More than five million people in Southern African may require humanitarian assistance during the 2012/13 period, if recent vulnerability assessments across eight countries are anything to go by.

National Vulnerability Assessment Committees’ assessments in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, and Namibia indicate that 5.48 million people may require food and non-food humanitarian assistance during the 2012/13 a significant increase from 3.93 million people in 2011.

Assessments in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa also indicate high levels of vulnerable populations. The expected soaring food prices are likely to increase these numbers.

Across the majority of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) over 200 million people are also at the risk of water shortages.

In the past decade, the ravages of climate change have brought uncertainty in rainfall patterns and because of over-reliance on rain-fed agriculture this has seen a decline in yields and the number of households requiring food aid.

Water scarcity is, therefore, a growing concern with population growth and associated demands for domestic, agricultural, and industrial increasing stress on limited water resources.

Water availability in Southern Africa is variable in both time and spatiality wherein some parts of the region experience scarcity and other parts abundance.

According to rainfall forecast released at the 16th Southern Africa Regional Climate Outlook Forum hosted by Zimbabwe recently, the region will receive normal to above normal rainfall in some areas while others will have a deficit.

“Most of SADC is likely to receive normal to above normal rainfall for the period October to December 2012. However, the south-eastern, northernmost parts of the contiguous SADC, southernmost Madagascar are expected to receive normal to below-normal total rainfall.

“The north-eastern parts of continental SADC and Mauritius are expected to receive above normal rains.

“For the period January to March 2013, the bulk of SADC is expected to receive normal to above-normal rainfall.

“However, the northern and the south-eastern parts of conterminous SADC region are expected to receive normal to below-normal rainfall,” the statement reads.

While the forecast may appear to be good news to farmers in the region, the Forum says the outlook is only relevant to large areas and may not account for national climate variability.

“This outlook is relevant only to seasonal time-scales and relatively large areas and may not fully account for all factors that influence regional and national climate variability, such as local and month-to-month variations (intra-seasonal),” added the statement.

This unpredictability of the weather patterns, the question that arises is what should be the long term plans for the regions to avert the problems caused by the changes in weather patterns that have seen food production in some countries in the region drop.

Carrington Lozane, a lands and water resources expert at Gwebi Agriculture College in Zimbabwe, says the problem in the region is mainly on using the water resources that are in abundance in the region.
“The rainfall patterns have become more and more unpredictable in the recent past due to changes in climate and this calls for proper use of the water that we receive.

“There is very little water harvesting in most households in the region and in cases where water has been collected in dams it has not been properly used to benefit the people,” he said.

Lozane cites countries like Israel that have become food exporters despite having arid conditions as an example.

“You look at such countries and you will realise that every drop of water to them is important, there is very little wastage.

“They have moved away from overhead irrigation to drip irrigation that maximises the use of water received,” he says.

SADC uses less than 10 percent of its dammed water, which he says is improper given food shortages that have been experienced in the past.

At least 70 percent of water sources in SADC are shared across national boundaries and Lozane says an integrated irrigation programme should be devised as a long-term solution.

SADC already has an Integrated Water Resources Management that seeks to provide “a co-ordinated, goal-directed process for controlling the development and use of river, lake, ocean, wetland, and other water assets”.

At a recent launch of a strategic launch on the Save River Basin, Shri RK Gupta the managing director of WAPCOSS, an Indian firm focussing on water and energy projects said it was important for SADC to come up with studies on how they can fully utilise their shared water resources.
The Save River basin is one of the transboundary water basins that include the Congo River Basin in the northern part of SADC, Umbeluzi River Basin in the southeast and the Zambezi River Basin, which covers eight SADC member states.

“Many people in the developing countries do not have access to clean water while at the same time do have reduced agriculture yields due to over-dependence on rain water.

“Now, for the SADC region, given the shared nature of water resources it becomes important that such initiatives and studies be carried out on how all countries can mutually benefit from the exploitation of this important resource,” he said.

Zimbabwe’s Water Resources Management and Development Minister, Samuel Sipepa Nkomo, says it is also important to find partners in the development of identified projects.

“These studies provide us with information we can take to financiers so that they are developed for the benefit of our people.

“What we have lacked in the past is to have such quantitative and qualitative data that shows the feasibility of projects.

“Co-operation between SADC countries will also help ensuring that we benefit in various ways from agriculture, energy and portable water” he says.

Source: southerntimesafrica