Diary: Climate impacts in Uganda - Part one

I have just come back from Uganda where I've been talking to farmers and animal herders about the impacts of climate changes on their lives.

Does it have the same impact on everyone? It quickly becomes apparent that the answer is "no".

I find this out early on in a village in Bundibugyo district in western Uganda, in the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains. I'm talking to an elderly gentleman called Mbejuna Lazaro who enumerates the crops he grows - cocoa and coffee, vanilla, matoke, soya beans, sweet potatoes, cassava, maize and groundnuts - and he says he's branching out into bee-keeping.

However, when asked what climate changes he has observed since he began farming in 1965, he looks puzzled and then says "I must refer your question to my wives".

In Uganda, as in most of Africa, women are of course the main farmers. The men may break up the land to sow the seeds, but the women usually plant and do all the work of tending the crops from day to day throughout the growing season.

His elder wife Florence Madamu emerges from the kitchen and immediately puts a different perspective on matters.

"The cassava no longer yields anything, there are flies that eat up the leaves," she says. "Bananas are attacked by mosaic. This area no longer produces beans; we've tried and failed. Sometimes we grow soya beans but they don't do well. The only crop that currently does well is sweet potato; for the cassava there's no hope".

The reason, she says, is climate change. "Because of the current weather changes the yields have completely gone down. All this is a result of long spells of sunshine - the sun is prolonged until the end of September - and whenever it rains, it rains so heavily it destroys all our crops in the fields. You can plant a whole acre or two and come out with nothing".

How does she adapt her farming methods?

She throws her hands up. "We've stopped even adopting seasonal planting, because it's so useless," she says. "Now we just try all the time. We used to plant in March and that'd be it. Now we plant and plant again. We waste a lot of seeds that way, and our time and energy. We regret it so often, why we planted. Then we have to plan to acquire other seeds, and the seeds here are very costly.

"Sometimes you feel like crying. Sometimes you've hired labour and you end up losing all that money for preparing your land".

This is the first in a five-part series, re-published from the Oxfam GB climate change and poverty blog.

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