Thank you.
As has been said, my names are Joshua Silu Mukusya, and I come from Kenya. I am going to talk about the movement of farmers in that region of Africa where we started a movement of farmers way back in 1977 to reverse the effects of drought and to enable farmers to grow enough for their feed and for themselves.
Over the years we have done a lot of work on terracing the land and trying to raise the water table by putting up sand dams or walls across the rivers. The reason we did that was simply because over the years, I looked back to when the colonial government was there; they had a program of soil conservation, which looked at slowing the speed of water. Out of those small points where they did the work, the areas remained very green, and I thought if we could develop that system and make it bigger, we would be able to be self-sufficient in food and pasture for animals.
In a period of about 30 years, we have been putting these sand dams on our dry riverbeds in the hope that we can increase the water table and create springs as well as grading our wetlands for growing vegetables and germinating trees to replace what has gone.
In that period we have had some success. We have also had failures. But mainly we have seen the biggest major problem setting us back as being the effect of climate change. After doing all that good work involving our own free labour and getting support from friends to get the materials like cement and reinforcements, the rains stood us up. They never came.
So we failed to some extent but we still think sand dams and the combination of trees and the terracing of the land is the answer to climate change and the best way the farmers can hold all their ideas to their own areas, improve their own food, with whatever support the governments of Canada and Kenya can give those farmers to improve their own food security situation.
We have seen this as a benefit to the land and a benefit to the people, but we still have a problem with other parts of the world, who have their own way of life and who have not thought about climate change, which we ourselves are trying to adapt to.
I'm thinking of governments, like the Canadian government, supporting the Kenyan government--that's being supported in the same system, doing the dams. Because of the effects of climate, that has a global cost, either in the northern hemisphere or in the southern hemisphere. If people don't take care of that, then we are back to the same problems.
We are improving and we are going back a step, because the climate is not allowing us to get to where we want to go.
It is my hope today, in this gallery, that those listening to us would have a way of finding a system that would enable future generations to enjoy the same soil we have been enjoying for the last 50 years, and to enable the poor farmers, through groups, to do the best they can to improve their quality of life.
I would like to stop there.