Caribbean farmers have been battling extreme droughts in recent years. A FAO official says drought ranks as the single most common cause of severe food shortages in developing countries, making it a key issue for Caribbean food security. Credit: CDB

By Desmond Brown
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Jul 20 2017 (IPS)

The Caribbean accounts for seven of the world’s top 36 water-stressed countries and Barbados is in the top ten. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) defines countries like Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts and Nevis as water-scarce with less than 1000 m3 freshwater resources per capita.

With droughts becoming more seasonal in nature in the Caribbean, experts say agriculture is the most likely sector to be impacted, with serious economic and social consequences.Expensive, desalinated water resources are also becoming more important in the Caribbean, accounting for as much as 70 percent in Antigua and Barbuda.

This is particularly important since the majority of Caribbean agriculture is rain fed. With irrigation use becoming more widespread in the Caribbean, countries’ fresh-water supply will become increasingly important.

In light of the dilemma faced by the region, the Caribbean Policy Development Centre (CPDC) is spearheading a climate smart agriculture project in which 90 farmers from three Caribbean countries, including Barbados, will participate over the next 18 months.

Executive director of the CPDC Gordon Bispham said the aim of the project, in which farmers from Grenada and St Vincent and the Grenadines are also involved, is to support sustainable livelihoods and reinforce that farming is serious business.

“Farming is not a hobby. It is a business where we can apply specific technology and methodologies, not only to be sustainable, but to be profitable. That is going to be very central to our programme,” Bispham said at the project’s launch last week.

“If we are going to be successful, it means that we are going to have to build partnerships and networks so that we can share the information that we learn from the project. We must not only upscale agriculture in the three countries identified, but bring more countries of the region into the fold,” he said.

According to the FAO, drought can affect the agriculture sector in several ways, by reducing crop yields and productivity, and causing premature death of livestock and poultry. Even a dry spell of 7-10 days can result in a reduction of yields, influencing the livelihoods of farmers.

Farmers, particularly small farmers, are vulnerable to drought as their livelihoods are threatened by low rainfall where crops are rain fed and by low water levels and increased production costs due to increased irrigation, the FAO said.

It notes that livestock grazing areas change in nutritional value, as more low quality, drought tolerant species dominate during extensive droughts, causing the vulnerability of livestock to increase. The potential for livestock diseases also increases.

“Drought ranks as the single most common cause of severe food shortages in developing countries, so this is a key issue for Caribbean food security,” said Deep Ford, Regional Coordinator for FAO in the Caribbean.

He adds that the poor are vulnerable as food price increases are often associated with drought. Expensive, desalinated water resources are also becoming more important in the Caribbean, accounting for as much as 70 percent in Antigua and Barbuda, and this can impact the poor significantly.

The FAO official adds that rural communities are vulnerable since potable water networks are less dense and therefore more heavily impacted during drought, while children are at highest risk from inadequate water supplies during drought.

Bispham said the youth and women would be a focus of the climate smart agriculture project, adding that with their inclusion in the sector, countries can depend on agriculture to make a sizable contribution to their gross domestic product (GDP).

While throwing her support behind the agriculture project, head of the political section and chargé d’affaires of the European Union Delegation to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, Silvia Kofler, highlighted the threat presented by global warning.

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impact of climate change. It is an all-encompassing threat, and the nature and scale of this global challenge that we are facing demands a concerted action of us all,” she said.

She gave policymakers in Barbados the assurance that the European Union was willing to assist the region in transforming their societies and sectors into smart and sustainable ones, whether in farming or otherwise. 

FAO said climate change is expected to increase the intensity and frequency of droughts in the Caribbean, so countries must enhance their capabilities to deal with this and other climate related challenges to ensure food security and hunger eradication.

A new FAO study says the Caribbean faces significant challenges in terms of drought. The region already experiences drought-like events every year, often with low water availability impacting agriculture and water resources, and a significant number of bush fires.

The Caribbean also experiences intense dry seasons, particularly in years with El Niño events. The impacts are usually offset by the next wet season, but wet seasons often end early and dry seasons last longer with the result that annual rainfall is less than expected.

Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Agricultural Society James Paul said 2016 was an extremely tough year for farmers, as the limited rainfall affected the harvesting and planting of crops.

But he is encouraged by the fact that unlike last year there is no prediction of a prolonged drought for Barbados.

“Rain if still falling on some areas off and on, so that is a good sign. But the good thing is that we haven’t had any warning of a possible drought and we are hoping that it remains that way,” he said.

“With the little rainfall we got last year, farmers had some serious problems so we are definitely hoping for more rain this time around.”

Deputy Director of the Barbados Meteorological Services Sonia Nurse explained that 2016 started with below-normal rainfall levels in the first half of the year. However, by the end of the year, a total of 1,422 mm (55.62 inches), recorded at the Grantley Adams station, was in excess of the 30-year average of 1,270 mm (50.05 inches), while the 2015 total of 789 mm (31.07 inches) fell way below the 30-year average.

“Figures showed that approximately 78 per cent or 1,099.1 mm (43.27 inches) of the total rainfall measured last year was experienced during the wet season (June-November) as opposed to 461 mm (18.15 inches) recorded during the same period of the 2015 wet season.

“However, rainfall data showed that 2015 started out significantly wetter than 2016, with accumulations of over nine inches recorded between January and April as opposed to a mere five inches, which was recorded January to April 2016. A similar rainfall pattern was reported from some of the other stations around the island.”

The Yallahs River, one of the main water sources for Jamaica's Mona Reservoir, has been dry for months. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
MORANT BAY, Jamaica, Nov 24 2014 (IPS)

As Jamaica struggles under the burden of an ongoing drought, experts say ensuring food security for the most vulnerable groups in society is becoming one of the leading challenges posed by climate change.

“The disparity between the very rich and the very poor in Jamaica means that persons living in poverty, persons living below the poverty line, women heading households with large numbers of children and the elderly are greatly disadvantaged during this period,” Judith Wedderburn, Jamaica project director at the non-profit German political foundation Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), told IPS."The food production line gets disrupted and the cost of food goes up, so already large numbers of families living in poverty have even greater difficulty in accessing locally grown food at reasonable prices." -- Judith Wedderburn of FES

“The concern is that as the climate change implications are extended for several years that these kinds of situations are going to become more and more extreme, [such as] greater floods with periods of extreme drought.”

Wedderburn, who spoke with IPS on the sidelines of a FES and Panos Caribbean workshop for journalists held here earlier this month, said Caribbean countries – which already have to grapple with a finite amount of space for food production – now have the added challenges of extreme rainfall events or droughts due to climate change.

“In Jamaica, we’ve had several months of drought, which affected the most important food production parishes in the country,” she said, adding that the problem does not end when the drought breaks.

“We are then affected by extremes of rainfall which results in flooding. The farming communities lose their crops during droughts [and] families associated with those farmers are affected. The food production line gets disrupted and the cost of food goes up, so already large numbers of families living in poverty have even greater difficulty in accessing locally grown food at reasonable prices and that contributes to substantial food insecurity – meaning people cannot easily access the food that they need to keep their families well fed.”

One local researcher predicts that things are likely to get even worse. Dale Rankine, a PhD candidate at the University of the West Indies (UWI), told IPS that climate change modelling suggests that the region will be drier heading towards the middle to the end of the century.

“We are seeing projections that suggest that we could have up to 40 percent decrease in rainfall, particularly in our summer months. This normally coincides with when we have our major rainfall season,” Rankine said.

“This is particularly important because it is going to impact most significantly on food security. We are also seeing suggestions that we could have increasing frequency of droughts and floods, and this high variability is almost certainly going to impact negatively on crop yields.”

He pointed to “an interesting pattern” of increased rainfall over the central regions, but only on the outer extremities, while in the west and east there has been a reduction in rainfall.

