Now we call it the Dry Season

Nineteen-year-old Yvette Nicholas hasn’t been farming long, but she knows that things are different today in Haiti than when her parents were young. “The older people taught me that rain started in April. Now people are planting their gardens in June and July because there’s no rain,” Yvette told me last September on a trip to Haiti. I was there to hear from farmers about how they were being affected by climate change.

Exactly a year before that I too was farming, on my family farm in Southwestern Ontario. I knew the agony of watching the sky for rain clouds during a particularly dry time, or praying for sun when the rain wouldn’t let up and hay was lying out in the field. But of course, my situation and Yvette’s are impossible to compare.

When I met Yvette it was well into the year’s second rainy season. Or what is traditionally known as the rainy season, when showers are expected on a near daily basis. With rainfall patterns becoming erratic, farmers in different regions of the country told me of an agricultural calendar in disorder. In 2015 the situation was exacerbated by El Niño. The country was in the midst of the worst drought those I met could remember.

Yvette lives in the community of Kabay, close to Desarmes in central Haiti. Of the 250 families there, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (of which Presbyterian World Service & Development is a member) is working with 150 of them on agriculture and reforestation initiatives. The area is designated one of the most food insecure.

Yvette has been involved with the project for a year. She was provided with seeds and barbed wire to build a fence around her garden to keep animals out. She says without that support she wouldn’t have had the means to plant such a variety of vegetables. And she’s already seeing benefits.

“These peanuts that I planted, there wasn’t much rain and I didn’t get as much as I wanted, but I bought two chickens with what I made from them,” she said. And her dreams for the future? “If it rains, I’m going to work the rest of the land. My dream is to advance, have things to eat and seeds to save. I would buy four chickens instead of two.”

Yvette wasn’t at the climate conference, known as COP21, held in Paris at the end of last year. Nor were the millions of small-scale farmers from around the world whose livelihoods were up for debate.

Much of southern Canada has been insulated from the effects of climate change so far. But we know that in other parts of the world more extreme and unpredictable weather is having an impact on farmers’ ability to grow food for themselves and their communities.

At least 70 per cent of people who suffer hunger globally live in rural areas in developing countries, and most are small-scale farmers.

While attending the climate conference last December I heard many world leaders make statements. The one that struck me was by the Honourable Gaston Browne, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, who quoted Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott from the nearby island of St. Lucia: “… a morning could come in which governments might ask what happened not merely to the forests and the bays, but to a whole people.”

Farmers in the developing world like Yvette are doing what they can to adapt to this new normal. But in a country like Haiti, where it’s estimated that 59 per cent of the population live below the poverty line, they can’t do it alone. Canada’s support for agriculture in the developing world has declined over the past few years. The Foodgrains Bank is encouraging the Canadian government to re-invest in this vital sector.

Back in Haiti, I meet Elanée Joseph who farms in a community up the mountain from Desarmes. He’s made the one-hour trek down to meet with me.
I ask him about any long-range changes he’s observed in the weather and if it’s something his neighbours are discussing.

“People talk about it all the time,” he said. “People say, ‘when I was growing up, it wasn’t like this.’ They’re asking ‘what’s it going to be like for us in the future?’ It used to be the rainy season, now we call it the dry season.” Elanée lost his beans and corn in the last planting season due to the scarcity of rain. He said that some of his neighbours no longer even bother to plant. “When I was a little kid it would rain a lot more. We would eat better.”

Like nearly everywhere in Haiti, Elanée’s community of Wondo has a deforestation problem. It’s estimated that less than four per cent of Haiti’s land area is forested. The mountaintops in the country have been particularly hard-hit. “A long time ago, people started to have less and cut trees down out of need to make charcoal, to eat and send their children to school,” Elanée said.

Reforestation is seen as an important adaptation technique to combat the drought and the increasingly dry conditions. In Elanée’s community alone over 357,000 trees have been planted over the past six years.

“Trees call the rain,” Elanée told me several times. In riverbeds that were dry, a little bit of water is now coming back. “Animals graze and people rest there. There’s cool air.”

At the Paris climate conference I heard an emotional plea from Julianne Hickey, the director of Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand. She spoke of how her home, and the other islands in the Pacific region, had once been a place of abundant food and water, but how this was being threatened by sea level rise, more frequent droughts and an increase in pests.

Through her tears, she quoted Pope Francis: “May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope.” They are wise words for us to remember as we Christians and the Presbyterian Church play our part in addressing climate change and ensuring farmers like Yvette and Elanée have equal opportunity to feed themselves and dream of a bright future.