Africa

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Agricultural mechanisation can reduce work burden, increase prosperity and enhance diets. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

By External Source
Dec 29 2020 (IPS)

Agricultural mechanisation is on the rise in Africa, replacing hand hoes and animal traction across the continent. While around 80-90% of all farmers still rely on manual labour or draught animals, this is changing, driven by falling machinery prices and rising rural wages. During the last couple of years, tractor sales grew by around 10% annually.

A look at the history of today’s mechanised countries shows that a widespread replacement of manual labour with mechanical power can have large socioeconomic and environmental implications.

In our latest study, we explored how mechanisation could change the face of African farming and rural areas. It’s important to ensure that mechanisation can be accompanied by policies that harness its potential and minimise potential negative effects.

Mechanisation can reduce work burden, raise prosperity and enhance diets. But there are also challenges such as soil erosion, deforestation and women’s access to tractor services. Identifying these challenges provides an opportunity to prevent them from arising, through agricultural research and appropriate policy action

To understand the effects of mechanisation, we collected data in 87 villages in Benin, Nigeria, Mali and Kenya. These villages were chosen as examples because they’ve already experience mechanisation. We conducted 129 focus group discussions with 1,330 rural residents. They identified various ways that mechanisation affected farming, rural life and nature.

The insights from the 87 villages revealed the great transformative power of agricultural mechanisation. Mechanisation can reduce work burden, raise prosperity and enhance diets. But there are also challenges such as soil erosion, deforestation and women’s access to tractor services.

Identifying these challenges provides an opportunity to prevent them from arising, through agricultural research and appropriate policy action.

 

Consequences of using tractors

Our study focused on the use of tractors for land preparation as this was the most commonly mechanised activity across the case study countries. Preparing land is labour-intensive and is usually the first activity to be mechanised. Participants were asked to mention positive changes directly related to mechanisation. They then identified subsequent changes. What they told us formed a picture of a chain of impacts.

Overall, we found that mechanisation has more far-reaching agronomic, environmental and socioeconomic consequences than commonly assumed.

On the upside, it frees men, women and children from heavy agricultural work. This gives them time to do other things, like running non-agricultural businesses or going to school.

Mechanisation also helps to overcome labour bottlenecks, a well-recognised constraint to rain-fed agriculture. This allows people to cultivate more land, as 61% of the respondents reported. In Mali, one farmer said:

Many farmers have land that they can’t farm, it is let as fallow. With the tractor, the land is farmed and produces volumes of crops beyond the consumption capacity of the household.

Using a tractor also improves the timeliness of agriculture. Farm activities can be completed at the optimal time, which raises yields. This was noted by 72% of all respondents. The overall increase in agricultural production contributes to enhancing food security and reducing poverty.

On the other hand, 58% of the respondents noted that mechanisation can undermine long-term soil fertility, in particular when the disc plough is used. They said the use of heavy tractors can trigger soil erosion and compaction. In Benin, one farmer reported:

Tractor increases soil compaction given the weight… This is followed by the problems of flooding and erosion, which considerably reduce fertility and consequently the yield.

Another concern is deforestation. Cultivating more land can mean losing trees on a large scale. Even clearing trees from fields so that tractors can operate there reduces biodiversity and makes the soil more susceptible to rain and wind erosion. In Mali, one farmer reported:

Trees are destroyed to enable the tractor to work comfortably. This exposes the land.

Some effects are highly context-specific, such as employment effects. In Benin, where mechanisation was associated with area expansion, this greatly raised the demand for labour to carry out the non-mechanised parts of farming. Here, no unemployment effects were reported, confirming a pattern from countries such as Zambia.

In Nigeria, where fewer farmers expanded land sizes, 48% reported job losses. Employment effects can be non-direct as well. Many rural residents reported that the rising prosperity of farmers due to mechanisation leads to positive spill-overs to non-farmers such as blacksmiths, carpenters and hairdressers.

As with most new technologies, mechanisation has benefits for some but not for others. While other studies have found that smallholder farmers have less access to mechanisation, this was only mentioned by 15% of the respondents. But mechanisation is less accessible for women compared to men. This was reported in all countries but it varied: 71% of women in Mali shared this perception but only 5% of women in Benin.

 

Managing the consequences

Most negative effects are not inherent to farm mechanisation and can be addressed with complementary agronomic practices and adequate policies. Soil erosion can be reduced with conservation agriculture, which protects soils by replacing heavy disc ploughs with less soil-disturbing rippers or direct seeders and continuous soil covers.

Deforestation can be minimised with careful land-use planning, for example, by protecting land that is particularly valuable for climate change mitigation, biodiversity, and wildlife.

