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Climate change adds to Africa's woes

John Madeley

Climate change has been identified as the latest addition to Africa's difficulties.

EFFORTS TO alleviate poverty in Africa will fail unless urgent action is taken to halt climate change, a group of Western development and environmental agencies has said. Acting collectively as the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, a coalition of 21 agencies says the poorest people on the planet are being hardest hit by global warming as land becomes uncultivable and pests and disease threaten livestock.

In its report, the coalition, which includes ActionAid, Christian Aid, Friends of the Earth, and the New Economics Foundation, says climate change threatens to leave an additional 80-120 million people worldwide hungry and, although, it was one of the main items on the G8 agenda in Scotland last month the G8, says the coalition, did nothing and it is Africa that will pay the price.

It says vital rains are already disrupted with serious consequences for the 70 per cent of Africans who rely on rain-fed farming as opposed to agricultural enterprises serviced by irrigation.

These rain-reliant farmers are overwhelmingly from the poorest families and the fear is that livelihoods built for generations on particular patterns of farming may become unviable.

Sixty-five developing countries, home to more than half the developing world's total population, risk losing about 280 million tonnes of potential cereal production as a result of climate change.

This loss is equivalent to 16 per cent of the agricultural gross domestic product of these countries in 1995. The severest impact could be in sub-Saharan African countries as they are the least able to adapt to climate change or to compensate for it through increased food imports.

Against this backdrop the coalition's report, "Africa: Up in Smoke?" not only calls for rich countries to go beyond their Kyoto carbon emission targets and make even greater cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions but also to make significantly more money available to help poor countries adapt to the world's changing weather pattern.

Two years ago, the former chief executive of the U.K.'s Meteorological Office, John Houghton, said he had no hesitation in describing global warming as a weapon of mass destruction and the present chair of the FAO's Interdepartmental Working Group on Climate, Wulf Killmann, has pointed out that changes in the world's weather will not only affect plant life but will also have an impact on animal health as well. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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