Climate shifts reduces farmers' productivity #sierraleone

Changing weather patterns as a result of climate
change are making life much harder for farmers
in war-ravaged Sierra Leone, a country already
battling with poverty, a recent study says.
With 70 percent of people depending on farming
for a living, erratic rainfall leading to decreasing
yields is forcing many to find other ways of
making money, sometimes creating additional
problems, according to the study's authors.
"This is about life and death, so there is need for
them to come up with something that will keep
them going," study leader Kabba Santigie
Bangura of the University of Sierra Leone's
department of geography said at the Mary
Kingsley Zochonis Lecture at King's College this
week.
Farmers in Sierra Leone rely on a traditional
pattern of a six-month rainy season followed by a
six-month dry season to know when to plant
their crops.
But 76 percent of the 250 farmers who
participated in the study said those weather
patterns are seriously changing. Bangura and his
co-authors recount that farmers noticed that now
"rainfall does not follow any regular pattern."
Adding to the problem, Bangura said there is a
lack of reliable meteorological information to help
farmers track and plan for the changes.
A decade of civil war in the 1990s similarly left
Bangura and his co-authors without any historical
weather data or archives to use as a baseline for
their research, which was published in the
International Journal of Sustainable Development
& World Ecology.
The lack of meteorological data means farmers
have a hard time knowing when is the best time
to plant crops, Bangura said. With little money to
replace seeds if they get it wrong, a lot rides on
their guess.
If they plant right before a dry period, they may
not have enough water to keep crops alive and
prospering. Alternatively, a flood could keep them
from planting at all, or make them lose their crop
shortly after they do.
This uncertainty about the best time to plant has
had a significant impact on farmers' yields, the
study says. Bangur told the story of a 54-year-
old man from the coastal settlement of Rokel who
watched as the yields from his family's swampy
farm dwindled from 100 bushels of rice a year in
his father's time, to just 40 bushels now.