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No Wetlands, no life
2008-02-14 10:52:25
By Lusekelo Philemon, Writing for JET
Jailo Mwaipungu who is in his seventies now, has been spending most of his time farming rice along the wetland near his village-Mabunga - in Ipinda ward, north-western part of Kyela town.
He recalls back in 1970s whereby the area around the wetland produced almost all kinds of crops and went a long way to sustain their livelihood.
The land was very fertile for paddy production. Yet the old man did not then know why they were getting enough rice for commercial and home use.
`We were harvesting plenty of rice, some of which was sold to get money for other expenditures. I remember part of the rice produced in this land supported me to buy a cow for paying dowry to my wife,`` Mwaipungu recalls.
But things have changed. The land can no longer support crop production, or not as much as it used to do.
``The situation is not the same nowadays as farmers don`t get much from the land. Everyone is complaining that the land is no longer fertile,`` he recounts.
But he also acknowledges that the number of farmers in the area has more than trebled and the situation has also brought about a lot of other activities which have no direct link to farming.
The wetland has been invaded with the result that the soil has lost fertility and the cultivable area during the dry season has shrunk.
According to Mwaipungu, the introduction of a local irrigation system in 1990s only made the situation worse.
People from three villages-Mabunga, Kisegese and Kisale have since been engaged in rice farming during the dry-season (August-December) every year thus enabling them to harvest the crop twice a year- in the dry season and during the rainy season.
``This new variety has attracted many farmers who are not only using a lot of water for irrigation but some of them are now cultivating on the fringes of the wetland. They are destroying it,`` he says.
Consequently everything is diminishing - water, soil fertility, fish, animals -all are slowly disappearing. Over using the wetland has on the other hand led to depletion of resources, subsequently making communities fail to enjoy some benefits which they formerly did.
Shami Thomas, a Primary School teacher in the same village, bitterly complains about the current human induced activities as it has greatly affected the production of rice.
``There is no water in the wetland. People have encroached the area which was full of vegetation that protected the water in order to expand farms,`` he says.
The environment in general has been degraded to the extent that villagers fail to understand what their future will be.
For many years, Kyela district has been famous for producing a very palatable rice variety that has a very pleasant smell and very marketable.
However production of this variety has been going down due to environmental degradation which has made the area lose water as well as soil fertility.
Esau Mwaijumba, who is the Village Executive Officer, says that there is an urgent need to rectify the situation in the area for ecological benefits and for future generation.
Such situation gives a clear picture of what is happening in the Tanzania`s wetlands that have negatively been affected by human activities.
This puts the wetlands in danger of extinction and so automatically threatens the human survival and entire livelihoods.
Awareness campaigns on the wise use of wetlands should be undertaken in order to reverse the situation. Local government officials and policy-making mechanisms need also to be well informed on managing the country`s wetlands.
But the most important thing is that communities themselves must participate fully in the protection of wetlands as they are the ones who enjoy the benefits and stand to suffer most of these ecosystems disappear. Awareness campaigns must thus start with them.
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