Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Photo journalist Gethin Chamberlain, crop failures force third world farmers to sell off their kids.
Why climate change is creating a new generation of child brides
As global warming exacerbates drought and floods, farmers’ incomes plunge – and girls as young as 13 are given away to stave off poverty
by Gethin Chamberlain (words and photographs)
It was the flood that ensured that Ntonya Sande’s first year as a teenager would also be the first year of her married life. Up to the moment the water swept away her parents’ field in Kachaso in the Nsanje district of Malawi, they had been scraping a living. Afterwards they were reduced to scavenging for bits of firewood to sell.
So when a young man came to their door and asked for the 13-year old’s hand in marriage, the couple didn’t think about it for too long, lest he look elsewhere. Ntonya begged them to change their minds. She was too young, she pleaded. She didn’t want to leave. But it was to no avail. Her parents sat her down and spelled it out for her: the weather had changed and taken everything from them. There was not enough food to go around. They couldn’t afford another mouth at the table.
That night she lay down in bed for the first time with the man she had never seen before and followed the instructions of her aunt, who had coached her on the important matter of sex. Ten months later, she gave birth to their first daughter.
Everyone has their own idea of what climate change looks like. For some, it’s the walrus struggling to find space on melting ice floes on Blue Planet II. For others, it’s an apocalyptic vision of cities disappearing beneath the waves. But for more and more girls across Africa, the most palpable manifestation of climate change is the baby in their arms as they sit watching their friends walk to school. The Brides of the Sun reporting project, funded by the European Journalism Centre, set out to try to assess the scale of what many experts are warning is a real and growing crisis: the emergence of a generation of child brides as a direct result of a changing climate.
…
Leaving aside the rather tenuous link between climate and weather, can anyone imagine selling your kid rather than selling the farm if the money runs out?
There is no circumstance under which I could imagine selling a family member to pay the bills. You sell stuff, not people, if you are short of cash.
Farmers in Malawi might have had a hard time lately – the nature of primitive subsistence farming with minimal help from fossil fuel powered farm equipment is regular periods of extreme hardship. But my sympathy is tempered with utter disgust at the Guardian’s efforts to rationalise a backward misogynist culture which considers daughters to be just another chattel to sell to the highest bidder if the money runs out.
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He knows nothing of Africa, not even been there I suspect. Just his opinion from his armchair. Total rubbish!
Often people want to put guilt on Westerners. This is an example.
when you exceed the carrying capacity of your land it is time to change what you are doing.
Fact: Climate change is producing more claims about the effects of climate change.
The effects are anything you can imagine.The better your imagination, the more effects you detect.
Somewhere, a venal academic is rushing to complete a scholarly paper in which he shows a substantial correlation between dandruff and climate change. He’s already selected a correlation coefficient; now he need only make up some underlying (waka-waka) data. Onward to junkets, fame and glory and endless grants!
Fact:
The Grauniad is producing more child like minds in adults.
It’s more like the lack of climate change is stimulating more claims of the effects of (nonexistent) climate change. They are trying to prove climate change is happening by claiming that anything they notice is due to climate change.
The hidden code here is that their definition of “climate change” is “global warming due to human activities.” In the real world, of course, climate change is always happening, getting warmer or getting cooler, so their ingenuous definition is the key to their hidden meaning and agenda.
In Islamic societies it is custom to arrange for a wedding when your daughter reaches puberty. This has been the custom in these parts of the world for hundreds of years. One only knows this if you’ve lived in African or MiddleEastern cultures for many years. Come on folks. We’re more intelligent than this article/author. I challenge you to get educated on how the rest of the world lives on a day to day basis. This is the polar opposite of the Western world’s values and ideas system
As Don Rickles said with a wicked leer, “Child brides? Nuttin’ wrong in that!” The more, the merrier, hey?
Yes. Child marriage is a question of culture, education, and tradition. Coal coukd provide the energy to increase productivity so these countries had better conditions for women. The Guardian has it upside down.
My wife is Malawian by citizenship, Zimbabwean by birth, frequent resident of South Africa. And now she lives with me here in Sydney, Australia.
Eish! Born in Harare for Malawian parents? We have some connections Zimbabwe and South Africa, where I visited only three months ago. I can’t speak Shona though.
This is actually funny. The two furst commenters have family from the area. Not what you expect from this site, eh?
But … But … Only old white males comment on this blog!
