Africa sets an enterprising example

The hills of Michimikuru are a little piece of heaven: pickers in brightly coloured scarves move slowly through the chest-high bushes of the vivid green tea-fields beneath the slopes of Mount Kenya. But as the saying goes, local colour is other people’s poverty. Just ten kilometres to either side, the desert is encroaching; the mountain’s snowcap is melting; and soaring temperatures, droughts and storms mean the crops of the country’s primary export often fail.

It’s the scene of a remarkable initiative, co-funded by the British fair-trade company Cafédirect and the German Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development, to help the 9,000 small growers of the Michimikuru Tea Company to adapt to climate change. And it’s a good indicator of the direction that businesses in many countries are going to have to take, like it or not. Because waiting for governments to agree and act may simply take too long.

As the climate change conference begins in Copenhagen, this is where Barack Obama really should be: walking the muddy village streets in his father’s native country, talking to tea-growers who also grow kale to sell for a few shillings so they can survive when their main crops fail. Perhaps then he would be happy to promote a deal for developing countries to help them survive the damage that is now widely blamed on developed countries; Kenya’s annual carbon emissions are just 0.3 tonnes per capita against 14 tonnes for the US.

The initiatives (there are similar ones in Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua) are deceptively simple. They include low-energy woodburning stoves that mean women who were having to spend up to five hours a day collecting massive bundles of wood can use just three sticks a day. That not only saves time and CO2 emissions, it cuts deforestation too.