Agricultural Technologies for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Developing Countries
Policy Options for Innovation and Technology Diffusion
by Travis Lybbert and Daniel Sumner
ICTSD-IPC Platform on Climate Change, Agriculture and Trade Series • Policy Brief 6
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Agricultural Technologies for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Developing Countries_web PDF • 1.07 MBClimate has obvious and direct effects on agricultural production. Greenhouse gas (GHG) implications of agriculture are also obvious and large. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported that agriculture is responsible for over a quarter of total global greenhouse gas emissions. Given that agriculture’s share in global gross domestic product (GDP) is about 4 percent, these figures suggest that agriculture is highly GHG intensive. This paper describes the potential role innovative agricultural practices and technologies can play in climate change mitigation and adaptation and aims to address the question: what policy and institutional changes are needed to encourage the innovation and diffusion of these practices and technologies to developing countries? We focus on developing countries in general with some specific references to Africa.
Concerns about mitigating and adapting to climate change are renewing the impetus for investments in agricultural research and are emerging as additional innovation priorities. In the coming decades, the development and effective diffusion of new agricultural practices and technologies will largely shape how and how well farmers mitigate and adapt to climate change. This adaptation and mitigation potential is nowhere more pronounced than in developing countries where agricultural productivity remains low; poverty, vulnerability and food insecurity remain high; and the direct effects of climate change are expected to be especially harsh. Most new technologies change the use of farm inputs, often in ways that alter the impact of weather on production and of production on carbon emissions. We describe some technologies that seem particularly promising in mitigating or adapting to climate change and use these as a platform for exploring the policies and institutions necessary to support the development and diffusion of current technologies – and to provide incentives for technological breakthroughs in the future. While new traits, varieti es and crops will play an important role, the range of relevant practice and technologies is much broader than this, including water management, production practices, post-harvest technologies, information and forecasting, and insurance.
Creating the necessary agricultural technologies and harnessing them to enable developing countries to adapt their agricultural systems to changing climate will require innovations in policy and institutions as well. In this context, institutions and policies are important at multiple scales. Impediments to the development, diffusion and use of relevant technologies can surface at several levels – from the inception and innovation stages to the transfer of technologies and the access to agricultural innovations by vulnerable smallholders in developing countries.
Potential constraints to innovation involve both the private and public sectors in both developing and developed countries. While the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has been invaluable to developing countries as a source of agricultural innovation for nearly 40 years, many countries have a long history of large, direct government intervention in both input and output markets in agriculture that have stifled the formation of vibrant private firms and accompanying incentives to innovate.
The process of transferring agricultural innovations across agro-ecological and climatic zones is often subject to agronomic constraints. Agricultural biotechnology has relaxed some of these agronomic constraints, but it raises a new set of potential impediments in the form of biotechnology regulations. Although intellectual property (IP) can also constrain technology transfer, it is almost never the most important barrier. Where IP seems to pose a problem, recent institutional and legal innovations provide a point of departure for effective remedies.
Often, the most binding constraints occur at the adoption stage, with several factors potentially impeding poor farmers’ access to and use of new technologies. These include static, poorly functioning or poorly integrated input or output markets; weak local institutions and infrastructure; inadequate or ineffective extension systems; missing credit and insurance markets.
From these considerations, we derive six policy principles. (1) The best policy and institutional responses will enhance information flows, incentives and flexibility. (2) Policies and institutions that promote economic development and reduce poverty will often improve agricultural adaptation and may also pave the way for more effective climate change mitigation through agriculture. (3) Business as usual among the world’s poor is not adequate. (4) Existing technology options must be made more available and accessible without overlooking complementary capacity and investments. (5) Adaptation and mitigation in agriculture will require local responses, but effective policy responses must also reflect global impacts and inter-linkages. (6) Trade will play a critical role in both mitigation and adaptation, but will itself be shaped importantly by climate change.
These principles lead to several specific investments and policy priorities: (a) investing in public agricultural R&D in developed countries, (b) rebuilding and expanding public agricultural research capacity in developing countries, (c) harnessing agricultural biotechnology as a potentially important option, (d) encouraging complementarities between public and private agricultural research, helping to mitigate risk, (e) investing in better information and forecasts, (f ) supporting competitive & responsive agricultural markets, and (g) encouraging investments that improve spatial market integration.
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Solar Powered Drip Irrigation has shown benefits. If a finance method can be provided, loans supported also
following the Grameen Bank model to a large degree, the affordable lending can be repaid. This action as
a Sustainable Development in Rural Developments can
have the Inclusive Business approach with Contract Growing by the poor. The promotion of Plug In Hybrid
Electic Vehicles (PHEV) with a Biofuel motor for the
Biodiesel or Ethanol added will lower greenhouse gas
and contribute to the Millennium Development Goals. My
Team is directly involved in doing this in Africa. GM
has just produced a B-20 Truck Engine with Warrantee.