“This is quite interesting because the locations that are most important for food security, particularly the parishes of St. Elizabeth [and] Manchester, for example, are seeing on average reduced rainfall and so that has implications for how productive our production areas are going to be,” Rankine said.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced recently that September 2014 was the hottest in 135 years of record keeping. It noted that during September, the globe averaged 60.3 degrees Fahrenheit (15.72 degrees Celsius), which was the fourth monthly record set this year, along with May, June and August.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Centre, the first nine months of 2014 had a global average temperature of 58.72 degrees (14.78 degrees Celsius), tying with 1998 for the warmest first nine months on record.

Robert Pickersgill, Jamaica’s water, land, environment and climate change minister, said more than 18,000 small farmers have been affected by the extreme drought that has been plaguing the country for months.

He said the agricultural sector has lost nearly one billion dollars as a result of drought and brush fires caused by extreme heat waves.

Pickersgill said reduced rainfall had significantly limited the inflows from springs and rivers into several of the country’s facilities.

“Preliminary rainfall figures for the month of June indicate that Jamaica received only 30 per cent of its normal rainfall and all parishes, with the exception of sections of Westmoreland (54 percent), were in receipt of less than half of their normal rainfall. The southern parishes of St Elizabeth, Manchester, Clarendon, St Catherine, Kingston and St. Andrew and St. Thomas along with St Mary and Portland were hardest hit,” Pickersgill said.

Clarendon, he said, received only two percent of its normal rainfall, followed by Manchester with four percent, St. Thomas six percent, St. Mary eight percent, and 12 percent for Kingston and St. Andrew.

Additionally, Pickersgill said that inflows into the Mona Reservoir from the Yallahs and Negro Rivers are now at 4.8 million gallons per day, which is among the lowest since the construction of the Yallahs pipeline in 1986, while inflows into the Hermitage Dam are currently at six million gallons per day, down from more than 18 million gallons per day during the wet season.

“It is clear to me that the scientific evidence that climate change is a clear and present danger is now even stronger. As such, the need for us to mitigate and adapt to its impacts is even greater, and that is why I often say, with climate change, we must change,” Pickersgill told IPS.

Wedderburn said Jamaica must take immediate steps to adapt to climate change.

“So the challenge for the government is to explore what kinds of adaptation methods can be used to teach farmers how to do more successful water harvesting so that in periods of severe drought their crops can still grow so that they can have food to sell to families at reasonable prices to deal with the food insecurity.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

By Desmond Brown
Jun 26 2014 (IPS)

Caribbean scientists are developing drought-tolerant varieties of crops which are then distributed to farmers in countries most severely affected by climate change. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ST. JOHN'S, Antigua, Jun 26 2014 (IPS)

The Caribbean region’s bid to become food secure is in peril as farmers struggle to produce staple crops under harsh drought conditions brought about by climate change.

But scientists are fighting back, developing drought-tolerant varieties which are then distributed to farmers in those countries most severely affected.

“We are mainly affected by issues of drought and…CARDI has been looking at methods of sustainable management of production using drought tolerant varieties. We are working with certain commodities and doing applied research aimed at producing them in the dry season,” Dr. Gregory Robin, CARDI representative and technical coordinator for the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), told IPS.

“We’re starting first with the crops that are more significantly affected by drought. We take, for example, dasheen, which is a crop that requires a lot of moisture and I’m working with that crop in St. Vincent and St. Lucia,” he said.

“Validation will serve Jamaica, Grenada, Dominican Republic – all the islands that produce dasheen. Sometimes it’s not cost-effective to do activities in all the islands so some of the sweet potato work done here can be used in St. Kitts, Barbados and islands with similar agro-ecological zones and rainfall patterns,” he added.

The Trinidad-based CARDI (Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute), which has worked to strengthen the agricultural sector of member countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) for more than 30 years, is at the forefront of the research.

“CARDI has a body of professionals around the region so if we have any issues of climate change and drought, CARDI is a body of scientists that is available to all the islands of the CARICOM region,” Robin said.

Another crop being given special attention is sweet potato. Robin explained that for the Caribbean region, sweet potato is very important as a food security staple and foreign exchange earner.

“We’re working with the crops that we think are going to be affected most. Sweet potato can take a certain amount of moisture stress but dasheen and crops that require a high level of moisture are not going to be standing up so well to moisture stress, so we are starting with those with a high requirement of moisture first,” he said.

