There are a plethora of
articles and stories written on the importance of agriculture as a significant
contributor to economic growth and development. As you are aware, the climate
change action debate is being vigorously pushed as one
means of achieving sustainable development – a feat no country is yet to
attain. And to just bog you once more with some grim statistic, the World
Bank's "Turn Down the Heat"
report released last year, predicts that by 2040, drought and increased heat
could reduce by 40-80 per cent the area of sub-Saharan Africa suited growing
maize, millet or sorghum. It says a 2°C increase in temperature (projected for
2040), could reduce maize yields by 5 to 22 per cent, wheat by 10 to 17 per
cent, and sorghum by 15 to 17 per cent. That is why developing countries are
being advised not to pursue an economic growth model through which the
industrialized nations accumulated their wealth – by burning coal and clearing
forests – so as not to add to the climate change problem.
At the heart of this
new and ideal ‘green economic growth’ in agriculture are new concepts such as
carbon neutral growth or Low
Emissions Development/Climate Resilient Development,
the Carbon
Markets to generate the necessary funding and Reducing
Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and Conserving and
Enhancing Forest Carbon Stocks (REDD+) for forestry. Intertwined
with these new concepts is Climate-Smart Agriculture, the new ideal way of
conducting farming both at the small scale and large scale levels in order to
minimize carbon emissions from agriculture and forestry which together
contribute about 31 per cent of the global emissions. As you might expect,
these new concepts will be spearheaded into fruition majorly by international
non-state actors who are sometimes accused of sidelining local non-state actors
as they seek to assist communities where they operate.
Until recently in the
agricultural sector, much effort has been driven towards climate change
adaptation while fewer resources and attention has been spent towards
mitigation and soil carbon sequestration potentials through sustainable
land-water management. However, a soil carbon project piloted in Western Kenya
among smallholder farmers has since been promising climate change mitigation in
agriculture intervention in the developing world. The Kenya Agricultural Carbon
Project (KACP) became the first soil carbon project in Africa to sign an
Emissions Reduction Purchase Agreement (ERPA) with the World Bank’s BioCarbon
Fund in November 2010. But not everybody is genuinely in interested in such
similar projects. Last year, it was reported
that in Cameroon, a certain foreign company has bought land somewhere in the
country in order to ‘sell’ the carbon in the soil and the trees to big companies
in Europe and North America.
The implementing
organization, a Swedish public benefit organization (the term non-governmental organization
is no longer being used here in Kenya) Vi Agroforestry is helping farmers adopt
sustainable agricultural land management (SALM) practices, such as reduced
tillage, use of cover crops and green manure, mulching, targeted application of
fertilizers and agroforestry. Statistics indicate that to date, some 15,000
farmers in 800 farmer groups have adopted SALM practices, which have been
applied to roughly 12,000 ha of degraded land. The organization targets to enroll
a total of 60,000 farmers and apply SALM practices on around 45,000 ha by 2016.
Vi Agroforestry estimates that this would result in reducing greenhouse gas
emissions by over 60,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e)
each year, while also restoring degraded land, boosting crop yields and
reducing the vulnerability of the farmers to the effects of climate change. This
if achieved will ultimately prove to be a significant game changer in the
field.
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