Addressing Climate Change in Agriculture

By Barrie | October 16th, 2007 | No Comments

Climate related disasters, seen as forced marriages between weather/climate hazards and vulnerabilities, need responses. Disaster risk mainstreaming, getting to deal with disasters as development issues, contains local preparedness measures (for what can’t be prevented), mitigation measures (to minimize consequences) and contingency measures (to counteract and temper consequences). But all these measures are forms of preparedness to reduce the impacts of disasters.

As to the contingency measures in agricultural production, certain countries, such as Bangladesh with respect to floods and cyclones, and India with respect to droughts, have increasingly prepared themselves for immediate assistance to victims after these disasters strike. International assistance is most visibly present for example in Africa since very many years.
Such climate and weather related disasters as to contingency measures are very similar to earth quakes and tsunamis and should be prepared for in similar ways.

Mitigation measures are conflict ridden. As far as climate change (and the related increasing climate variability) is concerned, the greenhouse gasses debate is the immediate front runner in discussing mitigation of causes and an example of many conflicts of interest. Mitigation measures to reduce disaster impacts in agricultural production are planning related and often marred by decisions in times the disasters don’t strike that appear catastrophical as soon as they strike. Problems with responsibilities in land allocations and chances with insurances enter, corruption creeps in, resource wars rage or loom (e.g. Sudan, Congo, Palestine, Columbia).

Without extreme political situations, basically impact mitigations are all aspects of rural governance, preferably decentralized and at the lowest organizational level (districts, communities, villages), also in agricultural production. This sometimes is related to promotion of diversification, such as in rice production in Indonesia, sometimes to addressing changes in land use between various agricultural uses or between use in- and outside agricultural production. An example of the first are choices between coffee and (intercropped) citrus in Bali, depending on prizes; an example of the second is the use of good soil for rice production for city and tourism expansion, governed by money too, also among many others in Bali. Climate change has made these planning issues often more urgent and more complicated.

It is slowly emerging that local preparedness for the changing realities of weather and climate should best be addressed by meteorological services in agricultural production. This means that the products of National Weather Services and of applied science at Research Institutes and Universities are made available through organized guidance of farmers. Basically that is where extension services were established for, but with few exceptions (Israel, China - be it often with a potential for improved information - and slowly starting in India) relations between the above mentioned institutions and Extension Services failed. Indonesia until recently also was an example of that.

All over the world, there are ample examples of permanent, slow and fast traditional adaptations to seasonal variability for coping strategies and food security. The return of intercropping, sequential cropping and agroforestry to parts of Asia and the Pacific is an example. In fact these adaptations may be seen as the oldest examples of response farming. However, there are no expectations of improvement of these traditional “fitting” methods per se under the presently fastly changing conditions. Their blending with more scientific meteorological/climatological approaches into actual services for farmers appears the only way forwards.

Response farming is a method of identifying, quantifying and forecasting, statistically or otherwise, seasonal rainfall variability and (un)predictability and related risks, addressing these risks at the farm level. The hypothesis is that solutions to farming problems may be found by improved forecasting of expected rainfall behavior in the cropping season(s).

Response farming means adapting cropping to the ongoing rainy season by guidance of agronomic operations, using experiences of the past, preferably from interpretations of meteorological rainfall records, with support from traditional expert knowledge where available as well as recent weather/climate forecasting tools. In the extremes this includes storms, floods and droughts of all kinds of lengths and severities.

Among the greatest challenges in disaster impact reductions is reaching earlier already well prepared and trained communities timely with early warning messages that can be followed up in also earlier decided, well received and well rehearsed response strategies. It is necessary to distinguish (i) immediate disasters such as cyclones and related floods, for which early warning messages must reach potential victims within hours, and (ii) slow, more seasonal disasters such as late and false starts of the rainy season, extended dry spells and longer droughts, or the occurrence of weather/climate related pests and diseases, that become visible in more creeping ways. The latter can be as devastating for agricultural production as the former. Climate change has altered the characters of these disasters.

This demands new extension approaches and in one of these, Farmer Field Classes (FFCs), Indonesia got an international reputation for successes in introduction of Integrated Pest Management (IPM), organized by FAO with local organizations.

This was recently followed up by the Directorate of Crops Protection, Jakarta, together with agrometeorologists from IPB, Bogor, in an expansion of Climate Field Schools (CFSs) that I visited in Indramayu, West Java.

Their role is that the trainers involved are one class of intermediaries, between the forecasting products of BMG and the farmers, in a service act of joint determination of rice planting time. A participative approach had determined that this was the single most serious problem of the farmers concerned due to climate change, next to droughts and floods.

I recently also visited with people from the Indonesia Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute, Jember, very successful FFCs in Kintamani, northeast Bali, which brought local farmers in a few years to being efficient and knowledgeable producers of very high quality coffee in a period of rising coffee prices, after a deep international coffee market recession. We came to the conclusion that CFSs could also here assist these farmers in coping with the climate change induced shifts in the rainy season that are starting to influence coffee bean filling negatively.

Such services in facing climate change, through CFSs and other new Extension Services approaches by intermediaries between scientific products and farmers, must play an important role in overcoming the many difficulties in increasing preparedness for disaster impact risks as described above.

The writer (Kees Stigter), a visiting professor in developing countries, is the founding president of the International Society for Agricultural Meteorology (INSAM, www.agrometeorology.org) and can be reached via cjstigter@usa.net.