Noting that irrigation is key to productivity, the CARDI official explained that, “I have been working here for the past seven years and it’s the first time I’ve seen it so dry and it’s highlighting the point that we need to look at our rainwater harvesting systems.”

Climate change has also forced Guyana, considered the bread-basket of the Caribbean, to develop new varieties.

“We have also been growing different varieties of crops that are resistant to salt water because one of the impacts of climate change is that the salt water will creep more into the inland areas and so we are looking at salt-resistant rice for example; looking at crops that are much more resilient to dry weather and that can withstand periods of flooding,” Agriculture Minister Dr. Leslie Ramsammy told IPS.

“We’ve been doing things like shade technology, drip irrigation, using technology and methods and utilising animals and crops that are far more resilient to extreme weather conditions.”

In addition to developing drought-tolerant varieties, CARDI is also actively developing new technologies to assist farmers with irrigation.

“I remember when I started in agriculture probably 20 years ago farmers used to irrigate using a drum and a bucket,” Bradbury Browne told IPS.

But he said over the years CARDI has introduced drip irrigation technology and other types of irrigation technology.

“For example if I want to apply 3,000 gallons of water to an acre of sweet potato I can programme [the irrigation system] so that I don’t have to be there physically to be turning on a hose or a pipe and there would be no issue of flooding if I am called away on an emergency,” said Browne, who now serves as a field technician at CARDI.

Meanwhile, longtime legislator in Antigua and Barbuda Baldwin Spencer noted that more frequent and extreme droughts are expected to become a feature of Caribbean weather.

And he said the impact of such drought conditions will increase heat stress, particularly for the more vulnerable, such as the elderly.

“Despite the decline in the production and export of major agricultural commodities from the OECS, agriculture remains an important sector in the economic and social development of the region from the stand-point of food security, rural stability and the provision of input to other productive sectors,” said Spencer, who served as prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda from March 2004 until Jun. 12 this year.

“These benefits are at risk from climatic events and this risk only increases as the climate continues to change,” he said.

Experts project that decreased production levels of major crops combined with increasing food demand will pose large risks to all aspects of food security globally and regionally including food access, utilisation and price stability.

The World Bank said food security is consistently seen as one of the key challenges for the coming decades and by the year 2050, the world will need to produce enough food to feed more than 2.0 billion additional people, compared to the current 7.2 billion.

It said most of the population growth will be concentrated in developing countries, adding pressure to their development needs.

The World Bank added that to meet future food demand, agricultural production will need to increase by 50-70 percent, according to different estimates. And this will happen as the impacts of climate change are projected to intensify overall, particularly hitting the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

Rural Indonesian women selling jackfruit crackers. Photo: Abigail Lee/IPS

By Kanis Dursin
SUBANG, Indonesia, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

When 45-year-old Kaswati joined an income-generating project in her village in Indonesia’s West Java province in 1999, all she hoped to do was supplement her family’s income at a time of erratic harvests.

But today, 14 years later, her fertiliser and jackfruit cracker businesses have far exceeded those modest plans: they have become the main sources of income for her family of four and are helping to offset the expenses of maintaining their half-hectare rice field.

Water scarcity over the past few years has forced the farming family to “draw water from faraway irrigation canals”, meaning they spend more on pumping water, and on labour, Kaswati told IPS in Pogon, a village in the Subang district of West Java province, a two-hour drive from the capital, Jakarta.

The shortage has also “limited planting opportunities to two each year instead of three, as suggested by the government,” the farmer said, adding that her compost and cracker businesses have “come to (my family’s) rescue.”

“I’ve got an outstanding order to supply 348 tonnes of compost fertiliser this year and since I cannot meet the demand all by myself, I have asked my friends to make compost and sell it to me.”

She buys the compost at an average price of 51 dollars per tonne and sells it for 77 dollars per tonne, thus making a tidy profit while also supporting members of her community.

Kaswati is just one of the many women in Pogon to benefit from an income-generating project that was partially funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in order to help this Southeast Asian archipelago nation tackle the impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector.