Yes, born to Malawians in Zimbabwe, Bulawayo. Bit like New Zealanders in Australia. Their children are New Zealanders. Her daughter, 10, speaks 4 languages. Shona, Zulu, another native language I forget the name of and English.
My other half is in Harare right now.
She says the weather is a bit cool and rainy, but the people are happy.
“…Only old white males comment on this blog” (I’m sure Dave didn’t need to include “sarc” tags in that crack.)
Can’t speak for the rest of us, but female person of color / red here. I admit to being post menopause, but I don’t think I’m really all that old.
question for you two….does it ever go the other way?
….I mean someone here selling someone to Africa?
If so, I’ve got a sister in law……..
…and a lot of live-in mother-in-laws are complaining about the cold weather this time of year…
Well my now late father-in-law got interesting offers when he was in Saudis. You’d be paid in camels, but I read the situation such that you would not mind if they just keep the change.
I know I would prefer the camel………
…and walk a mile for it…
There must have been a lot of ‘Climate Change’ in the Seventh Century A.D. when Mohammed married a nine-year-old Aisha and established the practice of child-marriage firmly in Islam. Perhaps ‘Climate Change’ also forced Muslims to marry up to four wives….yet another study needs funding!.
won’t happen
NASA may have funding for that.
I thought the UN was supposed to be protecting against child abuse such as child brides.
The UN has accomplished so much for us.
We should give them more money and authority! /SARC!!
(
The UN. What a worthless blight on humanity! (No sarc)
The UN is “multicultural”, meaning they only hate white males in America. Everyone else is okay and all lifestyles are accepted.
Child brides( &husbands)were not unknown among European families in medieval times .mainly to effect dynastic&or family property/land entitlements. Largely confined to aristocratic or royal families
As an example ,lady Margaret Beaufort was widowed at thirteen&pregnant..she was the mother of Henry vii,1485, ,father of better known Henry viii
But the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which Mankind has no control. So if you need to blame anyone for what is happening the real culprit is Mother Nature. You can go to court over this and sue Mother Nature for damages caused by climate change. Lots of luck collecting on a judgement against Mother Nature.
With respect and without wishing in any other way to support this execrable piece by the Guardian, that simply betrays a complete lack of understanding of the Non Western mindset: Without a farm, the whole family is dead. Sacrificing one child is the lesser of many evils.
There is no social security, no government ready to bail out failure – deserved or otherwise.
Meanwhile in the UK, apparently British born women are having less children than ever. Immigration is the main source of population increase.
“Leo Smith November 26, 2017 at 1:53 am
With respect and without wishing in any other way to support this execrable piece by the Guardian, that simply betrays a complete lack of understanding of the Non Western mindset: Without a farm, the whole family is dead. Sacrificing one child is the lesser of many evils.”
Very true. My wife came with a “debt”, a “price” almost for westerners, to the family. That “debt” was 8 cows. Jokingly I keep saying it was cheaper to pay her airfare home. *It’s ok, I pay for that every time I wind her up about it lol*
How soon we have forgotten the whole western ‘dowry’ business.
I have to agree. Plus, they aren’t selling the girls into slavery, but marrying them off into other families.It makes a big difference.
Have you ever heard the original story of Hansel and Gretel? The reason that they were abandoned in the woods is because the family was starving. That was considered acceptable, if unfortunate, at the time. It was only later that the parents were framed as evil to justify the plot.
test of hypeetext markup
There is a test page, see the menu at the top, but it loads so slowly I don’t even try it these days…
It is all about controlling through guilt. It is are fault. We caused the bad weather so we must take responsibility. The blacks in Africa are not as advanced and capable of doing anything about it themselves. The great white weather gods, that is us are acting irresponsibly. We the great white gods must change are ways.
The Guardian is a white supremacist web site.
Africans can create modern infrastructure, can use modern water management, can build reservoirs etc. Australia has droughts and I do not see white farmers selling their kids in Alice Springs.
As always, the real racists are on the Left.The Guardian simply doesn’t consider Africans capable of doing anything for themselves.
No, it is the anti-human, far-left Agenda that creates child-brides, man-brides, goat-brides…. etc etc.
Volcanoes in Indonesia caused by Global Warming causes destruction of crops, which causes poverty of farmers, who need to sell their daughters as child brides to make ends meet. See, it happens in Indonesia too.
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/11/your-car-causes-volcanoes-and-volcanoes-release-co2/
Don’t muddy the ideological waters with plate tectonics. The advocacy lords won’t have it.
More proof that climate change causes volcanoes.
This is definitely a cultural issue, some cultures find it acceptable to sell their kids.