It is true that Climate Change has affected greatly the yields of crops in most rural communities engaged solely in subsistence food production to feed hungry families. Most modern technologies brought to solve farmer problems are quite technical and not user friendly. I wish that in the short term there could be more focus on weather forecasting and seasonal and daily prediction for communication to farmers to enable them take short term decisions on types of crops/varieties could be planted. This will cover the effects of daily and seasonal variations on crop yields and mitigate hunger conditions of farm families in the short term. This will help the farmers to decide on timeliness on specific farming activities in line with the seasonal forecast. This is in line with the global concern shown on hunger/ famine caused by hazzards of weather (e.g.drought and floods) and the survival rate of individuals in communities, especially women and children. Let the farmers/farming communities have simple weather forecasts to enable them succeed in their subsistence farming.
This does not mean that the broader, long-term issue of Climate change should not be tackled by Scientists to find sustainable solution to the Climate Change.
[...] Agricultural Technologies for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Developing Countries: Poli… [...]
The topic on “climate change and the role of agriculture in this regard” cannot be answered suitably without additional focus on the efforts now being undertaken to save the environment. The answer has to come from communities of tropical countries with basically agriculture oriented economy
These communities are losing their identity due to more and more concentration on advancement in industrialization, turning a blind eye to the basic sustaining factor, food. This trend is leading to the very brink of bankruptcy of food resource, even as we are witnessing unthinkable levels of malnutrition among children - besides starvation deaths- in several geographical areas. The situation is becoming more critical due to environmental change.
A belated focus on this subject will also help, directly and indirectly, in saving the globe from such problems like global warming, and alternative source for bio fuels in the energy sector.
The basic problem today, is the one relating to green house gases, which spirals into other problems connected with the environment in all its dimensions, starting from global warming.
Talking about green energy, the present day efforts of resorting to ethanol, wind or solar energy ( an urgent necessity of the hour), could at best be referred to as ‘ white energy’. Referring to them under ‘green energy’ is like conferring Honorary D. Lit on a person of eminence, which is more a conventional courtesy than true to its meaning! The true ‘green energy’ could be meaningful if only it comes from a naturally green source of plant origin, with all its blessings, which cannot be provided by the other sources of alternative energy. This is possible by resorting to plantations that could provide a green cover to earth and incidentally help eliminating green house gases from the atmosphere admitting, green house gases problem cannot be avoided with increasing need of industrialization and road transport. The other alternative sources of energy cannot help here.
Green energy programs through raising plantations of perennial non edible oil- seed producing plants, will help in cleansing the atmosphere and in the production of bio diesel, for direct use in the energy sector or in blending with fossil diesel in certain proportions, and to that extent minimizing use of fossil fuel. These programs could be planned on arid and semi arid lands without competing with regular agricultural crops raised on more fertile soils; suitable agricultural crops of short duration could also be raised in these plantations as inter crops, supplementing regular agricultural production. Such efforts will help in reducing the effects of global warming, thereby brightening the prospects for increased rainfall in tropical belts, it will also serve the cause of agricultural communities of the developing world by creating more job opportunities.
Our efforts to raise such plantations with wild and regular Castor plants along with short term crops like pulses and cotton as inter crops, have yielded good results. These trials were done as community development programs with the help of N G Os. Unfortunately, neither Govt. organizations nor the Corporate bodies are interested in encouraging such efforts with financial assistance, or as joint venture with N G Os and with farmers’ organizations.
The Corporates are more interested in quick-money oriented business enterprises, and not in socio-economic programs of this kind
B N Ramamurti
Consulting Agroeconomist
B-2 Sudarsan Garden
106, Velachery Road
Guindy, Chennai 600 032
I N D I A
Any effort to discuss this topic without referring to the already vast work on this subject (the IAASTD report from UN, WB, WHO, GEF, FAO, UNESCO) which has been endorsed by many countries in 2008 already, is doomed to be very partial. The work of NGO’s has indeed, like Mr. Ramamurti said, been grossly underestimated. It’s this work, like for instance, the story of the System of Rice Intensification (http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/), that is much more promising than a narrow focus on genetic research. Plant development is a function of genetics X environment. SRI practices in more than 40 countries show that focusing on the “environment” factor yields much greater results than a narrow focus on genetics. It is true however, that in terms of ‘trade interests’, only the genetics research offers perspectives for multinationals and governments with a short term profit focus. When considering the poor, the environment, and the quality of agricultural products on the contrary, focus on the ‘environment’ factor is much more adequate. That is the only reason ‘agro-ecological intensification’ is considered a nonissue in the conventional agricultural research establishment (which is paid largely by multinationals).