The char­ity Oxfam says extreme food short­ages in Nepal are to due to cli­mate change. Oxfam says that weather pat­tern changes has effected farm­ers yields in the country.

The poverty fight­ing char­ity calls on gov­ern­ment and NGO’s to pro­vide assis­tance to rural farm­ers dur­ing the upcom­ing plant­ing sea­son by intro­duc­ing new crop vari­eties and assis­tance with irrigation.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press story hosted at Google, writer Binaj Gurubacharya details Oxfam’s statement.

Chang­ing weather pat­terns have dra­mat­i­cally affected crop pro­duc­tion in Nepal, leav­ing farm­ers unable to prop­erly feed them­selves and push­ing them into debt, Oxfam Inter­na­tional said in a report released in Katmandu.

The British aid agency described the sit­u­a­tion as “deeply worrying.”

“Com­mu­ni­ties told us crop pro­duc­tion is roughly half that of pre­vi­ous years … Last year many could only grow enough (food) for one month’s con­sump­tion,” said Oxfam’s Wayne Gum, adding that less pre­cip­i­ta­tion has been fore­cast this win­ter, which will make the sit­u­a­tion worse.

More extreme tem­per­a­tures, drier win­ters and delays in sum­mer mon­soons have all com­pounded the sit­u­a­tion, the report said.

More than 3.4 mil­lion peo­ple in Nepal are esti­mated to require food assis­tance, and food stocks in farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties will last only a few months, it warned.

Oxfam said Nepal will likely suf­fer more fre­quent droughts because of cli­mate change. River lev­els will decline due to the reduced rain­fall and glacial retreat, mak­ing it harder to irri­gate crops and pro­vide water for livestock.

“The pre­dicted impacts of cli­mate change will heighten exist­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, inequal­i­ties and expo­sure to haz­ards,” the report said.

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