Some cultures see it totally acceptable to buy a minor. This is the key.
At least the guy in the story didn’t ask to trade-in his present wife for a newer model, that’s expensive in any society. /sarc
The Graudiad are certainly into the soft bigotry. “we cant expect black people to not know they should not sell their children”
and the BBC also show soft bigotry, “we cant expect black people to speak proper English so lets provide a pigeon english service”
Mark – Helsinki
Pidgin.
Err, that one hurted.
Hugs
Wetin dey happen? – (What’s going on?)
🙂
I’m dyslectic, but not on the letter level. I just can’t put the little friends called morphemes in the right order. Must be because I read fast but don’t produce English at the same pace. It is as if all the words appeared at the same time, not left-to-right. To, a, the, and is are the most common ones just lost. But any other error, even hopelessly funny ones, may pass my parser with the return code zero.
Pigeon English is really difficult for Americans. You have to keep bobbing your head as you speak.
squiggy9000
Coooo.
Yet another freelance journalist, desperate for money, writing nonsense only the failing Guardian would print.
Has anyone read Monbiot recently? His hysterical shrieking is getting more painful by the article. And Toynbee…….Ugh!
Fake news and disgusting lies. Child brides have been the way in Africa for ever. And once the custom is established it becomes entrenched because there are few potential brides if you wait as a man.
What is undeniable fact is that it is poverty which is the problem, and the way to alleviate poverty us to do the opposite if everything the Guardian suggests, economically, socially and in terms if energy.
The Guardian bears some responsibility for the continuation of child brides because it has consistently supported policies in Africa that entrench and spread poverty.
“There is no circumstance under which I could imagine selling a family member to pay the bills. You sell stuff, not people, if you are short of cash.”
Eric, that’s very easy to say from the comfort of a full belly & knowing that you wont starve within the next 12mths, on a computer that would have cost more than some family’s earn in a year.
Circumstances will change your perception on life, survival instincts kick in; I am not a thief BUT if I had no means other means of getting food I would steal some,
Sorry to correct you – but from the piece-
1. they didn’t have enough ‘stuff’ to sell.
“the water swept away her parents’ field” “they were reduced to scavenging for bits of firewood to sell.”
2. they didn’t sell her, they gave her away.
“girls as young as 13 are given away to stave off poverty”
Watch commercials for “Save the Children” and other similar ads for “African relief”. The children are wasting away but the parents aren’t. Too bad they didn’t “give her away”. Maybe she would have been taken care of.
At most, drought may have an effect, not global warming, but we all know that CO2 promotes crop growth, not retard it. So we should criticize this article for stupidly pushing for CO2 reductions, right?
Is there any evidence that “climate change” or increased CO2 in the atmosphere is causing an increase in crop failures in Africa, or increased flooding, or increased drought? Did Gethin Chamberlain provide such evidence in his article, or did he just assume it?
Louis November 26, 2017 at 1:22 pm
Is there any evidence that “climate change” or increased CO2 in the atmosphere is causing an increase in crop failures in Africa, or increased flooding….”
Almost certainly, no. Probably all the global data (e.g. average lifespan, food produced per head of population) show increases over recent decades.
The example given was Malawi. It just happens that, a couple of years ago, I had a brief email conversation with a Church of England bishop. When I asked him for a specific event made worse by climate change, he cited the floods in Malawi, in the previous January. Here’s my WUWT post from two years ago:
*******************************************************************************************************************
This summer I exchanged two emails with a Church of England bishop, and it is relevant to this thread.
A few months ago the Daily Telegraph printed a letter from a group of religious leaders, including the bishop. The letter claimed that already the poor were suffering from a changing climate.
I emailed the bishop, asking what his justification for that claim was.
To his credit, the bishop did reply. As evidence he gave a link to the NOAA, a list of recent storms and floods. In my reply I pointed out that a list of storms proves nothing, as there have always been storms. Some of the storms were tornadoes and hurricanes. I pointed out that the data showed no increase in tornadoes and that average hurricane intensity has been falling for decades.
I then asked him to give me a concrete example of how the poor are suffering from a changing climate.
Again, to his credit, the bishop replied and gave a concrete example: the storms and floods that had occurred in Malawi in January of this year. But of course he gave no justification for thinking it had been made worse by global warming.