Under the programme, which ran from 1999 to 2006, each woman was given a bank loan, worth about 40 dollars, as capital to start a business. The loan carried an interest rate of one percent and had to be repaid in 12-month installments.

When the programme ended in 2006, Kaswati and her fellow women villagers ventured into the compost business. Along the way, however, all but Kaswati abandoned the fertiliser trade. In 2008, Kaswati began a jackfruit cracker business, together with 24 other women in the village.

“The programme taught us how to start and manage a business in order to make a profit. We also learned about bookkeeping,” Kaswati recalled.

Climate change hits hard

Indonesia’s agricultural sector provides 87 percent of raw materials for small and medium-scale industries, contributes 14.72 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), and employs 33.32 percent of the total labour force.

Due to its geographical situation, Indonesia is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change including increased droughts and floods, changes in planting patterns, and increased pests, all of which threaten the country’s food security, according to Hari Priyono, secretary-general of Indonesia’s ministry of agriculture.

“Indonesia has been focusing on increasing rice production from 54.1 million tonnes in 2004 to 69.05 million tonnes in 2012,” Priyono said in his keynote remarks at an early June media workshop on climate change, which was part of an IFAD series for journalists.

“Agricultural development faces increasingly serious challenges due to climate change as well as conversion of fertile agricultural land for industrial estates and settlements,” he continued.

Prolonged drought and an extended rainy season have struck Indonesia more frequently in recent years, leaving farmers in a quandary over when to start planting crops and causing worries about the country’s food security.

In early June, for example, climate experts here predicted that Indonesia would experience rain throughout 2013, even during the dry season that usually runs from May to September or early October.

Given the changes in climate patterns, the ministry of agriculture introduced in 2012 a ‘cropping calendar’ that advises farmers on the best planting periods, seed variety, fertilisers and pesticides. It has launched new rice varieties that can withstand prolonged drought or flooding, or high salinity due to seawater intrusion.

One expert, however, says these innovations may prove insufficient to deal with the impacts of climate change.

“The problem is we don’t have the technology yet that can predict the exact beginning of each dry or wet season or the severity of floods and drought,” said Zulkifli Zaini, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) liaison scientist for Indonesia.

To make things worse, almost 100,000 hectares of fertile farmland on the island of Java are being converted into industrial estates and settlements every year.

“Rice fields on Java island yield twice the amount produced by rice fields outside Java and this means that the government has to create 200,000 hectares of rice fields outside Java just to cover the loss (of these converted lands),” Zaini said.

According to IFAD, around 70 percent of Indonesia’s 245 million people live in rural areas, where agriculture is the main source of income. A least 16.6 percent of the country’s rural people are poor.

“Millions of small farmers, farm workers and fishers are materially and financially unable to tap into the opportunities offered by years of economic growth,” IFAD’s country manager for Indonesia, Ronald Hartman, said.

But Kaswati’s experience seems to show that diversifying means of income can help rural villagers continue to make a decent living from agriculture.

Kaswati’s businesses have only grown bigger. Early this year, she took out a bank loan worth 4,100 dollars to finance her compost business, which has given her financial freedom and power.

“I no longer ask my husband for money to buy food and other household needs, and more importantly my first daughter now studies at a university,” said Kaswati, who until early 1999 had worked as a farm labourer.

Another woman participant who declined to give her name told IPS that her jackfruit cracker business has allowed her to send her children to school.

“My first child finished elementary school only, my second only finished junior high school, while the third only senior high school – but the fourth is now studying at a local university,” she said.

“Now my husband involves me in decision-making, particularly when it comes to my children’s studies.”

Kenyan farmer Geoffrey Ndung’u adapted to a prolonged drought and now earns a living growing watermelon. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Thalif Deen
ROME, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has long warned that a quarter of the world’s farmland is “highly degraded”.

The main culprits are natural disasters, including droughts, floods and desertification. These pressures have now reached critical levels, with climate change expected to worsen the situation, according to the FAO’s annual report The State of Food and Agriculture, released here."Farmers urgently need support to increase the diversity of seed varieties that they can save and grow." -- Teresa Anderson of the Gaia Foundation

At the 38th session of FAO’s biannual conference, currently underway in Rome, three major issues on the table are the high level of undernourishment, volatile food prices and sustainable agricultural productivity.

