Limiting the inescapable consequences of a scorching drought

Feb 20, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The damage being inflicted on our country by this prolonged drought has to be seen to be appreciated. In the countryside, sweltering villages and farmsteads are turning brown as the drought intensifies. Pastures where cattle once grazed on lush green grass are now tindery and ponds which provided water to these animals are now dried holes.
As the battle to channel rapidly depleting fresh water into parched rice fields, soak other crop holdings and partially saturate tinder-dry pastures continues in the face of this searing El Niño-inspired drought now “forecast to last until mid-April”, water conservation in the city and around the country must immediately be made compulsory.
I wish to endorse the statement by President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo that “tough decisions and sacrifices would have to be made and everyone needed to understand completely the importance of conserving water.” Dr. Jagdeo made the statement when he met farmers and others at a national forum at the Red House in Georgetown earlier this week.
Indeed, everyone in the city and villages along the coastland must again be made aware of the fact that water is life and every drop of it is precious, especially at a time when our rivers and conservancies are running dry and rains are not expected in several weeks.
Habitual wasting of water has become part of our culture and tradition but these are serious times and our individual, collective and national psyche must be reprogrammed to ensure water conservation in all of our daily activities where water usage is necessary.
Our entire country is now faced with a very serious situation and we all have our individual roles to play as we seek to limit the inescapable consequences of this scorching drought.
The government, through the Ministry of Agriculture, must be complimented for doing all it can as it desperately seeks to try and lessen the impact of this weather phenomenon on a country not used to natural disasters, but with fresh water stocks diminishing by the day the impact on agriculture is expected to be significant when the losses are counted. So far, the greatest threat is to the rice industry which, under normal circumstances, would have been in an advanced stage of growth and nearing harvest. Fruits and vegetables farms as well as cattle ranches have all been consumed by the unrelenting heat.
President Jagdeo disclosed at the stakeholders’ meeting that the financial fallout from this drought can cost the economy as much as $3B (US$15M). This is an estimate based on the present scenario in the agricultural belt. If the rains do not come as expected, we can expect this figure to increase.
While I wish to commiserate with our government as it seeks to do all it can to alleviate the suffering of rice and other farmers as well as ranchers, we must accept that there is a limit to what can be done. On the other hand, the prediction by a non-governmental organization (NGO) of a small decline of five per cent in rice production this year is wishful thinking and is out of sync with the realities on the ground. The ongoing disruption in global weather patterns in recent years can nullify the accuracy of any such forecasts. Such predictions can also lead to complacency at the official and farmers’ levels.
While I am hopeful for a full recovery of our agriculture sector, one must be guarded against forecasting as the conditions which traditionally guided such undertakings are no longer static and predictable. Meteorologists have been at pains to forecast accurate or near accurate weather in the recent past as many traditional models have become partially or totally obsolete. Our local meteorological office which has previously predicted El Niño to end in March, 2010 has since revised the exit of this distressing and ruinous phenomenon by around two weeks to mid-April.
The President, at this week’s meeting with stakeholders, also stated that no one can clearly predict when the rains are going to come.
There is no permanence to this new timeline and it can again be revised to coincide with the beginning of the traditional May/ June wet period.
We have grown accustomed to experiencing massive floods after such droughts and this alone can spell a continuation of disasters for our agricultural sector, the rice industry included.
Over the past several months, Guyana has been recording lower-than-average levels of rainfall and this has put a strain on the water resources in the rivers and conservancies. The ‘Land of Many Waters’ is fast drying-up and rain-fed rivers which meander into the highland, interior regions and which normally deposit fresh water supplies along the coast feeding the agricultural belt, have temporarily lost their water sources as the entire country experiences this extended drought.
In Georgetown, our capital city of an estimated population of 250,000, about 50 per cent of the water consumed daily is sourced from the Mahaica River, channeled through the Lamaha Canal and fed to the Shelter Belt where it is treated and pumped to various sections of the city. The remainder comes from ground sources.
The present water level in the Lamaha Canal is dangerously low despite some amount of pumping being done at its Mahaica River source.
Among the many recent initiatives undertaken by both the government and farmers to save sections of cultivated rice and sugar plots which still remain green was to irrigate fields by pumping fresh water from rivers and creeks into irrigation canals.
This collective, gargantuan undertaking around the country is costing government at least $3M per day. This amount does not include the cost being incurred by individual private farmers.
Pumping from the Mahaica River is reported to be continuing despite the intrusion of salt water from the sea which kept moving inland and in some instances breaching infrastructures meant to keep it away from dried-up canals in farming communities. Salt water penetration can devastate lands used for the cultivation of rice and other crops and these lands can return to normal production only after an extended period of as much as a few years of flooding, fallowing and ‘washing’ with fresh water.
