Resilience building and water demand management for drought mitigation

Doughts resulting in complete crop failure are common in Eastern and Southern Africa. We are at present experiencing a regional crisis, where crop failures related to drought are threatening the lives of millions of people in several countries in Southern Africa. A major challenge is to seek ways of mitigating and coping with droughts in small-holder farming systems, particularly in semi-arid regions which are most hardly hit by the effects of drought. An entry-point for drought mitigation is to build water resilience of present rainfed farming systems. The water balance is a good starting point to assess the options. As has been argued for decades, the term drought is very debated, and the boundaries between droughts being politically and biophysically defined is not sharp. Often crop failures and social suffering are blamed on drought, while in reality the causes are more complex than only a decline in rainfall. A challenge is to find management strategies to deal with the unreliable and extremely variable rainfall in savannah environments. In this paper examples of small-scale management practices to mitigate drought in semi-arid rainfed farming are presented. Focus is on water harvesting systems for supplemental irrigation. It is shown that with relatively simple and cheap means it is possible to build resilience to deal with water scarcity in semi-arid farming systems. If such measures are combined with efforts of maximising plant water availability and plant water uptake capacity, there are good chances of mitigating certain droughts. Conservation tillage systems have proven to maximise rainfall infiltration and storage of water in the soil, enabling even crops lacking supplemental irrigation to bridge severe dry spells. Interestingly, building resilience in rainfed farming systems is also a means of water demand management. More crop is produced per drop of water in resilient farming systems, which reduces the amount of water needed to produce food. Despite the opportunities to build resilience to mitigate droughts, it is impossible to escape from the severe drought years. This is where coping mechanisms are required, which involve social, economic and institutional preparedness to cope with the social effects of climatic droughts. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.