Tanzania’s climate seems to be shifting dramatically. Reporting from a World Meteorological Organisation meeting, attended by meteorologists and climatologists representing 187 countries, freelance journalist Amanda Gearing writes in Crikey today:
More rainfall seasons have been failing since the 1980s, severely affecting food supplies of people who are mostly subsistence farmers on small farms.
“If (the short rains) fail it means their survival is threatened and this becomes worse when the second rain fails because it means the whole year is a total failure and we’ve had the government intervening more often to give food assistance to the people,” Tanzanian principal agro-meteorologist Deusdedit Kashasha said. “They produce on small farms which may not be enough for a year in a good season so if they don’t even have that small amount produced it becomes pretty dire.”
Australians are meant to know about drought. We’ll see soon enough, I guess.
[Update 26 May 2008: Quite a few commenters have decided to tear this article apart. Some are “the usual suspects”, sure, but others…]