India's Small Farmers Already Facing Climate Change

Dec. 15, 2009 - PRLog -- While global leaders meet in Copenhagen to discuss climate change, farmers in India's Uttar Pradesh state, near Nepal, are adopting techniques to meet the challenge of changing weather.

According to AlertNet, for decades regions of Uttar Pradesh have been afflicted by dramatic weather changes, including short, highly intense rainfall. Powerful storms have produced floods that have wiped out homes and destroyed crops and livestock. Some 4.5 million people in India are touched by climate change, which makes it hard for farmers to know when to plant and harvest.

To deal with climate uncertainty, farmers along the Rohini River in Uttar Pradesh are diversifying their crop production, moving away from wheat and rice to include potatoes, onions, peas, spinach and tomatoes. The vegetables are a nutritional and financial hedge against wheat and rice damage from bad weather.

And in response to erratic flooding, north of the city of Gorakhpur, farmers have raised road levels and hand pumps, built 10-foot-high home foundations, and dug new drainage systems.

SOS Children's Villages Also Adopts Straightforward Solutions to Deal with Broad Problems

The techniques that farmers are starting to use in some parts of India to manage the adverse impacts of climate change will not solve the problem. But they are a start.

The poverty, homelessness, and broken families that unpredictable rains and drought can produce leave their heaviest scars on India's children. SOS Children's Villages, which operates 39 Villages in India that provide warm homes to orphaned and abandoned children, alone does not have the capacity to raise every Indian orphan in need.

But the way in which SOS helps children and families has a multiplying effect. Beyond offering loving homes, education, and health care to the children it raises, SOS Children's Villages runs family strengthening programs to help fragile households living near its Villages. The aim of these programs is to keep families in surrounding communities intact and able to care for their children.

Keeping Families Together Through Modest Support

SOS bolsters families by providing relatively modest services: counseling families on parenting skills, on disease prevention, and on how to start small businesses. Some SOS Children's Villages also offer monthly food packages to help struggling families to get back on their feet.

Modest levels of support go such a long way in India's rural areas. Consider sponsoring a boy or girl in desperate need of a home, regular meals, and medical care. Please, click here to learn more: http://support.sos-usa.org/site/PageServer?pagename=spons...

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About SOS Children's Villages

For 60 years, SOS Children's Villages has been dedicated to the long-term care of orphaned and abandoned children. With 500 villages in 132 countries, SOS offers a family-based village model that provides for the holistic needs of a child - family, community, education and support - essential for the successful transition from childhood into adulthood. Through Villages, schools, medical facilities, micro-lending, and family strengthening programs, SOS Children's Villages impacts the lives of over 1 million people each year. In 2009, SOS Children's Villages was honored with the Save the World Award. SOS has also been awarded the Mother Teresa Gold Medal, the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize and the Vietnam Friendship Medal. For more information, visit http://www.sos-usa.org