As 2023 opens, I have been grappling with an irrational sense of optimism.
Why do I feel so positive about the year ahead, when the climate is so poor and there are no real signs of relief anywhere?
Climate change doesn’t end with our New Year celebrations, as Europe was reminded promptly on New Year’s Day with the warmest January 1 since records began.
Russians and Ukrainians are still murdering each other horribly, with the Russian President showing no signs of any cap on how many innocents must fall to his mission to expand his nation.
And our own drought is deep in warnings of worse to come, with food prices already up by 70 per cent in 2022, according to USAID.
Indeed, our vegetable exports and milk deliveries were down in the third quarter of last year, we now learn, just when we most needed boosted incomes and increased food supplies.
Yet life gives us new chances over and over again, and if we now move in hard on our agricultural production and in what we plant, and how, we still have a hope of cushioning ourselves from so many of the global problems that have been touching us.
It’s early yet to think of the planting season as the heat blazes, but with real, new support for farming laid out on the agricultural budget released last Friday, we do have an opportunity to grow more food, if we only seize the chance.
The government has placed emphasis on improving the quality, healthcare and insurance of livestock.
We are promised more inputs, better seeds, and help with the climate-change-driven explosion in our agricultural pests and diseases.
But our success rests on our own ability to make changes.
In 2023, please plant a tree: get a food-bearing, productive one that doesn’t deplete our water supplies, as eucalyptus did, but helps, alongside the best fodder shrubs for livestock, in capturing rainfall deep into the ground boosting our underground water table.
Let us bother with the costs of drip irrigation and solar-powered pumps to feed it, and do the smart thing digging manure or even simple, homemade fertilisers and nitrogen fixers into our land.
Sometimes, it takes some hard knocks to make us change what we are doing, but if we can each seize this moment to genuinely move to that ‘smart agriculture’ the few keep citing endlessly, we can yet turn our ship, and so fast: all for a little soil management, wiser pest control aided by the promised capacity building in our extension officers, and that extra food tree, or three, helping our water retention.
And then we shall, indeed, have a much happier New Year.
The writer is a development communication specialist.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
