AIDS is killing off African farmers before they can pass on the centuries of local knowledge that their orphans will need to survive, a new study says.
The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization tracked traditional farmers in Mozambique and found they were producing less food, cultivating less land, and leaving their children without the basic local knowledge needed to feed themselves.
“We are demonstrating how essential traditional knowledge is in an AIDS situation,” FAO AIDS expert Marcela Villarreal said Wednesday. “When you’re looking at the poorest of the poor, often the only asset they have is their traditional knowledge.”
This could include knowing which plants were resistant to drought or disease, she said. In 2002, severe drought left up to 14 million people in Southern Africa suffering food shortages.
More than 1.3 million of Mozambique’s 18 million people are thought to be living with HIV, with the government estimating that over 600,000 children have been orphaned.
The FAO is adapting techniques normally used to educate adult African farmers to teach the orphans farming and life skills as well as details on how to protect them against the disease, Villarreal said.
'Tip of the iceberg'
The FAO survey showed 45 percent of HIV-positive Mozambican subsistence farmers had reduced the area under cultivation and 60 percent saying they had cut the number of crops grown.
The study interviewed about 80 men and women in Mozambique, which Villarreal said could lose 20 percent of its agricultural workforce to the disease by 2010.
Namibia could lose up to 25 percent, the FAO said. Almost two-thirds of the world’s HIV/AIDS sufferers -- 25 million people -- live in sub-Saharan Africa.
“What we are seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg,” Villarreal said “We’re just starting to see the impact and it’s going to increase considerably.”
Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland and Namibia would be the southern African countries most at risk from AIDS-related food supply problems, but subsistence farmers in South Africa are also affected, she said.