Farmer Crescencio Hernández checks seedlings in his chinampa in the San Gregorio Atlapulco collective land, in the Xochimilco municipality, in the south of the extensive metropolitan area of Mexico City. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy
SAN GREGORIO ATLAPULCO, Mexico , Sep 18 2024 (IPS)

Mexican Crescencio Hernández orders radishes, herbs and lettuce for shipment to an alternative market in west-central Mexico City.

The vegetables have been harvested from his chinampa, a pre-Hispanic wetland farming system that survives in three boroughs in the south of the Mexican capital, albeit surrounded by multiple threats.

Hernández, 44, married without children, attributed the success of the traditional technique to good practices. “We take care that there is no sewage in the canals, no construction in this area, we don’t use agrochemicals and reforest every year,” the owner of the Crescen de la Chinampa brand explained during a tour of his chinampa with IPS.

With three workers, Hernández harvests about 500 kilograms of vegetables each week, including tomatoes, peppers, chilli peppers and spinach, from a chinampa he owns and another he borrows in the town of San Gregorio Atlapulco, home to some 24,000 people and part of the borough of Xochimilco, known as ‘the land of flowers’.“We take care that there is no sewage in the canals, that there is no construction in this area, we don't use agrochemicals, we reforest every year": Crescencio Hernández.

Originally from the municipality of Acambay, in the state of Mexico (neighbouring Mexico City), Hernández has been a chinampa farmer (chinampero) for 28 years, an activity he shares with his brother, who rents another of these plots of land for agricultural production.

In 2017, he abandoned the use of agrochemicals and now uses compost from the organic matter produced by the farm. In June, he installed a greenhouse inside the chinampa to plant tomato, lettuce and cucumber.

“The basis of the system is water, it sustains it. I diversify production to meet the demand, as I am asked for several products, and also to take care of the soil,” he said.

But what he and other chinampa farmers protect, is destroyed in nearby areas, with the complicity of the authorities, who are responsible for protecting these unique sites.

Irregular urbanisation, the use of pesticides, the effects of the climate crisis, over-exploitation of the aquifer and neglect have dug their daggers into the bowels of the chinampa, according to a study by the World Cultural and Natural Heritage Zone Authority (AZP) in Xochimilco, Tláhuac and Milpa Alta.

The AZP, established in 2014, manages the preservation of the wetland’s special ecosystem in order to maintain the World Heritage designation.

Chinampa farmers in the municipality of Xochimilco, in the south of Mexico City. Credit: Fundación Tortilla

Ambiguity

The original peoples used chinampas, , a term that comes from chinampi, which in the indigenous Nahuatl language means ‘in the fence of reeds’, long before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 15th century.

The technique creates small, rectangular gardens in the wetlands of the micro-region, by means of fences made of ahuejote (willow) stakes, a tree typical of this ecosystem with the virtue of tolerating excess water.

The bottom of the chinampa is rich in mud and organic waste, which provide nutrients for the growth of plants, irrigated with water from the canals, in one of the most studied areas in the centre of the country.

The chinampas are the vegetable garden that partially feeds the 22 million people of Mexico City and its metropolitan area.

The chinampas system retains water, produces fish, vegetables, flowers and medicinal plants, and saves water compared to traditional irrigation, with a network of navigable canals of some 135 kilometres.

Luis Zambrano, doctor in basic ecology at the Institute of Biology de of the public National Autonomous University of Mexico, believes chinampas have had their ups and downs.

“There are chinamperos who… want to work the way they used to work, and that helps resilience and local food production. But it’s getting worse, because urbanisation, such as houses, football pitches and night clubs, is gaining ground,” he told IPS.

This, he said, because “Xochimilco is very threatened by local public policies that promote these activities, when the land’s vocation is to be productive”.

San Gregorio Atlapulco, part of the municipality of Xochimilco, in the south of Mexico City, lost conservation land between 2012 and 2024, victim of urbanization and the installation of greenhouses, as shown in the two satellite images from each of those years. Credit: Google Earth

In 1992, the Priority Zone for the Preservation and Conservation of Ecological Balance y was established as a Natural Protected Area (NPA), which covers the ejidos (community farms on public land under concession) of Xochimilco and San Gregorio Atlapulco, with a total of 2,507 hectares.

The chinampera area has 1,723 hectares, equivalent to 68 % of the NPA.

The borough hosts three zones in the ejidos Xochimilco, San Gregorio Atlapulco and San Luis Tlaxialtemalco, which still have canals and host 2,824 active chinampas out of the 18,524 existing ones.

Of the active points, 60% apply the chinampero system, 12.5% host greenhouses, recreational sites and football fields, 9.4% are dedicated to pastures and 16% were converted into residential areas.

In Xochimilco there are 864 active chinampas out of 15,864 registered over 1,059 hectares, corresponding to 47% of the total surface of the traditional system. This area preserves the largest number of chinampas that have potential for restoration.

San Gregorio Atlapulco has 1,530 operational chinampas out of 2,060 registered, over an area of 484 hectares (22% of the total), which makes it the locality with the greatest presence of these active sites.

San Luis Tlaxialtemalco is the smallest, with 103 hectares (5% of the territory), and 430 active chinampas out of 600 registered.

Xochimilco, with just over 442,000 people in an area of about 125 square kilometres, has been a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) World Natural and Cultural Heritage site since 1987.

In addition, its lake system has been part of the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, known as the Ramsar Convention, since 2004, especially as a habitat for waterfowl.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) classifies the chinampas as part of the Ingenious Systems of World Agricultural Heritage, as they conserve agrobiodiversity, adapt farmers to climate change, guarantee food security and combat poverty.

