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Women farmers battle climate change and drought
Little men: Children of Siar village play around their neighborhood
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Little men: Children of Siar village play around their neighborhood.
Erratic weather patterns and changes in the seasons make life harder in Papua New Guinea as the country faces its worst drought in 17 years.
The village of Siar, with traditional thatched dwellings nestled among palms, fruit trees and wild flowering hibiscus on the beautiful north coast of Papua New Guinea, is a world away from the gritty streets of the main provincial town of Madang, which is only 15 minutes south by road.
The more than 2,000 indigenous Bell people who reside in Siar have a foot in both worlds. While many are in waged employment in Madang or at the tuna fish cannery located close by on the main road, traditional subsistence agriculture is still their source of food.
Urbanization is a growing trend in this southwest Pacific Island state, but more than 80 percent of Papua New Guinea's population of 7 million still live in rural areas and grow fresh produce.
However, it is an ever greater challenge for Siar's women, who are the principal cultivators, because of increasingly erratic weather patterns and changes in the seasons.
This year that is made infinitely harder as the country faces its worst drought in 17 years, exacerbated by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate phenomenon.
Water and food shortages, as crops fail to grow, have affected more than 2 million people across Papua New Guinea, with hunger a factor in 24 fatalities reported in the mountainous province of Chimbu in the past week.
Sitting under a large mango tree near the beach, Mangab Selau, one of the senior women of the village, recounted her observations of the changes that have taken place over the past generation.
'We now have a longer dry season, lasting for seven months. Instead of starting in May or June, the dry season now starts in April and it will rain maybe only once a month. I have noticed, too, that the day and night temperatures are much hotter than they were many years ago,' she said.
Papua New Guinea has a tropical monsoonal climate and two seasons, the dry and the wet, which usually begin in May and November, respectively.
The country has one of the highest levels of rainfall in the Pacific Islands region, about 3,142 millimeters per year. Yet some locations in Central, Eastern Highlands and Madang provinces are prone to drought.
Climate scientists forecast that weather extremes, as well as sea levels, will increase in Papua New Guinea during the next century. The sea level could rise by up to 63 centimeters and surface air temperatures by 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2090, reports the Pacific Climate Change Science Program.
Impacts on agriculture, such as the withering of crops, declining soil fertility and lower yields, are already being witnessed in Siar.
'The heat is affecting taro, sweet potatoes and bananas, which now start to go black when they are on the tree and are much smaller in size,' Selau claimed.
Mary Lilih, the Madang provincial food crop officer, said that crop production in the province had been consistently good until about 2012.
'Since then the seasons have been very changeable. Our dry season has been getting longer and there are more pests and diseases. We have experienced Bogia Coconut Syndrome for about 10 years, but since 2012 the disease has spread to other crops, such as bananas, taro, yams and sweet potatoes,' she said.
In Siar, the longer dry season means that yams, the only staple food that survives at this time of the year, are now harvested earlier, in July rather than September. But the women are actively adapting their agricultural practices to improve yields. This includes storing yams for eating during the lean months and mixing different crops within the same cultivation area.
'We plant the yam garden and then we plant taro and banana among the yams, and that is working,' said Hilda Jerome, one of the village mothers.
Another strategy they are employing is keeping plant seedlings in nearby swampy areas during the dry months, then retrieving them when the wet season arrives for planting in the food gardens.
However, the decrease in rainfall is also worsening shortages of fresh water. The community has few groundwater sources and only one rainwater tank for every 10 households, which is not enough.
'We are running out of drinking water. We are digging wells during the dry season to try and get more water, but the well water is not safe for our children,' Jerome explained.
Standing by the shore, overlooking the brilliant blue Bismarck Sea, it is clear that villagers are also battling coastal erosion; the sea is now washing away land dangerously close to the foundations of houses.
'For a long time, for some years, the sea has been rising and stronger winds are driving the waves much harder against the shore,' said Rita Sindam, one of the younger women.
Jerome emphasised the scale of the problem.
'We live near the sea, so we have to go down and use stones to build a seawall. But when the sea level is high, it just washes them away again. We need to do it every day.'
Village homes are directly threatened, but population growth at a rate of 2.7 percent in the province and limited areas of customary-owned land will make it difficult for households to relocate.
'We cannot move because we do not own other land, so we will have to just keep on building our seawalls,' Jerome said.
The people of Siar are determined not to be defeated by climate change. They believe that protecting the village, food and water security depends on adapting through creativity and resourcefulness and ensuring the needs of everyone in the community are met during periods of hardship by traditional social and cultural obligations of care within extended families.
' Photos by Catherine Wilson
