Peru's farmers look for support in face of changing climate

|PIC1|Without stronger action from the West "millions of poor people will be abandoned to the escalating ravages of an unpredictable climate", says one Peruvian battling against poverty.

Bruno Guemes is a skilled worker with the Catholic development charity Progressio and works on the frontline of poverty in Peru.

He is sad that climate change talks in Poznan and Brussels last week made only modest progress.

Rich nations, which have caused most of the global warming through industrialisation, have a responsibility to protect the poorest communities of Peru and elsewhere around the world, he believes.

“Here in Peru, climate change is already having a devastating impact on the natural environment," he said.

"In the valley of Huaral where I work, one in three people relies on small-scale farming to make a living and feed their families. But glaciers and snowcaps are melting, rains are less frequent and water resources are running dry."

Guemes said that in lowland areas too, farmers like 56-year-old Irene Herrera of the Acos community had reported that seasons are disappearing, making it difficult to plan watering times, sowing and harvesting.

Other farmers told him that water pollution and changes in water temperature are affecting fish stocks, while farmers worry that climatic phenomena such as El Nino are becoming more frequent and increasingly devastating.

In the past week European leaders in Brussels agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, based on 1990 levels. In Poznan, a halfway point in a two-year process aimed at reaching a global deal to follow the Kyoto Protocol, governments proclaimed themselves pleased with progress towards a major summit next year in Copenhagen.

Developing countries at Poznan were particularly critical of the lack of money put forward to help poor countries adapt to the ravages of climate change.

Speaking from Peru, Guemes added: “People here are saddened by the fact that they are suffering the consequences of Western inaction on climate change. They have little hope that richer countries will want to make the right choices if it means their own economic development is compromised.”

He went on to describe graphically the human cost of a changing climate.

“In one community, people are taking decisive action in response to water shortages - they are leaving their ancestral lands."

He pointed to one community leader in Peru, Fabian Garay, who had told him, "Everybody but the old people is leaving. And in many more communities, traditional methods of farming are becoming a thing of the past. They just don’t work anymore.”