A man carries water through a busy alley in Kathmandu. Experts say water management is vital in South Asia due to erratic rain patterns. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
KATHMANDU, May 16 2013 (IPS)

With a combined population of over 1.7 billion, which includes some of the world’s poorest but also a sizeable middle class with a growing spending capacity, South Asia is a policymaker’s nightmare.

The region’s urban population is set to double by 2030, with India alone adding 90 million city dwellers to its metropolises since 2000.

Over 75 percent of South Asia’s residents live in rural areas, with agriculture accounting for 60 percent of the labour force, according to recent statistics released by the World Bank.

Thus the impact of changing weather patterns on this region is staggering.

In Sri Lanka, an island of 20 million, close to two million have been affected by prolonged drought and intermittent yet deadly floods in the last year.

When Cyclone Nilam slammed Southern India last November it left half a million hectares of agricultural land in tatters, over 1,300 small tanks damaged and an estimated 7,000 kilometres of roadways in dire need of repairs – all from just four days of heavy ran.

South Asia has always been a climatic hot spot. According to Pramod Aggarwal, South Asia principal researcher and regional programme leader for agriculture and food security for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), over 70 percent of the region is prone to drought, 12 percent to floods and eight percent to cyclones.

“Climate stress has always been normal (here); climate change will make things worse,” he said.

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that possible long-term impacts on the region include melting of glaciers in the Himalayas leading to intense flooding; coastal erosion as a result of sea-level rise; and enourmous stress on limited natural resources to support a growing urban population.

“South Asia is a very complex, complicated, vulnerable region,” Ganesh Shah, Nepal’s former minister of science and technology, told IPS, adding that as the effects of changing climate patterns increase, he and other policymakers will be forced to put political mistrust aside to achieve a common action plan.

W L Sumathipala, former head of Sri Lanka’s national Climate Change Unit and current advisor to the ministry of environment, told IPS the region is looking at a “very significant policy shift” towards better communication and sharing of technical know-how, to find common solutions to global warming.

Lessons in the agricultural sector

As warmer weather and ever more frequent natural disasters batter this region, populations have been forced to improvise and innovate in order to survive.

Aggarwal cited the example of Indian apple farmers discovering new growing areas on higher grounds in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, after rising temperatures drove them from their traditional farmlands.

He also pointed out that moderate increases in carbon dioxide concentrations can result in 20 to 30-percent higher yields of plants categorised as “C3” such as wheat, rice, potatoes or yams, all of which make up large portions of the South Asian diet.

Still, these “advantages” will be manifest only in the short term, until around 2030, after which point we can “expect a larger negative impact,” he said.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures could lead to yield losses of between seven and 10 percent for other, less resistant, crop varieties. Bleaker forecasts predict that many South Asian crops will experience 30 percent decreases in yield by the middle of this century.

To avoid this scenario, Aggarwal feels that research generated through such agencies as the New Delhi-based Indian Agricultural Research Institute – with its controlled environment facilities that recreate possible future climate scenarios and assess the real-time impact on crops – needs to be shared.

“We have to understand the opportunities and exploit them,” the scientist said, adding that the impact of changing climate patterns is likely to be more pronounced in tropical countries, which will also experience food shortages.

For years South Asia has been teetering on the brink of a food crisis: according to John Stein, sector director for sustainable development for the South Asia region of the World Bank, the region is already home to half the stunted and wasted children in the world. This will likely increase as a result of climate change.

Thus Aggarwal also stressed that “preventive action” is needed, such as identifying crops that can perform better under warmer temperatures and new locations for growing climate-resistant crops. This information must then be quickly disseminated, he said.

Water, water everywhere

Besides agriculture, another major issue for the region is water management, which will have to be urgently addressed in light of “changing monsoon patterns,” Sumathipala said. Already, 20 percent of the region’s residents do not have access to safe, clean water.

Water management becomes even more complex in the Indian Subcontinent where rivers flow across national boundaries, such as the Ganges, which originates in the Indian Himalayas and flows through Bangladesh before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

Sumathipala believes better sharing of monsoon-related forecasts, generated mostly in India, could be a first step towards greater climate security in the region. Just last month the Indian Meteorological Department announced that it was enhancing its pre-monsoon forecasting capacities.

South Asia is also under threat from short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) such as black carbon, which have a shorter life span than CO2 but are thought to be responsible for about a third of current global warming.

According to the World Bank, black carbon “also influences cloud formation and impacts regional circulation and rainfall patterns such as the monsoon in South Asia,” as well as outdoor air pollution.

“The four countries with the highest air pollution impact on human health,” wrote World Bank Senior Economist Maria Sarraf earlier this month, “are all in South Asia: India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan.”

South Asia currently accounts for around 10 percent of global emissions, of which India is responsible for between seven and eight percent.

Despite all this evidence on the need for stronger regional cooperation, experts like Shah know how difficult it is to get countries to come together. Platforms have already been put in place, especially through bodies like the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), but very little has been achieved.

He puts the lack of action down to lack of pressure, stressing, “Climate activists need to be raising this (issue) at each SAARC summit,” the last of which concluded in Addu City, the southernmost atoll of the Maldives, in 2011.