But these recognitions have not prevented the destruction, and restoration has been an ever-present promise, always unfulfilled.

The protected natural area has lost at least 173 hectares in recent years due to urbanisation, construction of greenhouses and spaces for mass events, such as festivals, according to calculations by Zambrano and his scientific team. The ANP’s 2018 management plan bans those activities.

Compounding the despair, in 2021 the capital’s government built a vehicular bridge over a wetland, which increases the threats to the ecosystem and has led to several complaints to Unesco, which have yet to be resolved.

The canals between the chinampas provide sediment, the base for planting, and water for irrigating vegetable crops, in a wetland located in three localities in the south of Mexico City. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

A possible future

In this adverse context, the chinamperos also sow optimism that flows through the canals of the area.

Biologist Zambrano leads a project that includes research, maintenance of the sites and protection of the axolotl, working with 25 farmers and 40 chinampas that distribute their produce to shops and restaurants with the ‘chinampera label’.

In 2024, the restoration project has a budget of around USD 250,000 from private donations.

The amphibian axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is endemic to the area and is at risk of extinction due to habitat loss.

At the moment, they are analysing profitability and increased production, in order to encourage more farmers to join.

Farmer Hernández highlighted collective work and government support as hopeful elements.

“I see solutions, but it depends on the government giving money. We need farmers to be aware of water use,” he said.

Zambrano called for a ‘social force’ to compel the regional and national governments to restore Xochimilco.

“Today they need subsidies, the value is very low and competition is high. This is a race against the dynamics we have brought in the last decades,” he argued.

He predicted a future with possibilities. “There are going to be places crowded with tourists, a lot of urbanisation and deterioration. But if we manage to change the balance and increase production, if the government supports it, we could have a very profitable area,” he concluded.

Zimbabwean farmer Handrixious Zvomarima (centre) and family members admiring their cowpea crop in Shamva District, planted using conservation agriculture techniques. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
JOHANNESBURG, Jan 9 2018 (IPS)

Conditioned that ploughing is the sure way to produce crops, Zimbabwean farmer Handrixious Zvomarima surprised himself by trying a different method. He planted cowpea seeds directly without tilling the land. It worked.

The new method tripled Zvomarima’s cowpea yield when many farmers did not harvest a crop following the El Nino-induced drought which affected more than 40 million people in Southern Africa.Some of the technologies that more farmers need include access to resilient seeds and livestock breeds, timely weather information and weather index insurance.

Zvomarima from Shamva District, 120 km northwest of Harare, adopted the water-saving method known as ‘no till farming’. This is part of the Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) practices and approaches developed and promoted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This model of climate-smart agriculture seeks to sustainably increase productivity and incomes while helping farmers adapt to and become more resilient to the effects of climate change. CSA practices also aim to reduce and remove agriculture’s greenhouse gases emissions, where possible.

With policies, CSA practices pay

“Policymakers have a role to play in climate-smart agro-technological innovation; the researchers suggest traditional supply-side measures and equivalent demand-side measures (such as tax breaks) could reduce cost and increase return on investment for users,” said Dr. Federica Matteoli, project Manager at FAO Climate Change and Environment Division in Rome.

She shared a case study of Italy’s embrace of CSA at the 4th Global Science Conference on Climate Smart Agriculture in Johannesburg, South Africa in November 2017. Matteoli said policies need to be compatible with CSA objectives and their ability to boost the development and adoption of CSA technological innovation.

Italy was currently at the forefront of promoting research and developing scientifically supported policies related to climate change adaptation and mitigation measures, Matteoli said. At the same time the country was promoting the application of the principles of CSA to locally building resilience throughout the food system.

Matteoli said cooperation and knowledge sharing can promote an enabling policy environment at national and local level in promoting CSA. Italy has promoted conservation agriculture, no tillage practices, climate-smart production systems and knowledge transfer which have collectively been called the Italian Blue Agriculture.

For an enabling environment to promote CSA, potential users must be engaged with earlier in the innovation process, ensuring sharing of information and linkage with universities, technical bodies and national institutions. In addition, there is need for appropriate education programmes and awareness campaigns and the identification of knowledge needs for CSA and priority areas for intervention using consultative and participatory approaches, Matteoli said.

CSA adoption down, time to scale up

Researchers say CSA techniques are effective but there is urgency to quickly spread out the practices, innovations and technologies as climate change threaten agriculture productivity. Some of the technologies that more farmers need include access to resilient seeds and livestock breeds, timely weather information and weather index insurance.

Scaling up CSA needs bold and inclusive policies which are still lacking several decades after CSA approaches were introduced. Researchers and development actors argue that alternative farming methods have been proven to help farmers cope with weather variability and still harvest crops even in poor rainfall.

Another Zimbabwean farmer, Fungisai Masanga (44) saved 150 dollars in labour in the last season after adopting conservation agriculture, another approach of climate smart agriculture. She intercropped maize with nitrogen fixing cowpeas, pigeon pea and lablab.

“This system has allowed us to have more crops in the same field,” says Masanga, a mother of five children. “We have harvested some of the cowpeas which my family has enjoyed and we are soon to harvest maize too, all from the small field where we did not have to plough.”

Zimbabwe has a national investment framework which has recognized CA as a sustainable agriculture intervention and as a tool in climate change adaptation. Promoters of conservation agriculture laud it for saving soil moisture, enabling farmers to plant crops earlier and produce more yield and income in 2-5 cropping seasons.

