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Comprehensive approach to current food and water crises
2006-02-15 07:00:10
By Editor
The ongoing acute shortage of foodstuffs and electricity are major crippling factors to other well-meaning efforts to combat poverty.
Food is not sufficiently available because of the centuries old inherent weaknesses in rain-fed agriculture systems.
Lack of the tropical rainfall cycles evidently symbolizes that the water cycle is no longer stable owing to merciless man made havoc wreaked on our fragile bionetwork for years.
As a result, water reservoirs for electricity production have dried up, while nobody is quite sure that even the long rains will arrive when expected.
The cost of the ongoing power daily outage is beyond calculation, and ministries will have to cut down on their budgetary votes and transfer them to food relief efforts.
Definitely, in the short term, we seem to be heading down a blind alley. And, that is what management by crisis implies.
However, over the last twenty years or so, various stakeholders had correctly predicted the imminence of such disasters, but nobody paid heed to the alarms.
That is why licences for harvesting forests indiscriminately were until recently legal for log exporters, a practice that destroyed water catchments.
Uncontrolled logging and pastoralism have speeded up erosion and subsequent silting in electric power generating reservoirs.
This menace occurs in a country where laws are well in place to regulate and stop further destruction of ecosytems.
It would be a miserable idea to consider aggressive investment in irrigation agriculture unless surface water flow is inherently stable.
The current drought for instance, has parched the multi-million Bwagala Irrigation Dam in Dodoma. Both crops and animals have perished.
The present crises should remind us about precautionary options available to us, but which have not been put to any effective use.
Water harvesting and the intensive use of alternative energy sources are issues whose implementation at national level has been postponed for too long.
It is only a comprehensive approach to the current crises that will clear the way out.
The war on reducing poverty would become insurmountable if food and water are not sustainably available.
Once we decide to act, all responsible decision makers and managers have got to ensure that a new hopeful era is taking its natural course.
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