Farmers in Indonesia’s West Java province follow instructions on the government’s “integrated planting calendar”. Credit: Kanis Dursin/IPS

By Kanis Dursin
JAKARTA, Mar 29 2013 (IPS)

Last October, at the beginning of Indonesia’s rainy season, a 37-year-old farmer named Herinurdin took a leap of faith. Instead of planting corn in his entire 1.3-hectare rainfed farm in the Sukabumi town of West Java, as his family had done for generations, he sowed 1,600 square metres worth of rice instead.

In November he ploughed another 700 square metres and by December he had seeded the remainder of his land in this densely populated province, some 120 kilometres south of the capital Jakarta.

“The rice (planted in December) is now flowering,” Herinurdin told IPS. “I harvested 750 kilogrammes of unhusked rice from that 1,600 square metres.”

Until last year, he had always used the farm for corn or peanut “because I did not know that rice could grow in the rainfed field”.

With rice selling for 0.36 dollars per kilogramme, against the going rate for corn of 0.8 dollars per kilogramme, Herinurdin took in more money this year than he can ever remember.

Herinurdin is one of the earliest beneficiaries of a government programme launched last year aimed at easing the impacts of climate change on the roughly 41.2 million farmers spread across this archipelago.

Indonesia has been scrambling to find solutions to irregular rain patterns that have made farmers’ lives a living hell. Excessive rain, floods, and prolonged drought ferquently hit the world’s largest archipelago, home to 242 million people, undermining national food security programmes.

Agriculture plays an important role in Indonesia’s economy, with around 18 million farmer households and five million peasants dependent on the sector for livelihood, according to the state Central Statistics Agency (BPS).

“The planting calendar is designed to deal with adverse impacts of climate change, particularly changes in rain patterns that directly affect the planting season,” Eleonora Runtunuwu, a researcher with IAARD, told IPS.

It also contains information about suitable planting weeks for each of Indonesia’s 6,501 districts in 33 provinces; crops and seed varieties appropriate for certain planting seasons; fertilisers required for recommended crops; and potential scourges such as pest attacks.

In drawing up the calendar, the IAARD, which falls under the Ministry of Agriculture, takes into account weather forecasts issued by Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BKMG), the agriculture ministry’s Automatic Weather Station, and the Predictive Ocean Atmosphere Model of Australia.

The agency divides the year into three planting periods: the rainy season that runs from October to February; the first dry season from March to May; and finally, the second dry season from June to September. The calendars are issued in August, February, and May respectively.

Besides publishing the calendar online, the ministry has dispatched tens of thousands of field experts to advise farmers on what crops to plant, how to take care of them and when to fertilise.

But results have so far been patchy, and the iniative has illicted harsh reviews across the country.

Flaws abound

Nandang Sunandar, head of the West Java Agricultural Research and Development Agency (BPTP), praised the planting calendar but lamented the fact that the government cannot force farmers to follow the guidelines.

“The calendar only gives recommendations to farmers on crops, seeds, and fertiliser. Farmers have the final say; they may or may not follow (our) advice,” Nandang told IPS from Bandung, the provincial capital of West Java.

Others, like Tejo Wahyu Jatmiko, coordinator of the Alliance for Prosperous Villages, charge that the calendar has not been communicated adequately to farmers.

“The more detailed the weather information is, the better for farmers and the calendar is doing just that – however, farmers have little knowledge about the calendar, forcing them to stick to traditional schedules that result in crop failures due to prolonged drought or excessive rains,” he said.

“Most farmers here are following our traditional planting calendar, which we believe to be more reliable for our area,” said Astono. Known locally as ‘pranta mangsa’ this calendar takes its cues from animal behaviours, plants, the sun’s position, and ancient wisdom on astronomy.

“Our calendar takes into account not only the beginning or end of the rainy season and rain intensity, but also cycles of pest and rat attacks based on our experiences,” he told IPS, adding that some farmers who follow the government’s calendar have often experienced crop failures due to unanticipated pest attacks.

Experts who believe farmers themselves should have been consulted in the development of the calendar say that traditional wisdom is being lost.

“Farmers should be involved in designing food-related programmes because they have knowledge of the local environment,” Said Abdullah, manager of the People’s Coalition Network for Food Security, told IPS.

Another hurdle to full implementation of the planting calendar is a shortage of seed.

“Often farmers simply cannot find seeds recommended by the calendar, prompting them to use any seed available in the market and completely ignoring our advice,” Nandang said.

According to Abdullah, few farmers can afford to buy the subsidised fertiliser and seeds recommended by the calendar. “In the end, they borrow money from loan sharks,” he said, which pushes prices even higher.

Though the government has assigned state-owned enterprises to distribute seeds and fertiliser throughout the country, the combination of poor coordination and extreme weather results in late deliveries, causing farmers to miss crucial planting dates.

“All seeds and fertilisers are imported from Java. When the sea is too rough for cargo ships to sail, we have no access to recommended seeds, (leaving) us with no choice but to use any low-quality seeds available,” said Adrianus Asia Sidot, a farmer from the Landak regency, a major rice-producing area in West Kalimantan.

Nandang also said that a dearth of field officials to explain the planting calendar and assist farmers in the lead-up to the harvesting period also slows down effective implentation.

“West Java province has only 6,000 field officials, far below its real need of at least 10,000,” he said.

Senior field official Titiek Maryati of Majalengka, West Java, added that his regency relied on just 395 field officials overseeing 2,336 farmers’ groups spread across over 100,000 hectares of rice fields in 2012.

(END)