Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Remember history lessons about the Industrial Revolution – about how the rise of city based factory jobs, and more efficient farming practices, caused mass migration from farms to cities?
Now a similar mass migration is occurring in the poorer parts of Africa. But some green charities are doing everything in their power, to stop it from happening.
Zimbabwe: Climate Change Opens Up Migration Floodgates
Two years ago, 35-year-old Bernard Chingawo was a successful small scale tobacco farmer in Mt Darwin, Mashonaland Central.
Now he wakes up early in the morning to buy an assortment of wares from a Chinese shop in Harare for resale.
Still in Mashonaland Central, 41-year-old Titinotenda Chaora, a single mother of one who used to eke out a living from buying tomatoes in Chinhamora communal lands for resale in Bindura town, has none to sell today.
She is considering relocating to Harare.
…
Sebastian Kasirai, the village head of Murikitiko in Gutu, says people are leaving their homes in droves.
“There is nothing to stop them from leaving the villages, how would they survive if the rains are not falling and there is no food?” he asked rhetorically.
In the Matabeleland region, most people are relocating to neighbouring Botswana and South Africa in search of jobs to fend for their families back home.
…
“There is little research to establish the extent of climate change – induced migration and its impact on rural people. But certainly, the movements will put pressure on already strained urban authorities. Local authorities need to act swiftly to avoid a situation whereby services like water and sewer provisions, demand for power and other essential services overpower them,” Zvigadza added while equating the Zimbabwean situation to that of Europe and America where millions of people are migrating as economic refugee or climate refugees.
…
Responding to climate change effectively means taking action to reduce the threats and prevent people from moving from their areas.
…
Oxfam which is also funding projects in the drought-prone Gutu rural, found that engaging local communities in the design and implementation of climate change adaptation activities – for example, creating small scale irrigation schemes, grazing areas – holds considerable potential to reduce migration.
Read more: http://allafrica.com/stories/201605191030.html
The point the author misses is migration is often a good thing. I’m not disputing the good intentions of the people and charities who are interfering. But all these poor rural people who have moved to cities, are embracing their new lives voluntarily.
For many people, moving off the farm might even be their only hope of a longer lifespan.
Running a farm with primitive tools is awfully hard work, likely too hard for someone past their prime. In dirt poor rural economies, people who can’t work starve to death – there is very little spare capacity to take care of the elderly and sick. Zimbabweans have a shockingly short life expectancy.
But running an urban street stall, like Bernard Chingawo, is the kind of work which older people who are past their prime can do.
To stand in the way of progress, to try to prevent people from undertaking what in Western experience is a vital step, towards building a modern, wealthy industrial economy, with all the consumerist and health advantages which we take for granted, is simply wrong.
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Most young people dont want to be farmers
Of course not, that would entail lots of hard work. Much better to sit around playing video games and collecting government handouts taken from those that do work.
You really do not need conspiracy theories or climate change or colonialism or any of the other self flagellating memes of the lefty luvvies to explain Zimbabwe. It was the bread basket of Africa then Mugabe took over and now it is the basket case of Africa.
You can spend your life fighting wars that were over 50 years ago or you can get on with your life today. The successful people and Countries do the latter.
and there are so many things going on here also..
first of course= “Climate Change” = pass-the-buck, its someone ele’s fault, such as those evil Kock brothers, Big Oil, BP, The Chinese, somebody, anybody but me. Me: I’m perfect and want to save these people, critters, poly bears, grandchildren, The World etc… Me, I care so much I cry myself to sleep at night.
Next up is Good Intentions.
Oxfam and the like are riddled with these. They so desperatly want to ‘help’ these people, to look after their welfare, health, homes and to save them from some or all of any imagined disasters, present or future. One of the great things about humans is the ability to tell lies and, even worse, for liars to believe their own lies.
We here at WUWT are fully aware that the urge to ‘save’ is actually a deep seated urge to control, to control other people, critters, environments and/or whatever.
Why this need to control and why is it lied about?
Simply, it is yet another manifestation of a chronic depression within (certainly Western) society. Depressed people cannot handle uncertainty, they lack the self confidence to deal with the unknown and unexpected. Therefore, free-spirited and free-willed people become a threat. Such folks are able to, and will do, random and unexpected things and slow witted & muddled brains cannot handle that. Hence the need to control, mendaciously disguised as the urge to save.
What about another correlation? Try alcohol consumption (=chronic depression and lack of self confidence) versus the belief in cAGW, especially the catastrophic bit…..
Moocher (a la Atlas Shrugged) ‘rats move to the city. Producers seek out their Galt’s Gulch Utopia Far From the Madding Crowd.
Heinlein had it right: ‘Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.’
Cities attract people who want to control other people, and people who want to rely on other people to make their decisions for them – i.e. people willing to be controlled.
Rural areas are attractive to the iconoclasts.
Somewhere in-between there is a point where the conveniences of city life and the freedom of rural life balance. For me that is a city of about 100,000 to 200,000. One of my co-workers is most comfortable in a city of millions, another in a town of under 1000.
Let’s see, a phenomena that has been going on for hundreds of years, but we are supposed to believe that recently whatever caused it before has shut down and CO2 has taken over.
Where have I heard that story before?
..MarkW, I bet Keith T. Rodgers believes it’s an Alien conspiracy !! LOL
Zimbabwe is a naturally rich country and had a thriving economy before the current government undertook to steal the land from the farmers who knew how to farm and hand it out to those who knew nothing. They went down the same rabbit hole that Venezuela is now determined to follow – hyperinflation, loss of productivity, economic and social disaster.
If a naturally occurring drought cycle is occurring, Oxfam should be celebrating the rise in CO2, which is making it possible for plants to live in more arid conditions. In fact, to prevent rising CO2 could be interpreted as genocide, no? I love the smell of cognitive dissonance in the morning.
On 20th night in the city of Hyderabad/India there was a thunderstorm-lightning-wind associated with cumulonimbus clouds. This uprooted trees, branches broke, advertizement poles uprooted. The advertizement pole near Checkpost on Road No. 2 Banjara Hills fell on cars/motarbikes parked there. On the road no. 1 Banjara Hills near GVK Mall pipeline broke open, with the gussing of water washed away cars moving on the road and further down to it a tree fell on cars.
Around my house greenery [I developed huge green cover in and around my house — this you can find the Google maps — was intact, not even a branch fell from the trees.
The root cause of these disasters were due to the selection plant species and poor quality water pipes. Thunder storms and cyclonic storms impact is common to these areas. This time the low pressure area moved northwards along the east coast by strengthening in to depreson, deep depression, cyclonic storm, severe cyclonic storm land fall took place in Bangladesh. Along the coast heavy down was recorded after a severe drought condition.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy