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.
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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.
Graft and incompetence are made much worse in their effects by a lack of despatchable energy.
She was with the ‘husband’ the same day he called at the door asking for her hand in marriage. So when did the Aunt do all the sex coaching? Reading between the lines it sounds as if there had been a long running expectation that this sort of thing would happen, rather than it being an emergency response to a crisis. More a story of shocking cultural differences than climate change.
See my next comment.
With a high child-bride rate you are right to suggest “a long running expectation”
Looks more like the social climate is the cause, not the weather-based climate.
The bigoted imperialistic ignorance of climate hypesters is no longer surprising but is always disgusting.
This article highlights this aspect of “climate communication” quite well.
Droughts and floods are part of natural variations in climate change. This was there in the past, it is there now and will be there in future. We need to adapt to them. It is nothing to do with the so-called global warming. During drought, temperature & evaporation goes up and during flooding temperatures & evaporation come down. In India and as well in Africa the farmers traditionally adapted to the natural variability in precipitation. With the western based mono crop-chemical inputs technology this has changed and the negative impact gone up and with the growth in population it further amplified. This international organisations attribute to global warming.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Dr. Reddy,
With all due respect your argument us not at all clear.
India suffers less, nit mire, hunger now despite a still growing populationThis is apparently coinciding witj land use reform allowing more farmers to benefit from their efforts as well as the wide spread adoption of Western farming techniques.
Or are there still massive famines in Indua that are suppressed in the news?
The Grauniad is a hot-bed of embittered left-wing hacks who hose this sort of pig swill all the time. If it wasn’t for the money supplied to them by ‘AljaBeeba’, they would have gone up the swanny years ago.
Condensed review of article: “Halfwit writes nonsense.”
You could add, “Again.”
For the kicks.
Auto
More likely child marriages are common there, and the reporter just threw global warming into the mix.
How to be a climate scientist:
Step 1: Collect a 2 data point time series of anything you want.
Step 2: Whether it is increasing or decreasing, posit that the claimed trend is bad, ignoring any and all other factors.
Step 3: Since there has also been moderate warming between point A and point B, claim that climate change must be the cause, without any proof whatsoever.
Step 4: Profit.
There is a very thin line between selling a daughter into slavery versus the “bride price” paid to the daughter’s family in many cultures.
Te abuse of young girls is best understood via the history of the age of consent, which was traditionally the age at which a girl reached puberty. This had nothing to do with climate or CO2 or whatever crazy notion alarmists try to connect to climate change
From wiki:
The first recorded age-of-consent law dates from 1275 in England; as part of its provisions on rape, the Statute of Westminster 1275 made it a misdemeanor to “ravish” a “maiden within age,” whether with or without her consent. The phrase “within age” was later interpreted by jurist Sir Edward Coke as meaning the age of marriage, which at the time was 12 years of age.[5]
The American colonies followed the English tradition, and the law was more of a guide. For example, Mary Hathaway (Virginia, 1689) was only 9 when she was married to William Williams.[6] Sir Edward Coke (England, 17th century) “made it clear that the marriage of girls under 12 was normal, and the age at which a girl who was a wife was eligible for a dower from her husband’s estate was 9 even though her husband be only four years old.”[3]
In the 16th century, a small number of Italian and German states set the minimum age for sexual intercourse for girls, setting it at 12 years. Towards the end of the 18th century, other European countries also began to enact similar laws. The first French Constitution of 1791 established the minimum age at 11 years. Portugal, Spain, Denmark and the Swiss cantons initially set the minimum age at 10–12 years.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent
Just when you think these climate creeps can’t stoop any lower they limbo back under their rock.
Missed in this “analysis” is the fact that the unnamed young man is somehow now prosperous enough to seek a wife.
I guess climate-change-induced famines and hardship only affect subsistence-level farming families with photogenic girls?
Duty of care – nothing to do with Climate Change. UN useless as the rest of the do gooder brigade.
Culturally unacceptable to me but a way of life to them.
Sad but facts are facts.