I managed to locate data for a Malawi weather station (Chileka) that had almost unbroken precipitation data from 1930. You can see the plot here:
What a surprise! There is no trace of any long term trend that could remotely be linked to global warming. Ironically, the data for 1930 (the first group on the left, multiply the number by ten to get the year) showed slightly greater rainfall. According to the data, in 1967 there was more than 2 meters of rainfall in one day, an event of biblical proportions. The data clearly shows that the bishop’s claim is nonsense. I doubt if he ever looked at the data to see if there was a trend. Obviously, if there’s no trend it isn’t happening.
It will be interesting to look at rainfall data for Zambia.
I would suggest that, if anyone makes alarming statements about climate change and specific storms, and if there is no supporting data for the claim, then it is close to a criminal act. It is the moral equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded cinema.
The bishop makes a big thing about the poor. What sickening hypocrisy. It is precisely the policies, of which the bishop no doubt approves, that is the biggest threat to the poor countries of the world.
Mount Agung
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42126284
Bali volcano activity prompts ‘red warning’
These are smaller ash cloud eruptions coming from Agung. Common enough in Indonesia. The last time Agung erupted in 1963, it was a few months of this kind of low level activity before the VEI 5 eruption happened. So, we still have to wait.
Interesting to see this pic from yesterday of a guy ploughing his field with oxen while Agung erupts in the background. This is exactly the problem this article is about. This guy can not compete with modern farming. He should give up and do something else and trade his labour for the efficiently produced food done by someone else.
Modern farming is done like this.
Bill,
I disagree on your economic perspective of that man plowing his field.
Outside (off shore) fresh food is expensive. It requires hard currency. It requires air transport from thousands of miles.
Meanwhile his land is his. The sun is free. The rain is free. The oxen eat local grass and poop fertilizer.
So yes, that would make no sense in the developed world, with an easily connected transportation to commercial markets.
But on Bali… the outside fresh vegetables and expensive food goes to the resorts where foreign tourists readily pay in hard cash.
Go New Holland.
I only buy blue.
The only good green tractors are antiques.
If any dogmatic idea or otherwise half-assed hypothesis has been made adequately simplistic so that it can be easily understood with no one having to have any of the pertinent knowledge then it can be made into a “wagon” that can be loaded up with virtually endless amounts of simplistic bullwash that can be sold.
You are too polite.
According to the short info in google maps there were 14 million inhabitants in Malawi in 2010. In 2016 the number had risen to 18.9 million. The same quantitiy of food and 35 % more mouthes to fill makes the difference.
Rank Country Birth rate
(births/1,000 population)
1 Niger 46.12
2 Mali 45.53
3 Uganda 44.17
4 Zambia 42.46
5 Burkina Faso 42.42
6 Burundi 42.33
7 Malawi 41.8
8 Somalia 40.87
9 Angola 38.97
It is only gong to get worse with those birth rates. And the Left will still blame an atmospheric trace gas increase as the cause of their misery.
These high birthrate countries are the targeted recipients of the massive redistribution of wealth that the IPCC/UNFCCC and World Bank want to achieve. Mandatory birth control would be a better solution to their poverty while enriching the elite with absconded western wealth will only make things worse.
@co2isnotevil
Education is the best birth control.
The Climate Liars have no shame, alighting on any disaster, any human misery in order to tug at people’s heartstrings and blaming it on “climate change” (by which they mean CAGW). They are without a soul. Perhaps we should call them Climate Ghouls.
Everyone has their own idea of what climate change looks like
Personally I see a lot of snowflakes melting. Everywhere.
It’s interesting how so many folks have forgotten that indentured servitude was common in the west and only disappeared with the formal abolishment of slavery in the British Empire and later after the Civil War in the U.S.A. Selling of services and selling offspring is a matter of degree given how indentured servitude really worked.
Egypt is exports annually a great deal of food including US$150+ canned and frozen vegetables. India exports annually more than US$5bn worth of rice and US$400 worth of onions. Developing nations are doing better at feeding their own and even creating an exportable surplus. Some nations, especially in Africa have inadequate access to fertiliser, pesticides and farming machinery, all dependent on the “fossil fuels” which the Guardian and its ilk want to abolish. Subsistence farmers everywhere are benefiting from rising carbon dioxide levels. We may hope that atmospheric carbon dioxide will continue to increase,
The false-flag fear-mongering hasn’t worked as planned, so now they’re tugging at our heartstrings.
The PR types are getting desperate.
Maybe if we didn’t burn our corn in our cars these people could afford to buy food. Check out the price of corn since ethanol became a great idea. Third world always pays for the unintended consequences of our “feel good” policies.