Eastern, Southern Africa experience flood-caused crop damage

While recent attention on climate change has focused on the trend of drier seasons in Africa and their effects on agriculture and many other aspects of life, in recent months many in Eastern and Southern Africa have had to contend with the effects of torrential floods. The floods have done significant crop and erosion damage in parts of Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Zambia.

A BBC report said tens of thousands of families in northern Burundi had their crops ruined by intense rains. Fields which at this time of year should be rich with sweet potato, rice and maize have been turned into swamps. The recent floods have devastated 80% of last November's crop. The next harvest is not due until June. This signals a looming food crisis in a country still battling to recover from 13 years of civil war.

The country's lush green hills stand in stark oppposition to the reality that as many as one in four Burundians out of the population of 7 million may soon not have enough to eat. But the the stunning hills make soil erosion a particular problem when the rainfall is sudden and intense.

Stephanie Savariaud of the UN World Food Programme says, "You need more than food aid to get a country back on its feet after 13 years of civil war, and it will take other people to help Burundi recover. But you can't get economic growth or sustain peace on an empty stomach."

There is now a push to get African governments to take responsibility for their own humanitarian crises, than to perennially beg for outside assistance. Ministers have rightly been accused of mishandling food stocks around the region. But Burundi is so poor it simply does not have any reserves to draw upon.

While climate change may be changing the patterns and frequency of calamitous natural events, the human ability to cope with the changes is lagging sadly behind. Despite all the talk about reducing activities in industrialized nations that are thought to most contribute to climate change, the committment to them and what effects that will have remain uncertain. It therefore seems a safe bet that droughts and floods will continue to rage with devastating effect in Africa until Africans get serious about adopting coping mechanisms to at least reduce their effects. Many of these are known, and not all are beyond the means of countries that are described as the poorest in the world. Very often mis-allocation of resources and lack of will and committment to address known problems with available resources are as much of a reason for natural events having a worse effect in Africa than elsewhere.