A few years ago, a group of us went to parts of Gujarat to find out how climate change was affecting small farmers there. In villages in eastern Gujarat, they told us that the winter maize crop had been getting hit. Because winters have been getting warmer, the dew (os) had lessened, or stopped entirely for the last few years. For those without wells – most of them poor households – dew is the only source of moisture for their crop. With less or no dew falling, either their crop dried up, or they were being forced to leave their lands fallow. Maize is a very important source of nutrition for poor households in these and nearby regions. In other villages in north Gujarat, we were told of other effects: that nowadays, it is not raining when it should, or it rains when it should not, that lots of rain happens in little time, people are facing new illnesses and cattle are falling sick more often, pest attacks have gone up, etc.
The people’s response there to all this was interesting. |