotive language on the website seems to be used to encourage donations to the non-profit organisation. In the case of Lake Chad, I think that although there is extensive academic literature describing issues in the region, the 'crisis' is often not publicised in the mainstream media. Although it could be considered common knowledge that there is a lack of access to safe water in Africa, in my opinion, more needs to be done to spread knowledge about threatened lakes such as Chad and Tanganyika which have experienced significant environmental change.
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