However, mass adoption of these production changing innovations is not happening across Southern Africa, much to the chagrin of scientists. One reason being the promotion of manual CA systems to farmers, competition for crop residues with livestock, lack of access to appropriate machinery, and increased need for weed control in the first cropping seasons after conversion.

Many innovative climate-smart agriculture practices have been developed in Africa with the capacity to increase productivity and build resilience. These are largely unknown and therefore not adopted, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) found in a 2015 study.

Dr. Christian Thierfelder from CIMMYT explains the multiple benefits of ‘climate-smart agriculture’, in conservation agriculture plots with a maize-cowpea intercropping system outside Harare, Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Agriculture on the global agenda

Several countries who signed the Paris Agreement in 2015 have included agriculture as both an adaptation and mitigation strategy on climate change in their national development plans and climate-related strategies including the Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) and Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs).

The United Nations recently agreed to discuss issues related to agriculture, paving the way for the promotion of CSA approaches such as heat adapted crops and weather index insurance for crops and inputs.

This actually means that if one has policy that supports climate smart technologies then one needs to tackle a wide range of policy issues, says Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

Campbell cites improving the regulatory framework for index-based insurance, enhancing the ICT regulations so they can foster the spread of mobile phones and connectivity and enhancing the business operating framework so that private sector can function easily.

“Scaling up is crucially dependent on government, providing an enabling policy environment for farmers and business,” Campbell told IPS. “Research also needs to be changed, to be much more connected to the end-users of stakeholders – research must be directed to the issues that stakeholders see as priorities.”

Show us the money

Food security is an urgent priority but agriculture has been the poor cousin when it comes to investment both in research and innovations compared to other sectors. Campbell predicts a slow process in agriculture investment.

“Agriculture is also to blame – the sector lags behind in terms of its excitement around innovation – when one thinks of climate smart solutions, the public think of electric cars, wind energy,” he said, adding that, “Agriculture needs to up its game on innovation and communicating about the exciting things that are indeed happening in agricultural innovation.”

Upping agriculture’s game needs money, which the sector does not have.  Global costs of adaptation in the agricultural sector have been estimated at 7 billion dollars per year to 12.6 billion per year but only. 2.5 percent of public climate finance goes to agriculture. The majority of the needs for finance will have to be derived from private sources, making it imperative to get markets in agriculture working in Africa, currently a net food importer spending more than 50 billion dollars annually.

“Without a conducive policy environment, we cannot achieve much,” argues Oluyede Ajayi, Senior Programme Coordinator of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), an ACP-EU institution based in The Netherlands, which has just launched a 1.5 million Euro regional project to help more than 150,000 smallholder farmers in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe address the impacts of climate change.

Stable and clear CSA policies matter in attracting public investment in public goods such as weather stations, data quality and training, Ajayi says while highlighting the need by researchers and development workers to effectively engage in CSA policies by understanding the political process, and identify policy champions and shapers that could help in policy engagement.

“We need to create an enabling policy environment with government and private sectors cooperating in order to upscale CSA,” said Ajayi. “We have to make sure that within policies, we emphasize empowering women and youths.”

The challenge to science and policy makers is how to bring the science/policy nexus and to directly bear on accelerating and expanding the evolution, adaptation and uptake of climate smart farming practices, Ibrahim Mayaki, CEO of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), who gave a keynote address at the 4th Global Science Conference on Climate Smart Agriculture in South Africa last November.

According to the Malabo Montpellier Panel – a group of international agriculture experts guiding policy choices on food and nutritional security in Africa – examples and innovations in climate smart agriculture have multiple benefits. For example, agroforestry helps to diversify the produce of farms, improves soil quality and enhances resilience. Solar irrigation enables smallholder farmers to increase their yields without contributing to emissions while the use of stress tolerant seed varieties counter climate change, are more nutritious and are often more pest and disease resistant.

Climate Smart Agriculture not smart?

The concept of ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ was originally developed by the FAO and the World Bank, claiming that “triple wins” in agriculture could be achieved in mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions), adaptation (supporting crops to grow in changing climate conditions), and increasing crop yields. The FAO views CSA as an approach for developing agricultural strategies for food security under climate change.

But the global civil society organization, ActionAid, says there is confusion on the meaning and benefits of climate smart agriculture.

A number of industrialised countries (the US in particular), along with a number of agribusiness corporations, are now the most enthusiastic promoters of the concept, ActionAid says.

“But increasingly civil society and farmer organisations express concerns that the term can be used to green-wash industrial agricultural practices that will harm future food production, said ActionAid in briefing.

ActionAid contends that some governments and NGOs also worry that pressure to adopt Climate Smart Agriculture will translate into obligations for developing countries’ food systems to take on an unfair mitigation burden. They point out that their agricultural systems have contributed the least to the problem, but that mitigation obligations could limit their ability to effectively adapt to the climate challenges ahead.

“Ultimately, there are no means to ensure that ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ is actually smart for the climate, for agriculture, or for farmers,” says ActionAid.

While there is debate on the benefits and constraints of climate smart agriculture technologies, its techniques such as conservation agriculture have improved the productivity for farmers like Zvomarima.

“CA has produced good results for me and as I apply its methods more, I am convinced my crop yields can only get better.”

Minimum tillage (ripping) in Kasiya Camp, Zambia. Credit: Crissy Mupuchi/DAPP

By Friday Phiri
PEMBA, Zambia, Nov 7 2017 (IPS)

As governments gather in Bonn, Germany for the next two weeks to hammer out a blueprint for implementation of the global climate change treaty signed in Paris in 2015, a major focus will be on emissions reductions to keep the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C by 2020.

