This is after a hiatus in delivering this weekly column in 2014 after a good 10 years of talking with you. I am sure many of you have been wondering where I disappeared to. Well, I had taken on another demanding International Nutrition, Food Systems and Dietetics. And we are now living in a world and era where so much has happened and more is chaining every second right before our eyes. Due to environmental soil degradation and of course mostly due to climate change. Whether you believe in it or not, climate change and variability directly affect our agrifood, nutrition, health and development systems.
Let be more specific. Due to climate change, the world is experiencing more rises in temperature, seasonal shifts, heavy rains, floods and unprecedented cold spells. These changes directly affect farmers’ agricultural production and productivity levels. The small holder family farmers are getting less and less yield as the soils are nutritionally depleted. Moreover, they are now left no choice but to buy hybrid Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) seeds which by their very design cannot reproduce. This is a phenomenon and reality very foreign to us in Africa.
