Maya village in Mexico suffers as climate changes

Desdemona Despair

By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press
Sun Dec 5, 4:59 pm ET

TABI, Mexico – The first time Araceli Bastida Be heard the phrase “climate change” was on TV two years ago. Then she began to understand why strange things had been happening in her village.

Tabi was in its second year of drought, and the corn that sustains the village was left stunted on the stalks. Farmers couldn’t bear the midday heat anymore, and were in their fields at dawn in order to finish before noon.

After a half-mile (1-kilometer) walk from school, Bastida Be’s son would return home with headaches. Summer nights were too hot to sleep until after midnight. And winters were so cold the villagers had to buy blankets.

A year earlier, Hurricane Dean reached deep into Mexico’s rain forest, destroying Tabi’s beehives and blowing down several thatched-roof homes.

“We don’t know what’s going on. All we know is that something has changed,” says Bastida Be, 31, who tends her own corn crop while her husband is away working in construction jobs on the coast.

In Cancun, a resort 155 miles (250 kilometers) to the north, world governments are grappling with Tabi’s problems. A 193-nation climate conference is debating measures to restrain emissions of carbon and other gases that are causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise. They also are discussing how to help people like Tabi’s 400 residents adjust their lives to new conditions.

But the subsistence farmers of Tabi can’t wait. Their traditional haphazard practices, rooted in 2,500 years of Mayan culture, can no longer produce enough to feed them.

The rainfall at the start of planting season, which once could be predicted almost to the day, is now unreliable. If the rain doesn’t come within four days of planting, the farmers have to start all over, as they did last year, losing an entire season’s worth of seed.

The hot weather has reduced yield by 50 to 60 percent over the past 15 years, according to Mexico’s department of rural development, culminating in 2009 with the worst drought in 60 years.

Scientists say average global temperatures have been rising markedly, with each of the past three decades hotter than the previous. The villagers say they began to notice about 10 years ago that days were warmer and trees were not flowering as they used to.

This year, in a further sign of the erratic conditions, the spring rains returned to Tabi in a deluge: nearly 14 inches (350 millimeters) in the planting month of May, about 10 times more than last year. …

Mayan village in Mexico impacted by climate change

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