The United Nations said up to 12 percent of Africa’s agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) is being lost due to environmental degradation, with comparable figures for countries in Latin America varying from six percent in Paraguay to about 24 percent in Guatemala.

According to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), food yields in Uzbekistan have declined by 20 to 30 percent, while in East Africa nearly 3.7 million people still require food aid following the 2011 drought.

“Business as usual is no longer an option,” said UNCCD Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja.

“Desertification, land degradation and drought are key constraints to building social and environmental resilience, achieving global food security and delivering meaningful poverty reduction,” he added.

Mohamed Adow, global advisor on climate change at the UK-based Christian Aid, which promotes sustainable development and battles hunger and global poverty, told IPS, “Climate change remains the significant challenge facing food security.”

Extreme and less predictable weather patterns are having the first and hardest impacts on food production, which in turn affects those who are least able to protect themselves, he added.

Adow said that with just the current 0.8 C rise in global temperatures, the world is suffering from increased hunger, disease, floods and sea level rise.

“And this is predicted to worsen given the abysmally weak climate pollution targets in developed countries,” he noted.

This means that year after year, the numbers of people needing food aid and adaptation support are increasing as the effects of climate change exceed the coping limits of the poor, and as more people go hungry.

Developed countries have a responsibility and obligation to take decisive action to support adaptation and increase opportunities to develop sustainable climate-resilient livelihoods all over the world, Adow declared.

Teresa Anderson of the London-based Gaia Foundation, which advocates secure land, seed, food and water sovereignty, told IPS one of the key reasons for the existence of the U.N. climate convention is to address the inevitable impacts that climate change and increasingly erratic weather will have on food production.

Less rain, more rain, rain coming at unpredictable times – all this affects the germination and growth of crops, she pointed out.

Changing temperatures that are too high or too low can also reduce growth and pollination. And different pests and diseases are likely to emerge in different climatic conditions.

“To deal with these multiple challenges, farmers urgently need support to increase the diversity of seed varieties that they can save and grow, while improving soil health,” said Anderson.

Unfortunately, the growth of agribusiness focused on selling fertilisers and just a few types of seed, is making farming even more vulnerable to climate change, she added.

In addition, communities reliant on fishing and livestock grazing may find the ecosystems on which they rely producing less fish or grass.

Anderson said many communities will also face extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes and droughts, as well as slow-onset impacts such as rising sea levels and salination that will make food production impossible.

Meanwhile, a report released at the climate change talks in Bonn last week by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) said the cloudy aspects of climate forecasts are no excuse for a paralysis in agriculture adaptation policies.

“Climate projections will always have a degree of uncertainty, but we need to stop using uncertainty as a rationale for inaction,” said Sonja Vermeulen, head of research at CGIAR’s research programme on climate change, agriculture and food security (CCAFS) and lead author of the study.

“Even when our knowledge is incomplete, we often have robust grounds for choosing best-bet adaptation actions and pathways, by building pragmatically on current capacities in agriculture and environmental management, and using projections to add detail and to test promising options against a range of scenarios,” she said.

The CCAFS analysis shows how decision-makers can sift through the different gradients of scientific uncertainty to understand where there is, in fact, a general degree of consensus and then move to take action.

Moreover, she said, it encourages a broader approach to agriculture adaptation that looks beyond climate models to consider the socioeconomic conditions on the ground. These conditions, such as a particular farmer’s or community’s capacity to make the necessary changes, will determine whether a particular adaptation strategy is likely to succeed.

A farmer walks past the solar panels used to pump water in the Soan Valley. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
SOAN VALLEY, Pakistan, May 22 2013 (IPS)

Staring out at his golden wheat field with satisfaction, 50-year old Alamgir Akbar says with a sigh of relief: “We’ve had a good crop this season.”

