Farmers

From the income he gets from his vegetable farm of mainly cabbage, tomato and beans, Kalses provides for his young family including his three children who currently attend elementary school.

“I have up to five hectares of land but I only farm about one hectare of that,” Kalses tells me on the corridors of Vanuatu’s National Conference Centre, one of the venues of this week’s Pacific Week of Agriculture.

But now that we are passed the El Nino period, scientists are warning that another climate extreme may be coming our way: La Nina. We are on a La Nina “Watch”, with a more than 50% likelihood of La Niña forming later in 2016 according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

The El Nino system has been predicted to bring long dry spells that rival the drought of 1997.

A farming system officer, Peter Iesul, says most farmers are subsistence farmers, relying on rain and live on a day to day basis.

He says the Department of Agriculture is advising farmers to implement measures to preserve crops, such as planting resilient crop varities and using mulch, dry leaves and grass to cover the soil and save water.