AFRICA: “Climate witnesses” do not want handouts – and many think God is responsible for climate change
CAPE TOWN, 5 October 2009 (IRIN): The “climate witnesses” – all poor farmers – told a special tribunal on climate change in Cape Town, South Africa, Monday: “We do not want any handouts from the West.” Instead, they needed strategies and policies to help them overcome the effects of climate change.
It evoked memories of South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but rather than apartheid, the first of 125 hearings being held in 17 countries before a global UN meeting in December to clinch a deal on tackling global warming in Copenhagen, Denmark, was part of civil societys efforts to ensure that the voices of those least capable of dealing with the effects of climate change would be heard.
– It was not until I went to a meeting in Kampala (capital of Uganda) about climate change that I heard it was not God, but the rich people in the West who are doing this to us by releasing too much (greenhouse) gases into the atmosphere, said Constance Okollet Ocham, a farmer from the Tororo district of drought-affected eastern Uganda.
– We are asking that they stop, or reduce emissions, she urged. Between 1991 and 2000, Uganda experienced drought seven times and water tables have dropped, leaving dry many boreholes on which the rural poor rely.
Small-scale farmers from Kenya, Mali, Malawi, Ethiopia and South Africa also gave moving accounts of how their communities were coping with the cycle of floods and droughts that has gripped their homelands to a panel of guests led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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