Entry points to ensure that women benefit from mechanisation may comprise campaigns showing women role models using tractors, supporting women’s mechanisation groups and developing knowledge and skills.

With the right policies, countries can harness the potential of mechanisation and manage challenges. This can ensure that mechanisation contributes to an African agricultural transformation that is sustainable from a social, economic, and environmental perspective.

Thomas Daum, Agricultural Economist, University of Hohenheim

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Tractors Can Change Farming in Good Ways and Bad: Lessons from Four African Countries appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Miscarriage is the most common reason for losing a baby during pregnancy. It happens for up to 15% of women who knew they were pregnant.. Credit: UNSPLASH/Claudia Wolff.

By Ifeanyi Nsofor
ABUJA, Dec 29 2020 (IPS)

Recently, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, wrote a piece sharing about her miscarriage. I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second, she wrote. She is part of a growing list of celebrities who have publicly shared their experiences with miscarriages.

Model Chrissy Teigen also recently shared the pain she and her husband singer John Legend felt about the miscarriage of her third pregnancy. While celebrities may make news for sharing their personal grief, they are not alone in experiencing it.

Miscarriage is the most common reason for losing a baby during pregnancy. It happens for up to 15% of women who knew they were pregnant. According to World Health Organization, a baby who dies before 28 weeks of pregnancy is referred to as a miscarriage, and babies who die at or after 28 weeks are stillbirths. Most miscarriages are due to chromosomal anomalies. The risk of miscarriages increases with age.

No matter when it occurs, however, nor how old the pregnant woman is, a miscarriage exerts huge mental stress on the women and their families.

"This is one part many women who have gone through loss are never asked or speak of. Reading hers, I remember mine. We all just learn to live with it. If I will ever write a book, I will of mine"

When I tweeted about Markle’s piece,  Abuja-based Martha Ngodoo responded to my tweet – “This is one part many women who have gone through loss are never asked or speak of. Reading hers, I remember mine. We all just learn to live with it. If I will ever write a book, I will of mine”.

After reading Ngodoo’s tweet, I was compelled to reach out and hear her story. She said she experienced both miscarriage and stillbirth. She is now a 40-year-old mother of three.

Her first experience was a stillbirth that happened 16 years ago during her first pregnancy when she was 24 years old. This was a case of a poorly managed preeclampsia (high blood pressure in pregnancy). She went into labor and was rushed to the hospital. She was in labour for 72 hours. The medical team tried to induce labour using oxytocin but was unsuccessful. Her dead baby was eventually pulled out by hand in an assisted delivery.

Her second experience was a miscarriage which happened five years after. She was aged 29 years then and the miscarriage took place at her twenty-second week in pregnancy. She had a fever during this pregnancy. One night, she woke up with the urge to urinate. When she attempted, her baby came out in bits. She was then rushed to the hospital and the baby was completely expelled. It was a horrible experience, she said.

Both experiences made Ngodoo wonder what she had done to deserve such pain, twice. Though her husband was very supportive, she was worried about giving him dead babies from her pregnancies. Some cultural beliefs made this more difficult. Her husband suggested they move into his parent’s home so she could get additional support. However, this turned out to be very unhelpful. For instance, her father-in-law wanted her to continue life as if nothing happened after the stillbirth.

Ngodoo is stronger now and after many years and three successful pregnancies, she is able to talk about her experiences without feeling sad. When I asked her what she recommended for helping women deal with the pain of miscarriages and stillbirth, she shared three suggestions.

First, don’t tell a woman that it is “okay” when she loses a pregnancy and dismiss what she’s been through. Women undergo physical and psychological changes during pregnancy. They develop deep attachments to their unborn babies and losing one is painful. It is okay for a woman who has lost a pregnancy not to feel okay.

Fourteen years after, Ngodoo still wonders what her daughter would be like now if the pregnancy did not end in a stillbirth.  She still does not know where her daughter was buried. These are thought that still plague her mind, even though she is not as devastated as she once was. She has learnt that talking about such experiences allows victims to exhale and then allow the healing process to begin.

Second, women that lose pregnancies need mental health support. Ngodoo wants more women to receive the kind of mental health support that would enable them to speak about their experiences.  A way to achieve this is through training counsellors to lead support groups for victims.

These support groups could be at communities, health facilities or embedded within professional associations. There are lessons from the UK-based Miscarriage Association. The association has a network of support volunteers, who have been through the experience of pregnancy loss themselves and can offer real understanding and a listening ear. This is done physically or virtually, through Zoom meetings.

Third, families of victims of miscarriage should be safe havens, especially when others may not have even known about the pregnancy, let alone the loss. Sadly, this is not always the case.

