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Africa: Climate-Smart Agriculture – the Future of Global Food Security
WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2011-04-22 Time: 17:00:03 Posted By: News Poster
By Toni Bacala
Climate change has pronounced effects in agriculture, such as shifts in temperature and precipitation patterns, and prevalence of pests and diseases. Developing countries that get by with minimal productivity and limited technology are in danger of enduring lower and erratic production, aggravating both the farmers’ livelihood and the population’s food supply.
As the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects the global demand for food to rise by 70 percent by 2050, farmers, especially in developing regions, need to take on resilient and adaptive “climate-smart” agricultural practices to ensure the future of food security.
“The needs of agriculture have to be encouraged in the international climate regime,” Deborah Murphy of International Institute for Sustainable Development told MediaGlobal. “And poor, developing countries have to be involved.”
In the 2010 report “Climate-Smart Agriculture,” the FAO highlights the interdependence of climate change mitigation and food security, calling on developing nations to invest on climate-smart production systems that are designed to better equip farmers in transforming existing methods into more efficient, adaptive systems that ensure maximum yield with minimum carbon emission.
Conservation agriculture (CA) stands out among climate-smart practices that ensure productivity while building resilience to climate change.
“Conservation agriculture is the core of climate-smart agriculture for both mitigation and adaptation,” said FAO Senior Officer Theodor Friedrich. “And it is worldwide, growing exponentially.”
CA integrates technology in agricultural production and environmental management through three basic practices: crop rotation, maintenance of soil cover, and minimum soil disturbance.
While the first two methods promote diverse and healthy produce, the third reduces manual and mechanical tilling and plowing, significantly cutting cost and consumption of fossil fuel.
Friedrich explains that this practice mitigates climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil, thereby reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the use of fossil fuel, fertilizers, and other agricultural inputs.
CA features adaptive technology, including a water infiltration system that adjusts to extreme weather conditions. In dry periods, it reduces the water requirements of crops by 30 percent, enhancing soil fertility to withstand extended droughts. During rainy periods, this method facilitates the course of rain water to prevent soil erosion and flooding.
Today, about 8 percent of the global fertile cropland is being used for conservation agriculture. Farmers adopting this method use low-cost tools in rotating diverse crops while eliminating labor-intensive soil tillage.
In South Asia, where agriculture is dominated by the production of rice, wheat, and maize, CA has been instrumental in addressing the decelerating productivity of cereal systems. The Indo-Ganges region, in particular, has suffered from terminal heat and drought during peak crop season, as well as loss of biodiversity due to climate change.
“We promote conservation agriculture as a vehicle that helps adapt and mitigate these stresses,” shared Mangi Lal Jat of International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in India.
Jat explained how CA has contributed in buffering the soil and canopy temperatures to improve soil moisture. Reduced GHG emission from minimum tillage also helped in moderating terminal heat to allow for better crop growth.
“In the long-term, we see lot of reductions in GHG emissions and facilitate carbon sequestration,” Jat expressed to MediaGlobal.
The success in South Asia sets a feasible example of climate-smart agriculture. However, climate-smart strategies have yet to reach many farmers in developing countries who need to be informed of technologies that suit different climate change scenarios.
“Climate-smart agricultural concepts like conservation agriculture, which are knowledge-intensive and not blueprint-ready to copy technologies (as the green revolution was), require active farmer participation and organization,” Friedrich said.
As climate change and food security pose increasingly urgent challenges, investing in climate-smart agriculture in developing countries must be at the forefront of today’s climate change regime for the survival of generations.
