Pres­i­dent of the Soci­ety of Land­scape Archi­tects of Nige­ria, Niyi Kehinde, ana­lyzes the effects of cli­mate change on African food pro­duc­tion. Kehinde observes that a cou­ple of coun­tries have already expe­ri­enced a decrease of rain­fall that is attrib­uted to the cli­mate change the­ory. We found Kenhinde’s analy­sis at All Africa.

The top­i­cal issue now is the alarm raised on food short­age. Africa indeed is in trou­ble. Africa has been a con­ti­nent of drought in parts for decades. Cli­mate change may in fact be the last straw that will break the camels back. This is so because food sup­ple­ment from other lands may not be read­ily avail­able any more due to global short­age. Can Africa indeed sur­vive the onslaught of global food short­age and global warm­ing. Here is the answer.

“Because of its poverty, its depen­dence on locally grown food, recur­rent droughts and floods, the civil unrest and polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity of failed states and dis­eases like malaria and AIDS pan­demic, parts of Africa are in cri­sis or live on the edge of cri­sis. Global warm­ing will make cop­ing with these prob­lems worse in some cases much worse”(EEN)

Since Africa largely depends on rain fed agri­cul­ture for her exis­tence, any dis­rup­tion in the amount of rain­fall avail­able to Africa will def­i­nitely spell doom.

The real­ity though scary, is that global warm­ing (cli­mate change) has been pro­jected to reduce rain­fall in even areas now known as water-scare envi­ron­ment by between 5% — 20%.

Coun­tries like Niger, Chad, Sudan, Burk­ina Faso are def­i­nitely endan­gered already. The sit­u­a­tion will be exac­er­bated if fur­ther reduc­tion in these coun­tries are experienced.

Coun­tries like Nige­ria, Cameroon, Ghana are already bear­ing a lot of bur­den on behalf of the sub-Saharan coun­tries. This writer believes that until a coun­try like Nige­ria includes Chad, Niger, Burk­ina Faso in her food bud­get and pro­duc­tion, she (Nige­ria) will con­tinue to expe­ri­ence the hunger –induced influx of cit­i­zens of the named coun­tries in to Nige­ria. Now that food scarcity is pre­dicted for the next decades, how many of these ‘aliens’ will Nige­ria sup­port. The Xeno­pho­bia going on in South Africa has to do with the mat­ter of the stom­ach. South Africans believe that for­eign­ers espe­cially Zim­bab­weans who flee their coun­try to avoid hunger are dis­lo­cat­ing them from their own liveli­hood. Africa has been described as a top notcher among the failed states of the world.

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