EcoWorldly

After months of a bitter and violent political dispute, Zimbabwe’s political protagonists have decided to take to the negotiating table.

Besides resolving the country’s longstanding socio-economic problems, the ongoing political talks in Zimbabwe will go a long way to start redressing the damage that has been inflicted onto the environment over the past decade.

A botched government led land reform programme resulted in the unmonitored movement of people and the untoward cutting down of trees and an increase in the poaching of endangered animal species.
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It is Olympics season and every video house in this farming town is full with home fans following the athletics races in Beijing that their local heroes are featuring.

Eldoret is the bread basket of Kenya’s athletics elite and famous runners, including Kipchoge Keino who made history by winning the east African country’s first gold medal in the 1500 meters run at the Mexico City Games.

But the town is also home to Hanna Jeruto, a 24 year old HIV+ mother who exclusively breastfeeds her 4 month old son, Kipruto. Kipruto, however, is HIV negative and when she was delivering at the provincial hospital doctors had advised her not to breastfeed him.

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We spend a lot of time speaking about what we, as the ruling industrialized western nations, should be doing for the planet. And rightfully so. We have singlehandedly managed to send our planet into an environmental spin. With one hand we complain that China and India are putting out more and more in the way of harmful emissions while with the other hand we send them contracts to make everything from our clothes to our cutlery.

So it doesn’t come as a real surprise that we often end up forgetting the little people. Of course, whenever Africa is forced into the category of “little people,” there may just be a greater problem at hand.

Thankfully, despite the lack of attention that anyone in the world seems to be giving them, environmentally, Africa is taking matters into its own hands.

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Watch this space: Africa is fast becoming an important player in cleaner energy sources. If only 0.3% of sunlight falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts can potentially provide all of Europe’s energy needs because of its intensity, according to a report, how about everything else?

How much wind blows from Nouakchott to Natal, and how much of this is ever utilized as an alternative energy source? How much water flowing in the Zambezi is used to power villages in Zambia and Zimbabwe; and how much more of the great Nile waters that flow into the Mediterranean can sustainably be harnessed to run corn mills in Nakuru and cotton ginneries in Jinja and Khartoum or fisheries in Cairo?

And now some bold African should emulate John McCain. He may be better known for his tenacity inside the muddle of US politics than for his expertise on the quest for cleaner energy sources. But many surely gaped at the figures he offered for a battery to power America’s engines in the wake of the oil price burst recently.

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In spite of the sweltering heat, smallholder farmers in this border district of Zimbabwe can cheer about the black-eyed beans. The beans – a new crop in the area - are small, creamy white, with a black mark at the sprouting point, making them easy to recognize.

From the way they cook to the way they sell, black-eyed beans have proved a big hit among the small farmers in this district, traditionally known for growing maize, groundnuts, cotton and sunflowers.

In 2002, USAID’s Linkages for the Economic Advancement of the Disadvantaged (LEAD Program) sub-contracted VeCO, a non-governmental organization, to provide 1,250 farmers with the necessary extension support services, skills and resources to produce both black-eyed beans and Macia sorghum, crops which are drought tolerant. The overall objective was to reduce food insecurity, improve food intake with a new edible crop, and provide a new source of income for poor smallholders in drought prone regions.

Nyarai Njenge, 35, one of the beneficiary farmers, did not know anything about black-eyed beans prior to 2002. But, now, as most of the beneficiary farmers, she knowledgeably recounts the nutritional, income and food security benefits of the crop. Read the rest of this entry »

Many thanks to our friends at ZapRoot for featuring Sam Aola Ooko’s post on Chinese importation of African ivory on their latest show (above). We’re big fans… no one does indepth coverage with a healthy dose of humor better. Keep an eye out for more from ZapRoot on Thursdays: we’re going to start featuring them regularly on the GO Media blog network.

Dr Rene Haller’s is one story of how a man transformed a wasteland corner of Africa into a fledging green paradise that today attracts thousands of tourists from around the world, and may offer lessons for green progress in America on sustainability successes elsewhere.

1957 AD: A young Swiss agronomist goes to Africa, the dark continent, to manage a coffee plantation at the foot of the ice-capped mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest; a few years later, he gets another brief - to produce food - fruit and vegetables - for cement factory workers, many of whom were undernourished, as well as spruce up the area surrounding the site.

1970 AD: Dr Haller starts a unique ecological experiment, attempting to rehabilitate the limestone quarries scarring the Mombasa coastline, including the 7 square kilometer Bamburi cement quarry site from a barren and dusty lunar landscape to an ecological haven.

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Most Zimbabweans -  about 70 per cent of the population - live in rural areas and are engaged in smallholder agriculture. These smallholder farmers, particularly in the country’s low rainfall areas, are extremely food insecure and have little or no access to new technology.

They suffer from low incomes and a generally low standard of living, poor health and nutrition, poor housing and an inability to send children to school. Soil degradation and outdated farming methods have kept rural families trapped in poverty.

Inadequate and unreliable rainfall and the recurrent threat of drought also restrict the potential of rain-fed agriculture, on which the livelihoods of most smallholder farmers depend. In a word, access to water for irrigation is one of the most critical constraints that small farmers face.

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Zimbabwe, which currently faces seemingly intractable social, political and economic problems, has some of the worst environmental indicators in the world with ecosystems either in decline or under severe threat.

Suffice to state, the country did institute some good environmental protection programmes in the decade following the attainment of independence from British rule in 1980, markedly, Zimbabwe has about half of the world’s population of black rhinoceroses, an endangered species. During that period, the government even went as far as adopting a radical policy of shooting poachers on sight in order to protect endangered animal species.

In recent years, however, Zimbabwe has experienced desertification, soil and water pollution, slash and burn agriculture resulting in soil erosion mainly caused by an unplanned land resettlement programme initated by incumbent President Robert Mugabe’s government in 2000.

Yale University’s 2008 environmental performance index (EPI) which ranks 149 countries according to a weighting of carbon and sulfur emissions, water purity and conservation practices, positions Zimbabwe at number 95 thus highlighting the grim state of the environment in the country. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists in South Africa are testing a genetically engineered tobacco plant which detects the presence of nitrogen-dioxide, a marker for landmines, to turn red, in the hope that it may eventually be used to clear mine fields in post-conflict zones around the globe.

The team is part of a joint initiative of University of Stellenbosch and the Danish biotechnology firm, Aresa, which has developed the “RedDetect” bio-sensor technology in a weed called Thales Cress.

The weed changes color from green to autumnal red when it detects nitrogen dioxide leaching from mines buried in the soil.

Because the weed is too small to be seen from a safe distance, the scientists went looking for a more viable alternative, and landed on the tobacco plant, which grows easily in most parts of the world, with a little help from genetic engineering.

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