‘The one group of people that cannot absolutely lose hope are the farmers’

Pedro Mori shares his story of the 2021 Central South America cold wave with Lara Romero Iglesias.

Pedro is a fourth-year journalism student at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. Born and raised in Kobe, Japan, Pedro and his family moved to different countries during his childhood. They eventually settled in Santa Cruz, Bolivia for his last three years of high school, when Pedro’s dad became a farmer: growing soybean crops in the summer and sorghum and corn in the winter. “When I first moved, obviously the biggest thing for me was the language barrier because I didn’t speak Spanish,” he remembers. “I had a lot of horrible mix-ups.” Pedro can now fluently speak Japanese, Portuguese, English, and Spanish. In his junior year of high school, he combined his interest in travelling and meeting new people by pursuing journalism. In 2021, Pedro was planning to move to California to pursue a bachelor of journalism at the University of La Verne when his parents’ crops froze overnight, killing the harvest that was meant to pay for his first semester of university.

When you enter the farm, it’s a bunch of squares. It helps you keep track. You know where you already sprayed pesticide, where you watered. The land itself is about 900 hectares, so it’s pretty big. The northern part of the land is a giant circle that is four or five hundred meters in diameter. The corn grows huge, and sorghum grows a little taller than I am. 

That winter was unusually cold. Santa Cruz is in the flatlands of Bolivia, and it’s a very tropical climate. Even in the winters, when it’s the coldest, it’s like 14°C. Planting season starts around the end of April and it’s usually about 90 days till you harvest. So, you’re going to harvest sometime around July. 

It was the end of June when it got really cold suddenly. Temperatures were dropping to single digits, which in and of itself is abnormal, but we were approaching zero degrees Celsius, which is even stranger. So when we hit below ten, it was like a small alarm going off in you. You’re just like, ‘Okay, something might be coming.’ But nobody expected it. There was no official warning for the sudden drops in temperature.

I was in the living room with my parents. We were just watching the news after dinner. We got a call from the guy who was managing the crops at the property. He just goes, “Everything died.” It’s one of those things, right? No pun intended but your body literally freezes over because you just need to collect your thoughts. And you’re just like, “Everything?’ And they’re like, “Everything. There’s nothing. There’s not a single crop that’s alive.”

The first thing you think when everything dies is, “There’s no harvest, so there’s no money.”  There isn’t much you can do when stuff freezes over in agriculture. Because we’re growing crops like corn and sorghum that would develop giant long plants, the best thing to do is to just leave it to rot. Then that goes back into the soil and gets it ready for the next soybean season.

We just had to hope the next season has good weather and try to minimize the losses financially. You’re going to lose money because you still have to buy pesticides, you still have to pay for diesel fuel for your tractors, and for all the machinery you use. You’re going to either be owing money somewhere or you’re just going to have to work it out with the bank. 

I was super nervous. I was getting ready to move to university. I had discussed with my father how expensive it was going to the United States. I was just saving up a little bit of money so that when I got to the US, I was gonna explore and do all this stuff.  It took away a lot from the excitement. Now you’re just worried, “Am I going to get there? Am I actually going to be able to lead a proper life? Am I going to be able to pay everything off?” It’s just a whole lot of concern that’s left inside of you. 

My parents went back to the farm a week after we got the phone call, and based on the pictures they sent me, a lot of the crops looked unhealthy. They had this weird colour between green and gray and everything looked quiet. There were no vibrant elements whatsoever. Picture any war movie and the colour scheme would be identical. 

Almost the entirety of Santa Cruz froze. It was an absolutely horrible season. Pretty much everybody in a 300 kilometer radius lost all of their crops too. It was harder for some people that were even further in the east. They had lost all of their crops to wildfires at the beginning of 2019, I believe. So they were finally starting to grow back and make back what they had lost, only for everything to freeze over.  Government aid for farmers in Bolivia is very rare. Unless it’s a large-scale disaster, like the wildfires that happened two years prior to this, the government generally doesn’t move.

I think farmers are probably the first ones to really see the effects of climate change. What a lot of people don’t realize is that farmers have been in the same area for ten, twenty, thirty years farming and taking care of their land, only to experience droughts, or freezing, or even extreme temperatures that cause wildfires that drive them out of those places. Farmers are the backbone of the world because we all have to eat. If farmers lose hope and they stop, everything could crumble to the ground. The one group of people that cannot absolutely lose hope are the farmers. 

There is a side of me that obviously worries that we’re not taking this seriously enough. And unfortunately, there happens to be a lot of farmers who do not believe in climate change, even if they’ve experienced it firsthand. If you’re the one who’s being affected by it and you don’t believe in it, that’s just a problem. Going forward, my hope is that governments realize how important farmers are to keep a country running, keep everything going and how they’re essentially the keystone to every society in the world. I just hope that people start taking better care of their farmers.

This story is a part of a series created by Thompson Rivers University students and led by instructor Jennifer Chrumka as part of the Climate Disaster Project. 

Link to the article: https://thewrennews.ca/the-one-group-of-people-that-cannot-absolutely-lose-hope-are-the-farmers/