While achieving this goal requires serious mitigation ambitions, developing country parties such as Zambia have also been emphasising adaptation as enshrined in Article 2 (b) of the Paris Agreement: Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development, in a manner that does not threaten food production.“My skepticism turned into real optimism when the two hectares I cultivated under conservation farming redeemed me from a near disaster when the five hectares under conventional farming completely failed." --farmer Damiano Malambo

The emphasis by developing country parties on this aspect stems from the fact that negative effects of climate change are already taking a toll on people’s livelihoods. Prolonged droughts and flash floods have become common place, affecting Agricultural production and productivity among other ecosystem based livelihoods, putting millions of people’s source of food and nutrition in jeopardy.

It is worth noting that Zambia’s NDC focuses on adaptation. According to Winnie Musonda of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), “There are three mitigation components—renewable energy development, conservation farming and forest management, while adaptation, which has a huge chunk of the support programme, has sixteen components all of which require implementation.”

This therefore calls for the tireless efforts of all stakeholders, especially mobilisation and leveraging of resources, and community participation anchored on the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) approach.

Considering the country’s ambitious emission cuts, conservation agriculture offers a good starting point for climate resilience in agriculture because it has legs in both mitigation and adaptation, as agriculture is seen as both a contributor as well as a solution to carbon emissions.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), Conservation Agriculture (CA) is an approach to managing agro-ecosystems for improved and sustained productivity, increased profits and food security, while preserving and enhancing the resource base and the environment. Minimum tillage, increased organic crop cover and crop rotation are some of the key principles of Conservation Agriculture.

As a key stakeholder in agriculture development, FAO is doing its part by supporting the Ministry of Agriculture in the implementation of the Conservation Agriculture Scaling Up (CASU) project. Targeting to benefit a total of 21,000 lead farmers and an additional 315,000 follower farmers, the project’s overall goal is to contribute to reduced hunger, improved food security, nutrition and income while promoting sustainable use of natural resources in Zambia.

So what is emerging after implementation of the 11 million Euro project? “The acid test was real in 2015 when the rainfall pattern was very bad,” says Damiano Malambo, a CA farmer of Pemba district in Southern Zambia. “My skepticism turned into real optimism when the two hectares I cultivated under conservation farming redeemed me from a near disaster when the five hectares under conventional farming completely failed.”

The bad season that farmer Malambo refers to was characterized by El Nino, which affected agricultural production for most African countries, especially in the Southern African region, leaving millions of people without food. But as the case was with farmer Malambo, CA farmers thrived amidst these tough conditions as the CASU project discovered in its snap assessment.

“CA has proved to be more profitable than conventional agriculture”, says Precious Nkandu Chitembwe, FAO Country Communications Officer. “In seasons when other farmers have struggled, we have seen our CA farmers emerging with excellent results”, she adds, pointing out that the promotion of legumes and a ready market has improved household nutrition and income security for the farmers involved in CA.

And farmer Malambo is a living testimony. “In the last two seasons, I have doubled my cattle herd from 30 to 60, I have bought two vehicles and my overall annual production has increased from about 150 to 350 by 50kg bags.

“I am particularly happy with the introduction of easy to grow cash crops such as cowpeas and soybeans which are not only money spinners but also nutritious for my family—see how healthy this boy is from soya-porridge,” says Malambo pointing at his eight-year-old grandchild.

While Zambia boasts a stable food security position since the introduction of government farmer input subsidies in early 2000s, the country’s record on nutrition leaves much to be desired. Hence, the recent ranking of the country in the top ten hungriest countries in the world on the Global Hunger Index (GHI) may not come as a surprise, as the most recent Zambia Demographic and Health survey shows that 40 per cent of children are stunted.

The GHI, now in its 12th year, ranks countries based on four key indicators—undernourishment, child mortality, child wasting and child stunting. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, of the countries for which scores could be calculated, the top 10 countries with the highest level of hunger are Central African Republic, Chad, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Zambia, Yemen, Sudan, Liberia, Niger and Timor-Leste.

“The results of this year’s Global Hunger Index show that we cannot waiver in our resolve to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goal of zero hunger by 2030,” says Shenggen Fan, director general of IFPRI, adding that progress made since 2000 is threatened, emphasising the need to establish resilience for communities at risk of disruption to their food systems from weather shocks or conflict.

It is worth noting that Zambia has recognized the challenges of nutrition and has put in place several multi-sectoral measures such as the First 1000 Most Critical Days campaign—an integrated approach to address stunting by tackling both direct and indirect causes of under-nutrition. Unlike the standalone strategies of the past, the 1000 Most Critical Days campaign brings together all key Ministries and stakeholders of which the Ministry of Agriculture is a key stakeholder and entry point.

And the implementation of CA, of which crop diversification is a key principle, is one of the Ministry’s contributions to the overall objective of fighting under-nutrition. As alluded to by farmer Malambo, promotion of crops such as soy beans and cowpeas among other food legumes is critical to achieving household nutrition security.

“With a known high demand for good nutrition in the country, especially for rural populations, soybean and other food legumes offer an opportunity to meet this demand—from soybean comes soy milk which is as competitive as animal milk in terms of nutrition, use in the confectionary industry and other numerous value addition options at household level for nutritional diversity,” explains Turnbull Chama, Technical Assistant, Climate Change component at the FAO Country Office.

While CA is a proven approach to climate resilience in agricultural production for food and nutrition security, its adoption has not been without hitches. According to a study conducted by the Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute (IAPRI), adoption rates for Conservation Agriculture in Zambia are still very low.

