Kenya’s farmers are fighting climate change

Kenyan farmers mix their traditional way of life with modern methods and ensure their self-sufficiency by cultivating local varieties. This is the only way you can survive in the drought.

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In Turkana, the barren north of Kenya, there has been a drought for three years. People have lost almost all their livestock. In the fertile west, farmers wrestle with unpredictable seasons. Nomadic pastoralists in Turkana are having to redefine their millennia-old traditions, and in the west many farmers are switching to native millet varieties that are more drought-tolerant.

In Africa, unlike in Europe, droughts are nothing new. But like everywhere, they last longer and are more extreme. That they are consequences of global warming is undisputed. Combined with the war in Ukraine, they led to skyrocketing food prices and showed how dependent Africa had become on imports.

Ruth Oniang’o, probably Africa’s first female nutrition professor, shows that Africa, or in this case Kenya, is quite capable of feeding itself. The 75-year-old has already convinced more than 100,000 farmers in western Kenya to switch to cultivating local varieties. A trend that is growing internationally.

But native varieties are only part of the solution. The son of a cattle breeder, Billy Kapua, himself a Turkana who has been fighting for the survival of his people for years, shows how a mixture of traditional lifestyles with modern methods could work.

«NZZ format»: Documentary films from the «Neue Zürcher Zeitung»:
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