Water stoking wars among users in Africa
Conflicts on who gets access to water have already started in some parts of Africa, the Rome headquartered World Food Programme (WFP) reported in Dar es Salaam yesterday.
The WFP deputy executive director, Ms Sheila Sisulu, told the World Economic Forum on Africa that the water conflicts have started in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa.
While responding to The Citizen in an interview, Ms Sisulu said “the water conflicts are between pastoralists who are seeking water for their animals and farmers who are protecting their crops.”
“In some of areas in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa there are also conflicts, based on water, among pastoralists themselves who need it for their animals,” she added.
The WFP deputy executive director said Africa needed to speak with one voice when it came to looking for solutions to climate change problems, which include scarcity of fresh water.
Ms Sisulu said the WFP was working in collaboration with governments to put in place early warning systems.
“The early warning systems will help avail information that will be useful in warding-off and averting disasters,” she said.
Addressing a session devoted to managing the water-food-energy nexus, the South African minister for Water and Environmental Affairs, Buyelwa Patience Sonjica, said politicians needed to create an environment that will unite Africa around water to avoid such conflicts.
She said scarcity of fresh water caused by climate change was having spill-over effects on food production.
She added that 60 per cent of fresh water in South Africa was being used for irrigation, adding: “We need to introduce technologies on efficient use of water.”
Ms Sonjica said a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has revealed that 50 per cent of crop yields will be reduced by 2020 because of water scarcity.
The IPCC is a global scientific body tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity.
The president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), Mr. Namanga Ngongi, said since Africa depended on rain-fed agriculture it was high time African governments invested in irrigation.
He said this could be done by exploiting the continent’s major rivers, including the Zambezi and the Congo.
Mr. Ngongi said investors were hesitating to engage in agriculture because of weather uncertainties.
Xolani Mkhwanazi, chairman of BHP Billion, a global resources company based in South Africa, said there was need to educate farmers on how best to conserve land.
Source – The Citizen