It’s been longer than I intended between posts, regular updates being a casualty of problematic access to internet (it disappeared from my market town for a few months) and spending most of my time farming and reading (the Peace Corps life is mostly a quiet one). I wanted to check in again and post something about my area’s local history with regards to changing climate, which I think illustrates how agriculture and agricultural economies will struggle to respond to whatever degree of climate change is the legacy of industrialization.

I realize that when I post these things only a fraction of the experience comes through, that for you all Ghana remains an abstraction. Does Ghana become any more real to you by talking about its agricultural economy? Would it be better to talk about the beautifully patterned dresses the women wear, or the interaction between the traditional authority of the tribal Chiefs and the civic authority of elected officials? I don’t know, but in terms of “science” and “scientific interest” (broadly defined) I keep returning to the agricultural aspects of life here, since it captures my attention as an expatriate of the laboratory interested in how we as a society can thread the needle of sustainable development, whatever that ambiguous term means.

I stay in the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana, where the tropical rainforest of the south has ended but the savannah of the north hasn’t yet begun. It’s a transitional region in geography, climate, and culture. In my area, the northern half of Brong-Ahafo, most people’s livelihood is tied up in cash crops, in particular the cashew groves that grow locally and the cocoa farms they cultivate south of us, in the Western Region that is wetter and more lush. The cashew groves are beautiful, sturdy trees with big lobe-shaped green leaves and, when they’re producing, red and yellow fruit that the kids eat at their whim, leaving the hard-shelled nuts on the ground to collect later. Right now everything in my area is green from the rains, but in November and December when the rains leave and the Harmattan winds blow in from the Sahara everything dies and turns brown-except for the cashew trees that keep their leaves and provide the best damn shade around. Seriously, the temperature will drop like 20 degrees when you step into the grove off the bush paths leading out to them.

But it didn’t used to be that way. Cashew is a relatively recent introduction to this area, perhaps in the last twenty years, and it’s only been an important commodity for ten or fifteen. Its large scale cultivation in Brong-Ahafo is the result of a changing climate. Back in the day, people grew cocoa trees in this area as their cash crop, and while cashew is economically important cocoa is the primary engine of Ghana’s growth. A couple of things happened to alter the climate. One was deforestation; the name of a nearby city, Sunyanni, contains a reference to elephants that used to roam the forests in this region. They’re long, long gone, along with most of the tree cover. The second was a more general drying of the climate, probably exacerbated by deforestation, over the last few decades. People commonly tell me in conversation that back in the day the rains were extremely regular, when they came and when they left, but that something happened in the last fifteen years or so and now you can’t really tell. Meteorology helps the farmers to plan, but you can’t count on the abundance of rain that came in the past.

Hence the cashew trees, which need a long dry spell and like a relatively drier climate overall than cocoa. So people here now grow cocoa farther south and more cashew locally, it’s the kind of shift people mean about when they pontificate about “adaptations to climate change” and we’re lucky that this area has the ability to make that transition (although the cashew economy has problems, and people damn sure aren’t getting their full value from their trees, but that’s another story). But this kind of shift is problematic in areas that started out even drier than we are, where there might not be another cash crop to replace one that can’t be grown as effectively, or even more frightening, there might not be another food crop to replace those that don’t thrive anymore. And there are plenty of those stories in Africa as well. Ghana is in many ways an extremely fortunate place relative to some of its neighbors.

That’s climate change on the ground, people struggling to figure out reliable systems of food security and income generation in a rapidly changing world. I’m sure many of you are already on board with the necessity of responding to climate change, but it would be nice if more of our friends and family could keep these issues in perspective. As consumers in the developed world we’d be looking at relatively small increases in the very predictable costs of electricity, certain products, etc but our lives would remain very stable. (Maybe that’s an oversimplification, but it’s my impression of the costs of a well thought out policy response like carbon “cap-and-trade” as commonly discussed.) The people most affected by climate change deal with it as increasing, and increasingly volatile, uncertainty in the most basic aspects of their lives: putting food on the table and making a living.

(A quick post-script to cite my sources: everything about our area’s local agricultural and climate history is based on conversations with two or three Ghanaians in my village. I think that’s appropriate enough for an informal blog post, but these conversations are subject to my interpretation and possible misunderstanding.)