Ngodoo lived with her in-laws (in the family house) after her wedding. She feels her in-laws should have understood her loss better and not attempted to get her to resume normal activities immediately. She wishes visitors to the house wouldn’t have told her that she should carry on with her life because she is not the first woman to lose a pregnancy.

Ngodoo is now a mother to a daughter and two sons. Her daughter is 7 years old and her sons are 13 years and 10 years respectively. She describes her two sons as rainbow babies – born immediately after miscarriages. They are the sunshine that we are blessed with after a loss, she said.

With support, women can begin to heal after miscarriage. When women feel strong enough to share their miscarriage stories, it inspires others. The Duchess of Sussex is inspiring women by sharing her story. This should be the norm.

 

Dr. Ifeanyi McWilliams Nsofor is a graduate of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He is a Senior New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University. Ifeanyi is the Director Policy and Advocacy at Nigeria Health Watch.

The post Women Need Support and Understanding after Miscarriage appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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The main plant of the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant has a capacity of 11,000 megawatts, to which 233 more megawatts are added from the secondary plant. The complex cost twice the initial budget, equivalent to more than 10 billion dollars when it was built. It also faces difficulties such as the delay in the construction of the transmission line that will carry energy to the southeast of Brazil, inefficiency in generation and higher than expected social and environmental costs. CREDIT: Marcos Corrêa/PR-Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 28 2020 (IPS)

“We are no longer familiar with the Xingú River,” whose waters govern “our way of life, our income, our food and our navigation,” lamented Bel Juruna, a young indigenous leader from Brazil´s Amazon rainforest.

“The water is no longer at its normal, natural level, it is controlled by the floodgates,” she explained. The giant floodgates are managed by Norte Energia, a public-private consortium that owns the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant whose interest is using the river flow for profit.

Built between the middle and lower sections of the Xingú River, in the eastern Amazon, Belo Monte takes advantage of a 130-kilometre U-shaped curve in the river, called the Volta Grande."For the Juruna people, the impact is not only on food, but there has also been a heavy impact on our culture, which is fishing, taking care of the river that offers food, income and navigation to go to the cities, visit neighbouring communities and have fun. It is what brings joy to our lives." -- Bel Juruna

A 20-km artificial channel diverts most of the flow, in a shortcut that connects to the end of the curve, at an 87-metre waterfall. The shortcut kept the Volta Grande – where there are 25 communities, including two legally protected indigenous territories – from flooding.

The new project replaced the initial idea dating to the 1970s – which would have created a conventional 1,225-square-kilometre reservoir that would have submerged the entire Volta Grande – with two smaller reservoirs totalling 478 square kilometres. The first retains water before the curve and diverts it to the channel that forms the reservoir that feeds the main power plant, which produces 11,000 megawatts of electricity.

The second dam, with a plant that generates up to 233 megawatts, holds the floodgates that release water into the Volta Grande, which almost dried up, bringing other types of impacts for the riverbank population.

The Belo Monte complex, with the third largest power plant in the world, is planned to generate just 4,571 megawatts of firm energy on average.

This low level of productivity, of only 40 percent of installed capacity, is explained by the fact that it is a run-of-river plant whose flow varies from more than 20,000 cubic metres per second in the rainy season – which lasts a few months in the first half of the year – to less than 1,000 metres per second in some of the driest months.

The waters of the river, divided between its natural course and the channel, proved to be inefficient when it came to maintaining the level of electricity generation intended by Norte Energia and the energy authorities and at the same time meeting the vital needs of the people of the Volta Grande.

“We no longer know how to navigate the Xingú River, which channels to pass through, because Belo Monte closes and opens the floodgates whenever it wants to,” said Bel, a member of the indigenous people known as Juruna, who call themselves Yudjá, which means “the indigenous people of the river.”

A group of workers looked like ants given the size of the site, in 2015, during the construction of the main plant of the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant, when the machines and turbines were installed to generate 11,000 megawatts of electricity. The plant produces only 40 percent of its installed capacity and could further limit its productivity in the face of the deforestation of the Xingú River basin, which covers some 531,000 square kilometres. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The Xingú, one of the largest Amazon tributaries, 1,815 kilometres in length, is particularly rough in its middle section, with many visible and submerged rocks, islands and islets, and both deep and shallow channels. Navigation is dangerous and requires practical knowledge and familiarity, which have been thrown into chaos by the low water levels and the changes in the natural low and high-water cycles.

“We want enough water to flood the ‘igapós’ (blackwater swamp forests seasonally inundated with freshwater) where fish and turtles can breed and feed during the winter, to fatten up and maintain their weight in the summer,” demanded Bel, who took her ethnic group’s name as her surname, a common custom among indigenous people in Brazil.

Fish and the yellow-spotted river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis), a species of freshwater turtle abundant in the Amazon, are important sources of protein for the people of the Volta Grande, especially the Juruna people, fisherpersons and people who work on boats.