The study, which used data from the 2015 national representative rural household survey, found that only 8.8% of smallholder households adopted CA in the 2013/14 season. The report notes, however, that social factors, such as belief in witchcraft and prayer as enhancement of yields, were found to influence decision-making considerably.

But for the Southern Province Principal Agricultural Officer in the Ministry of Agriculture, Paul Nyambe, CA adoption should not be measured in a generic manner.

“The package for conservation agriculture is huge, if you measure all components as a package, adoption is low but if you looked at the issues of tillage or land preparation, you will find that the adoption rates are very high,” he says. “So, that’s why sometimes you hear of stories of poor adoption because there are several factors that determine the adoption of various principles within the package of conservation agriculture.”

Agreeing with these sentiments, Douty Chibamba, a lecturer at the University of Zambia Department of Geography and Environmental studies, offers this advice.

“It would be thus important for future policies and donor projects to allow flexibility in CA packaging because farmers make decisions to adopt or not based on individual components of CA and not CA as a package,” says Chibamba, who is also chairperson of the Advisory and Approvals committee of the Zambia Civil Society Environment Fund phase two, funded by the Finnish Embassy and managed by Panos Institute Southern Africa under its (CBNRM) forum.

This year’s World Food Day was themed around investing in food security and rural development to change the future of migration—which has over the years been proved to be as a result of the former. And FAO Country Representative George Okechi stresses that his organization is committed to supporting Zambia in rural development and food security to reduce rural-urban drift.

“With our expertise and experience, working closely with the Ministry of Agriculture, we continue providing policy support to ensure that farmers get desired services for rural development,” says Okechi.

“We are also keen to help farmers cope with effects of climate change which make people make a move from rural areas to urban cities in search of opportunities,” he added, in apparent reference to Climate Smart Agriculture initiatives that FAO is implementing in Zambia, among which is CASU.

Onay Martínez holds a sugar-apple on his farm, Tierra Brava, in western Cuba, where he practices conservation agriculture and has turned this sustainable system that minimally disturbs the soil into a model in his country. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
LOS PALACIOS, Cuba, Aug 10 2017 (IPS)

At the entrance, the Tierra Brava farm looks like any other family farm in the rural municipality of Los Palacios, in the westernmost province of Cuba. But as you drive in, you see that the traditional furrows are not there, and that freshly cut grass covers the soil.

“For more than five years we’ve been practicing conservation agriculture (CA),” Onay Martínez, who works 22 hectares of state-owned land, told IPS.

He was referring to a specific kind of agroecology which, besides not using chemicals, diversifies species on farms and preserves the soil using plant coverage and no plowing.

“In Cuba, this system is hardly practiced,” lamented the farmer, who is cited as an example by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of integral and spontaneous application of CA, which Cuban authorities began to include in their policies in 2016.

This fruit tree orchard in the province of Pinar del Río, worked by four farmhands, is the only example of CA reported at the moment, and symbolises the step that Cuba’s well-developed agroecological movement is ready to take towards this sustainable system of farming. The Agriculture Ministry already has a programme to extend it on a large scale.

FAO defines CA as “an approach to managing agro-ecosystems for improved and sustained productivity, increased profits and food security while preserving and enhancing the resource base and the environment. CA is characterised by three linked principles, namely: Continuous minimum mechanical soil disturbance; Permanent organic soil cover; Diversification of crop species grown in sequences and/or associations.”

Because of the small number of farms using the technique, there are no estimates yet of the amount of land in Cuba that use the basic technique of no-till farming, which is currently expanding in the Americas and other parts of the world.

CA, which uses small machinery such as no-till planters, has spread over 180 million hectares worldwide. Latin America accounts for 45 per cent of the total, the United States and Canada 42 per cent, Australia 10 per cent, and countries in Europe, Africa and Asia 3.6 per cent.

The world leaders in the adoption of this conservationist system are South America: Brazil, where it is used on 50 per cent of farmland, and Argentina and Paraguay, with 60 per cent each.

And Argentina and Brazil, the two agro-exporter powers in the region, are aiming to extend it to 85 per cent of cultivated lands in less than a decade.

Sheep are raised for meat on the Tierra Brava farm, which also produces fruit, expensive and scarce in Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“In conservation agriculture we found the basis for development because it allowed us to achieve goals in adverse conditions,” said Martínez, a computer specialist who discovered CA when in 2009 he and his brother started to study how to reactivate lands that had been idle for 25 years and were covered by weeds.

A worker operates a kind of mower characteristic of this type of agriculture to clear the paths in Tierra Brava, which has no electricity or irrigation system. The cut grass is thrown in the same direction to facilitate the creation of organic compost.

“There are places on the farm, such as the plantation of soursop (Annona muricata), where you walk and you feel a soft step in the ground,” Martínez said, citing an example of the recovery of the land achieved thanks to the fact that “no tilling is used and the soil coverage is not removed.”

Focused on the production of expensive and scarce fruit in Cuba, the farm in 2016 produced 87 tons, mainly of mangos, avocados and guavas, in addition to 2.7 tons of sheep meat and 600 kilos of rabbit.

Now they are building a dam to practice aquaculture and are starting to sell soursop, a fruit nearly missing in local markets.

Mandarin orange, canistel (Pouteria campechiana), coconut, tamarind, cashew, West Indian cherry (Malpighia emarginata), mamey apple (Mammea americana), plum, cherry, sugar apple (Annona squamosa), cherimoya (Annona cherimola) and papaya are some of the other fruit trees growing on the family farm, until now for self-consumption, diversification or small-scale, experimental production.

