Covid-19 not the only problem we face

What you need to know:

  • We expect floods and landslides this year and they will probably happen more frequently in the future, thanks to climate change. COVID 19 could be just an additional problem to food insecurity and climate breakdown.

COVID-19 has shaken the world but it should not be regarded as the only threat to humanity.

Last week the Minister of Agriculture, Vincent Ssempijja, called upon farmers to take advantage of the current rains to plant food crops for the country to be food secure in the days ahead.

His real message, in my view, was that hunger and malnutrition are as bad as COVID 19 and that life is impossible without food.

My attention has been drawn to an article by George Monbiot, a Guardian columnist, published on March 25 2020 in which he pointed out that the world is faced with a much bigger problem than COVID 19.

He wrote, “The planet has multiple morbidities, some of which will make this coronavirus look, by comparison, easy to treat. One, above all others, has come to obsess me in recent years: how will we feed ourselves?”

He spoke about overwhelming evidence of how climate breakdown is likely to affect our food supply while at the same time global population is rapidly growing. He mentioned long droughts, floods, fires and locusts as big barriers to food production in many parts of the world.

Here in Uganda and many other countries in Africa we are already facing incurable crop diseases that are killing our staple food plants. Many scientists link the new crop diseases to climate change. Every passing year global warming intensifies and its effects on farming get more real.

We expect floods and landslides this year and they will probably happen more frequently in the future, thanks to climate change. COVID 19 could be just an additional problem to food insecurity and climate breakdown.

But what practical steps have we taken, as a country, to avert the threat of food insecurity resulting from climate breakdown? It is one thing to tell farmers to plant crops in the ongoing rains and another for a country to develop disease resistant and drought tolerant planting material for its farmers, given the existing challenges. What steps have we made to protect our natural forests and wetlands? What is our soil health strategy?