“But it is life itself that is at risk, not just us indigenous people; it is nature that is deprived of the water cycle – the trees, the fish and other animals,” Bel told IPS in a Whatsapp dialogue from her village, Miratu, on the left bank of the Volta Grande.

The struggle of the Juruna people, which they say they are waging for humanity as a whole, was given a boost thanks to a new assessment by the government’s environmental agency, IBAMA, in December 2019.

The agency acknowledged that the scant water released by the hydroelectric plant does not ensure “the reproduction of life” in the Volta Grande ecosystem or “the survival of the local population.”

A chicken coop in the Miratu village, inhabited by Juruna indigenous people, was flooded along with other buildings when the Norte Energia company, owner of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, released excess water into the Volta Grande section of the Xingú River. “Today the floodgates control the flow,” rather than the natural cycles of the river, explains indigenous leader Bel Juruna. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

For that reason, IBAMA wants to increase the water in the “reduced flow section”, where it is about 20 percent of the previous normal flow as outlined in the so-called “consensus hydrograph”, which defines the monthly flows in the river’s natural channel, based on what was considered necessary to keep the ecosystem alive in 2009.

Citing data analysed since 2015, when Belo Monte filled its reservoirs, Ibama technicians pointed to the need for a better distribution of water between the production of electricity and the sustenance of life.

Ibama’s environmental analysts recommended a provisional hydrograph for this year with a major increase in volume for the Volta Grande in the period from January to May, especially in February (from 1,600 to 10,900 cubic metres per second), March (from 4,000 to 14,200 m3/s) and April (from 8,000 to 13,400 m3/s).

For the future, Norte Energia is to present studies to create a definitive hydrograph.

But the top officials in IBAMA delayed the proposed measures, and after that the company challenged them in court. It lost in the first and second instance and failed to comply with the demands in force in October and November.

The attorney general’s office decided to intervene and ordered IBAMA to draft sanctions against Norte Energía for non-compliance with the provisional hydrograph, the flows required for 2021 to enforce the precautionary principle, and measures to ensure that the company carried out the complementary studies to create the long-term hydrograph.

A strong water flow in the first months of the year and “for at least three months” is necessary for fish and turtles to be able to breed and feed, said Juarez Pezzuti, a professor of biology at the Federal University of Pará who is an expert on turtles.

Bel Juruna is a leader of the Miratu village, belonging to the Juruna people, in the Volta Grande of the Xingú River in the eastern part of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. The young woman protests the changes in the river that have disrupted the life of the riverbank communities since the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant was built. And ironically the plant has begun to show that it is energy inefficient. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“Increasing the flow only in April is not a solution. It is essential to have a volume of water that floods extensive forest areas, to the necessary level and at the proper time, for example, for the larvae to become fry and for the food chain to develop normally,” he explained to IPS by phone from Ananindeua, where he lives, in the Amazonian state of Pará.

For life along the Xingú River, more serious than severe droughts in the dry season, or “summer” in the Amazon, is “a low level of rainfall in the winter,” he said.

The battle is facing a crucial moment, because the actions taken by IBAMA – unexpected under the far-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which has worked against environmentalism – have been opposed by the power industry’s regulatory agency and by the Ministry of Mines and Energy, which claim that modifying the hydrograph would cause energy insecurity and higher costs for consumers.

Pezzuti believes that whatever the outcome of this dispute, Belo Monte is doomed to face increasing difficulties in terms of economic viability due to the worsening of droughts in the Xingú basin caused by climate change and intense deforestation upstream.

The crisis of 2016, when the Juruna indigenous people complained that there were fewer and fewer fish and that they were “skinny” due to the drought caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon, was a warning for the future, he said.

Since the approval of the mega hydroelectric project in 2009, numerous critics, including environmental authorities, indigenous people, university researchers and energy experts, have warned about the risks of the business itself, in addition to the social and environmental damage.

The project, which was inaugurated on Nov. 27, 2019, once the 18 generating units of the main plant were completed, has been highly praised for the innovative channel. But it turned out to be a deceptive solution, both for the company and for the affected population, which has suffered irreversible damage.

“For the Juruna people, the impact is not only on food, but there has also been a heavy impact on our culture, which is fishing, taking care of the river that offers food, income and navigation to go to the cities, visit neighbouring communities and have fun. It is what brings joy to our lives,” said Bel Juruna.

Related Articles

• Indigenous People in Brazil’s Amazon – Crushed by the Belo Monte Dam?
• Belo Monte Dam Marks a Before and After for Energy Projects in Brazil
• Fishing Families Left High and Dry by Amazon Dams

The post Belo Monte Dam: Electricity or Life in Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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