An assortment of fruit grown on the Tierra Brava farm in Los Palacios, in the western Cuban province of Pinar del Río. In the cooperative of which it forms part, farmers aspire to build a processing plant to sell “healthy fruit” to tourists. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“Rotating crops is hard and requires a lot of training and precision, but CA is also special because it allows you time to be with your family,” said Martínez, referring to another of the benefits also mentioned by specialists.

FAO’s representative in Cuba, German agronomist Theodor Friedrich, is one of the staunch advocates of CA around the world, based on years of research.

“Agroecology, as it was understood in Cuba in the past, has excluded the aspect of healthy soil and its biodiversity,” he told IPS in an interview. “Now the government recognises that the move towards Conservation Agriculture fills in the gaps of the past, in order to achieve true agroecology.”

Friedrich said that in this Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million people, CA is new, but “several pilot projects have been carried out, and there is evidence that it works.”

In October 2016, Cuba laid out a roadmap to implement CA around the country, after an international consultation supported by FAO. And in July a special group was set up within the Agriculture Ministry to promote CA.

“CA has not been immediately adopted on a large-scale around the country,” said Friedrich. “But as of 2018, the growth of the area under CA is expected to be much faster than in countries where this system only spreads among farmers, without the coordinated support of related policies.”

A worker operates a low-impact mower, used in conservation agriculture to clear the land, on the Tierra Brava farm in Los Palacios, a municipality at the western tip of Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Good practices that improve the soil, which form the basis of this system, have been promoted in Cuba for some time now by bodies such as the Soil Institute (IS). It is even among the few environmental services supported by the state in Cuba’s stagnant economy, to combat the low fertility of the land.

According to data from the IS, only 28 per cent of Cuban soils are highly productive for agriculture. Of the rest, 50 per cent is ranked in category four of productivity, one of the lowest, due to the characteristics of the formation of the Cuban archipelago and the poor management of soil during centuries of monoculture of sugarcane.

“In this municipality, the number of farms that use organic compost to improve the soils has increased. The payment for improving the soil has been an incentive,” said Lázara Pita, coordinator of the agroecological movement in the National Association of Small Farmers of Los Palacios.

“We have rice fields, where agroecology is not used, but where they do apply good practices for soil conservation such as using rice husks as nutrients,” Pita, whose association has 2,147 small farms joined together in 15 cooperatives, an agroindustrial state company and rice processing plant, told IPS.

Standing in a wide-roofed place without walls in Tierra Brava, Pita estimated that 40 farms qualify as ecological, and another 60 could shift to clean production techniques.

With the certification of a soil expert, a farmer like Martínez can earn between 120 and 240 dollars a year for offering environmental services, such as soil improvers, the use of live barriers and organic materials. This is an attractive sum, given the average state salary of 29 dollars a month.

Cuba, which depends on millions of dollars in food imports, has 6,226,700 hectares of arable land, of which 2,733,500 are cultivated and 883,900 remain idle.

Abshy Nchimunya of Kayokela farmers club in Pemba district, Southern Zambia. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
PEMBA, Zambia, Jun 29 2017 (IPS)

Frequent extreme weather and climate shifts pose a challenge to already vulnerable groups such as smallholder farmers in the developing world. Between 2004 and 2014, farmers are said to have endured the brunt of the 100-billion-dollar cost of climate-related disasters.

With traditional insurance proving costly, especially for smallholders residing in typical rural areas, the alternative approach – weather index-based insurance, which links pay-outs to events triggered by extreme weather – is increasingly becoming popular.R4’s integrated approach to risk reduction has somehow changed the dominant monoculture mindset of more than 2,000 farmers.

In Zambia, the World Food Programme (WFP) has been piloting such an intervention for the past two years in Pemba district of Southern Province. Premised on improving credit uptake and savings – two key enablers for smallholder agricultural growth – the insurance product targets farmers who have taken the initiative of engaging in climate smart agricultural practices (Conservation Agriculture).

Dubbed R4—Rural Resilience Initiative, the project takes a holistic approach to managing risk by integrating improved natural resource management (disaster risk reduction), credit (prudent risk taking), insurance (risk transfer), and savings (risk reserves).

But to what extent has the project helped smallholders? Abshy Nchimunya of Kayokela Farmers Club thinks to a large extent. While there has not been any pay-out in the two-year pilot project cycle, the 34-year-old believes the mere fact of being under insurance cover has been enough incentive for farmers’ resilience to climate shocks.

“I want to thank DAPP and its collaborating partners for initiating a programme like this which has opened my eyes to begin crop diversification so as to improve food security in my household,” says Nchimunya. “Besides this, the opportunity of accessing inputs on time through micro finance made me plant early and a large portion (2.5ha) which has not happened in my farming practices in a long time.”

Over the years, Nchimunya, just like many other farmers in his area, had always grown maize as a major crop. But when the project came, especially with insurance cover as a reward for conservation farming practices, it became an incentive for farmers to diversify into other crops such as cowpea and beans.

And 29-year-old Choobwe Meldah of Sinamanjolo village of the Ndondi Agriculture Camp thinks the project’s emphasis on diversification has uplifted the female voices in male-dominated households where legumes are usually considered female crops with little or no importance attached.

“Over the years, we have been conditioned and made to believe that maize is the best crop with a few legumes grown within the main field just for home consumption, and mainly cultivated by us women,” says Choobwe.

Since R4 however, “extension services have improved; coupled with timely weather information provision from fellow farmers in charge of project rain gauge stations, we have confidence to grow other crops and now treat farming as a business.”

