Esther Tola
Limpopo River Basin Credit: WikiCommons
The Limpopo river basin located in Southern Africa, is covered by South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This river could be an important irrigation tool for surrounding farmers if its water level wasn’t that unpredictable.
Water supply in this 1750 kilometers large water body is unpredictable in terms of duration and amount which is a serious obstacle to agriculture in the regions it covers.
“In the same basin where you’ll have floods of big magnitude, you’ll also at other times suffer terrible droughts that last for years,” Amy Sullivan, leader of the Limpopo river basin’s project explained. These water’s unpredictable flow and unavailability will harm agriculture more than any other activity or industry. Agriculture needs predictable water and it’s less likely to happen in this basin,” Sullivan added.
The head of the Limpopo river basin’s project explained that this instability of the water level in the basin is partly due to weather conditions in the regions the river is going through.
“Various bio physical factors are explaining this situation such as melting ranges or run off in the basin which means the water may not stay where it falls; this is generally caused by soil related factors such as slope.”
In both water overflow and drought cases, farmers are facing productivity problems and can’t make harvest plans according to the weather. This leads to crop loss and then to the absence of profits.
Amy Sullivan says there’s also a human side to the problem: “lack of storage is probably one of the other big reasons why this water related uncertainty affects many farmers. If there were more storage, then they could at least survive through the drought periods with what they had collected when there was water”.
Fortunately, some rivers are not posing this instability problem. It’s the case of the Zambezi River which has its source in Zambia. However, management problems are still hindering its exploitation to agriculture. Cecilia Violet Makota, national coordinator of the Zambian Women in Agriculture said the Zambezi river has a great potential but is not exploited by her country’s government.
“We don’t have the capacity or the equipment, we don’t even have the knowledge to use the potential of the Zambezi river for agriculture,” she explained. It is reserved and preserved for fish but just for local consumption not for exports. If farmers located along the river could only tap water from there, it would be a big progress. But there’s a problem of money at the government level as well as the farmers’ level.”
Irrigation then remains a stumbling stone for farmers even when living along water bodies. Amy Sullivan told IPS about the possible solutions to this problem. She said: “The idea of a mega dam up near the confluence where Zimbabwe and South Africa meet has been raised. This dam could release a constant flow down the main river for environmental flows to keep the river system alive while catching all of the runoff and storing it to be distributed more equitably. But that option is not realistic in the short term and needs time for consideration.
Sullivan added that the Limpopo river basin project is also looking at targeting particular audiences, understanding their conditions as well as possible and then determine which of the available technologies are the most suitable for particular audiences under particular conditions.
What the project is doing is as she put it, using science to map out the relationship between water and poverty.
If solutions envisioned to face the Limpopo river basin’s instability prove to be effective, they could be applied to other similar environments surrounded by farmers struggling with irrigation.
Credit: WikiCommons