While it is a historically and scientifically known fact that properly irrigated rice fields is one critical factor which aids in the improvement of paddy yield and quality, the fact is that many such fields around the country are in dire need of water and farmers are battling against tremendous odds to save their crops. Poorly irrigated fields, especially at the bearing stage, will result in a reduction in yield and quality.
It would appear that climate change is here and whether it is being induced by global warming, or cooling of the planet as some are wont to believe, it is real and we have to radically adjust our systems and lifestyles to cope with it.
This drought may be the forerunner of what may yet be the worst to come with changing climatic conditions.
We are not alone in this battle with nature. Other countries in the region and further afield are facing an uphill task as the hot weather dries sections of their economies.
Neighbouring Venezuela, also in the throes of a very serious drought reportedly also caused by El Niño, has enacted certain punitive measures to conserve on water, including, not laughingly, spending less time in the shower. Singing in the shower, at least temporarily, has been outlawed in Venezuela where neighbours have been encouraged to pry on those flouting this new measure and report such violations to the authorities.
Trinidad and Jamaica as well as the smaller Caribbean islands have also been severely affected and drastic measures have also been adopted in those countries to moderate the damage resulting from this global climatic occurrence which usually effect widespread damage.
The great Amazon rainforest, regarded along with the rainforests of the Congo and Indonesia as the lungs of the planet for their collective conversion of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into clean oxygen, is today experiencing a similar devastating drought. However, the accelerated destruction of that 1.5 billion acres rainforest which spans nine countries in the northern part of South America has long been believed to be one of the driving forces behind atmospheric and climatic changes and ultimately global warming.
It has been estimated that as much as 20 per cent or 300 million acres of once standing rainforests in the Amazon has disappeared through indiscriminate deforestation by loggers, miners and ranchers. At the present rate of destruction by man, it is further estimated that this entire rainforest will be gone in the next 75 years.
Approximately 60 per cent of the Amazon rainforest is located in Brazil, 13 per cent in Peru and the remaining 27 per cent shared among Guyana, Venezuela, Suriname, French Guiana, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia.
Even in faraway regions such as the Philippines and Australia, thousands of acres of crops including rice have been wiped out by El Niño.
In the Philippino province of Cagayan, a “state of calamity” has been declared “to mitigate the impact of the El Niño phenomenon on its farmlands.”
In addition to the physical devastation of crops and livestock, droughts can have serious health, social, economic, environmental and even political impacts with far-reaching consequences.
Water is one of the most essential commodities, second to the air we breathe, for our survival and where it is not available, as in a drought, conditions can become difficult and even dangerous very quickly.
The present catastrophic changes in weather patterns should be enough to send our policymakers scampering back to the drawing board to determine the best possible ways to counter future El Niños as well as flooding.
In Guyana, we consistently face a situation whereby at times we have too much fresh water which floods our productive lands and homesteads while in times of prolonged droughts like now, we do not have enough water on which we can draw to save our crops and pasturage. Our conservancies seem to have failed us again this time around or, perhaps, we have failed ourselves by not effectively managing our fresh water resources, albeit with limited resources.
Most of our drainage and irrigation systems and conservancies were conceived and constructed many years ago in colonial times when sugar was the main crop. The entire design of this collective infrastructure in many areas along the coast may now be in need of a total rethink and revamp. Ours will continue to be an economy reliant on agriculture and for this reason alone we need to invite experts here to evaluate and help us to improve these vital infrastructure lest we find recurrences of the same problems as global warming intensifies.
One of the options which we may have at our disposal and which needs careful examination so that we are better able to deal with future droughts is rotational (recirculation) irrigation as is done in many Asian rice producing countries with similar weather patterns as ours. Rotational irrigation has also been found to favour plant growth and reduces fertilizer application, as revealed in a recent study of the Taiwan rice industry by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
We have to find an economically viable way of storing and rotating water especially in the rice and sugar sectors as part of our list of measures to counter global warming which is expected to get worse in the coming years.
As I have proffered in previous letters, our rice varietal improvement programme must incorporate the experimentation of new varieties with longer roots that can reach deeper into moist soil in abnormally dry weather conditions as we are now experiencing.
We cannot allow our economy to be subjected to constant battering by floods and droughts. We have to find a way to deal with both phenomena in a more permanent way.
If we do not have the technical resources available locally, there are institutions such as the IWMI and the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) to provide us with expert advice. Agencies such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as well as friendly countries in Europe, Middle East and Asia can be tapped for funding for projects which will assist us in mitigating against the life-changing effects of droughts and flooding.
For a country as big as ours with an abundance of fresh water sources, rivers, creeks, canals and streams, our coastland where we live and farm should not be subjected to the difficulties we now face.
Even as we count our losses and try to survive this difficult period we must find the time to thank President Jagdeo, ubiquitous Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud and other central and regional government functionaries for the concern shown and the leadership they have been providing as our country battle this ongoing disaster.
This is surely a strong collective indication of a will to do better for the general good of our country. Can we do it? Yes, we can!
Mahadeo Panchu

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