By providing key services that are generally hard to access – financing for inputs, reliable weather information, a profitable market and simple saving schemes – R4’s integrated approach to risk reduction has somehow changed the dominant monoculture mindset of more than 2,000 farmers.

“So far, the project has shown a lot of impact—at least 60 to 70 percent of farmers are practicing conservation agriculture; all these farmers are accessing insurance, micro-credit, and we have taken it as a matter of principle to ensure that they all belong to small village saving groups,” explains Nervous Nsansaula of Development Aid from People to People (DAPP), a lead implementing Agency of R4.

As the pilot project ends this year, a four-year expansion project is on the horizon to cover the other four districts of Southern Province. “With a lot of success stories recorded, the plan is now to extend the project for four years and reach a target of 17, 000 smallholder farmers in four districts,” says Stanley Ndhlovu, R4 Project Manager at WFP Zambia office.

It is such success stories that have led agricultural stakeholders and development agencies to seek sustainable ways of up-scaling weather-based adaptation for farmers who largely rely on rainfall.

Hosted by the CGIAR research program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA), how to strengthen the momentum of weather-based adaptation to climate change was part of a fortnight long UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) talks in May 2017, in Bonn, Germany.

During the event, Bruce Campbell, Director, CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, echoed farmers’ reasoning that insurance opens numerous opportunities for farmers, aside the expected pay-outs for climate change losses.

“Through research, we have seen that formally insuring farmers against damage and loss caused by climate change is effective,” he said. “Insurance not only compensates smallholders to avoid catastrophic losses, it also allows them to invest and adapt, even when they don’t receive a pay-out.”

His plea is to ensure that all key players are engaged in order to reach more farmers, noting the importance of bringing the insurance industry together with climate change and agricultural researchers to develop truly global solutions.

Adding to the multiple benefits nexus, Michael Hailu, Director, Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), shared the prospects of CTA’s flagship project—Making Southern African cereal and livestock farming climate resilient, which seeks to promote the scaling up of four specific proven climate-resistant solutions for cereal and livestock farmers: drought-tolerant seeds, improved climate information services, diversified options for livestock farmers, and innovative weather-based insurance for crops and livestock.

“In one of our flagship projects in Southern Africa alone, 200,000 maize and livestock farmers in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia will have access to weather-based information services by 2019, which will help bolster the insurance market as one of the elements in a bundle of adaptation solutions,” said Hailu, adding that such innovations could pave the way for a proper scale-up.

Working in partnership with the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU), the project focuses on a challenge that has critical importance for Southern Africa now and in the future. Climate change is affecting all sectors of the economy in the region, but especially agriculture, which is generally rain-fed.

And Ishmael Sunga, CEO, SACAU, said: “The Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU) is actively encouraging farmers to take up weather-based insurance because we believe it is an important incentive for investment as well as a safety net for climate-related losses.

“SACAU is currently working with the private sector to help expand an innovative weather-based insurance solution after successful pilots in Zimbabwe. We strongly believe that scaling up index-based insurance on a regional level can effectively share the burden of climate change while also breaking the cycle of low risk, low investment and low productivity.”

Private sector involvement in agricultural development is heralded as a new normal. But how much insulation is provided to poor farmers from a profit-driven industry is usually the question that arises. For example, the first year in the WFP Zambia rural resilience pilot project, the premium for insuring 500 farmers cost about 77,000 dollars.

However, amidst an El Nino-induced drought that affected not only Zambia but the entire Southern African region, some farmers in the project were riled that the index insurance did not trigger a pay-out. This was due to the fact that the satellite data showed that there was rainfall during the agreed window period.

But for farmers, understanding such scientific technicalities proved difficult, a point that Pemba District Commissioner, Reginald Mugoba, highlighted during one of the District Development Coordinating Committee (DDCC) meetings.

“I think it is important to be clear with farmers from the beginning,” he said. “New concepts are always difficult for our farmers to understand, especially if they involve scientific interpretations,” he added, pointing out the need to avoid ambiguity for such projects to be successful in rural communities.

Aquaponics in Indonesia: Bumina and Yumina systems use an integrated farming technique combining vegetables, fruits and fish. Credit: FAO

By Kanis Dursin
JAKARTA, Mar 31 2017 (IPS)

Fifty-two-year-old farmer Theresia Loda was effusive when asked how conservation agriculture has changed her economic situation.

“My corn harvest has increased fourfold per season since I started practicing conservation agriculture,” Loda told IPS by phone from Kalimbu Ndara Mane Village, Wejewa sub-district in Southwest Sumba District, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) province, around a two-hour flight east of the capital Jakarta.“For us, the most important aspect is the increase in productivity, profitability, and resilience to climate change.” --Mark Smulders of FAO

Conservation agriculture encourages farmers to keep soil disturbance at a minimum. Instead of ploughing the field, farmers dig permanent planting holes and use compost instead of chemical fertilizer. They are also urged to grow cover crops such as legumes, and to rotate crops.

Loda started practicing conservation agriculture on a 2,800 square meter plot in early 2015. In the first season, she harvested around 500 kilograms of maize, compared to between 100 and 150 kilograms using traditional techniques. Her harvest soared up to 800 kilograms in the second season, before it went down to 600 kilograms in the October 2016-February 2017 season.

The widow and mother of 10 said she sold the maize to local people and used the money to send her children to school. In 2016, she sent her fifth child to study in a nursing academy in Malang, East Java province, one year after he graduated from senior high school.

Loda’s first and third children dropped out of school in grade five, while the second and fourth finished senior high school but were not able to go to academy or university due to financial constraints. Her sixth to ten children are still in senior high, junior high, and elementary schools.

In 2016, Loda, who separated from her second husband in 2010, used part of her maize income to buy piglets and rent a paddy field in order to augment her income. Her first husband passed away in 1994.

“I just sold two pigs to pay my fifth child’s tuition in Malang. Next week, we will harvest rice from our farm for the first time,” said Loda.

Mikhaela Imakulata, a 45-year-old farmer in Sikka District, shared Loda’s sentiment.

“We harvested around 2.6 tons in the first season, compared to 2.1 tons when using the traditional method,” the mother of two told IPS from Maumere, the capital of Sikka District, on Mar. 24.

Imakulata said she and her husband cultivated an area of over 1,100 square meters. Aside from corn, they also planted a wide range of bean varieties as cover crops.

“We just planted maize again immediately after we harvested the first planting. We want to find out how the weather will affect the crop,” she said.

Mark Smulders, FAO Representative for Indonesia and Timor Leste. Credit: Kanis Dursin/IPS

Loda and Imakulata are two of almost 13,000 smallholder farmers in NTT and West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) who practice and benefit from conservation agriculture the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) introduced there in 2013 as part of its priority program of reducing disaster risks caused by changing climate in the country.

According to Ujang Suparman, FAO national project manager for NTT and NTB, conservation agriculture projects were also implemented in West Sumba, Central Sumba, East Suma, Sabu, Malaka, Timor Tengah Utara, Timor Tengah Selatan, Alor, Lembata, Nagekeo, and Ende, West Lombok, Central Lombok, East Lombok, North Lombok, and West Sumbaw.

“Smallholder famers in NTT and NTB are among the poorest in Indonesia. They are prone to the impacts of climate change, especially long dry spells and irregular rainfall,” Mark Smulders, FAO representative for Indonesia and Timor Leste, told IPS in an interview in Jakarta.

According to Smulders, conservation agriculture is a win-win situation. “On one hand, we conserve the soil, which means we protect the soil from the sun, preserve the moisture, bring in organic materials, and on the other hand, farmers boost production and at the same time are better protected against climate change,” he said.

Data provided by FAO Indonesia and Timor Leste show conservation agriculture has proven to increase maize yield from an average of 2.1 metric tons to 4.3 metric tons per hectare.

“For us, the most important aspect is the increase in productivity, profitability, and resilience to climate change,” said Smulders.

Aside from conservation agriculture, FAO Indonesia and Timor Leste also encouraged farmers here to try integrated rice-fish farming, locally known as mina padi, where part of the irrigated rice field is turned into fish ponds.

According to Smulders, while mina padi is quite different from conservation agriculture, both are trying to intensify production using an ecosystem approach with far less use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

“What we do in mina padi is we take part of the rice field and make it into fish ponds. But fish also swim in between the rice and eat all the pests, fertilize the rice with their feces, and in the end we get better yields, better income, and better nutrition because farmers do not only eat rice they harvest but also the fish,” said Smulders.

Around 37 percent of children under five in Indonesia are stunted as a result of chronic malnutrition in the first five years of their life. On top of that, some 20 million people, or almost eight percent of the country’s population of 260 million, simply do not have access to the basic dietary energy that they need.

“We would like to put emphasis on a healthy diet from the farm to the table. We would like to see farmers produce a healthy diet, not just rice but other products as well,” Smulders said.

Sigit Paryono, a 46-year-old farmer in Sleman District, Yogyakarta, said his net income has risen significantly since joining FAO’s mina padi program in 2015.

“I used to earn between 38 dollars and 76 dollars per 1,000 square meters, now around 226 dollars,” said Sigit, who claimed to have a half-hectare of rice field.

Sigit said since joining FAO’s program in 2015, he has earned enough money to buy another 5,000 square meters of rice field. “I also sent my two children to universities,” he said.

“I hope FAO would help farmers in post-harvest processing. We want to sell mina padi rice and fish ourselves but we cannot do it without any help from others,” Sigit said.

Pramono, head of the Food Security Division, Sleman Agriculture and Fishery Agency, said mina padi works for both commodities. Rice benefits from food leftovers and fish feces as fertilizers, while fish benefit from pests that serve as their food.

“With pests eaten by fish and their feces serving as fertilizer, farmers need no pesticides or chemical fertilizers,” said Pramono.

He said his office introduced the embryo of mina padi to local farmers in 2011. “In 2015, with financial assistance from FAO, they were able to form a cluster of 25 hectares of rice field. At least 20 percent of the rice field is allocated for fish ponds,” said Pramono.

“While planted rice fields decrease by 20 percent, yields increase by 30 percent on average. On top of that, farmers still harvest between two to five tons of fish per hectare,” Promono told IPS.

“Many young factory workers have resigned to participate in mina padi cultivation,” said Pramono, adding “The future of rice production is strong again now that young farmers are entering the sector.”

Rice-fish farming was also experimented with in West Sumatra province.

Smulders said both conservation agriculture and mina padi were in line with the Indonesian government’s plan to create over 1,000 organic villages. “All three techniques, including integrated pest management, could be useful technics to promote organic farming,” he said.

He also said that his office is having discussions with the central government on how to scale up conservation agriculture and rice-fish farming areas.

“We feel we don’t have the capacity. We have demonstrated the good practice. Now, we want the government to invest. It’s a good thing to promote the two,” Smulders said.

FAO, according to Smulders, would focus on how to minimize post-harvest losses through improved storage. Too often, he said, farmers sell corn and rice at harvest time so prices are low.

“We are planning to work on a storage facility” so farmers can keep their commodities and sell them at higher prices several months later, Smulders said.