The farmer has waited a long time to utter those words. A resident of a small rural community on the outskirts of the Ucchali village in the Soan Valley, a 737-square-metre expanse of farmland in the Khushab district of Pakistan’s Punjab province, he has spent five years battling the impacts of a prolonged drought.

With just 12,000 acres of irrigated farmland and only saltwater lakes dotting the landscape, the Valley, which borders the hills of Punjab’s famous Salt Range, is not ideal for practicing agriculture.

Residents traditionally relied on rainwater to recharge their roughly 3,000 community wells, but half a decade of drought in the 1990s brought farming to a standstill and pitched the region’s 150,000 residents into the vortex of poverty.

Farmers here operate smallholdings of no more than five hectares, cultivating crops like cauliflower on flat land as well as terraces and selling the produce in Punjab’s big cities like Lahore, Faisalabad, Sargodha and Gujrat.

Before the drought hit, a farmer could typically earn a net profit of 600 to 800 dollars in a 75-day cropping period, but lost a considerable amount of this income on hiring trucks to transport goods to urban markets.

As the rains became increasingly infrequent, farmers were forced to bore tube wells, some as deep as 200 or 300 feet. This new system required investments in turbines to pump out the water, which in turn generated huge energy costs, as the 26-horsepower machines guzzled gallon after gallon of diesel.

Unable to afford the necessary investments, farmers turned to relatives for loans and sold their animals or other assets to continue farming.

When villagers began to chop down trees for fuel it sparked a process of deforestation, which then “accelerated the rate of soil erosion” and increased the risk of prolonged drought, Gulbaz Afaqi, director of the Soan Valley Development Programme (SVDP), told IPS.

Yields dropped, and farmers like Akbar began to despair.

Bringing back water

Driving down the mud track to Ucchali, the tranquil and almost picture-perfect pastoral scene is marred by solar panels.

But what outsiders see as an eyesore, villagers see as an angel of mercy. Owned and operated collectively by 12 families, these three-kilowatt panels are helping to pump water – and new life – into the farmers’ fields.

The landscape is once again alive with patches of cauliflower, coriander, chillies and potatoes as a pilot project spearheaded by the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) begins to bear fruit.

Working with 112 partner organisations in more than 90,000 settlements spread across 120 districts in Pakistan, the fund aims to help this country of 170 million meet the targets defined in the Millennium Development Goals before the 2015 deadline.

Armed with donations from the government, international agencies and corporate entities, the PPAF embarked on a nationwide programme of drought mitigation and disaster management in 2003, which quickly identified the Soan Valley as “one of the areas that needed our attention,” PPAF spokesperson Zaffar Pervez Sabri told IPS.

Determined to avoid the worst-case scenario of locals being forced to sell their livestock or migrate from the Valley, the PPAF developed a “water balance model” to manage and conserve remaining resources and address the impacts of climate change, according to Sabri.

To date, the fund has enabled the construction of 124 irrigation pipes feeding over 8,000 acres of farmland; 60 rainwater harvesting ponds, each about the size of an acre; five delay action dams that collect surface water and are ideal for the Valley’s pitted landscape; 40 check dams, which help to prevent erosion; and 12 natural resource management schemes, benefitting over 100,000 people.

Villagers themselves raised the money for the solar panels that pump the water, giving community members a sense of ownership over the project. “We collected 6,000 dollars from the village, and the fund provided the other 6,000,” Afaqi said. By eliminating the need for diesel pumps, the panels have enabled farm communities to save over 2,000 dollars annually.

Villagers also replaced traditional open channel irrigation networks with the more efficient pipe irrigation system to avoid “huge losses and water evaporation in unpaved water courses,” said Afaqi, adding, “The PVC pipes facilitate even distribution of water into the field.”

Mohammad Ismail, an engineer working with the SVDP, told IPS that pipe irrigation is especially useful on slopes where surface water would otherwise run off.

A 50-percent increase in crop yields after this transition nudged farmers into accepting other, more comprehensive changes in their lives, such as new crops and cropping patterns.

Following the SVDP’s advice, farmers gave up cultivating cauliflower, a water-intensive crop that needs to be watered 16 times in 75 days, in favour of potatoes, “which need to be irrigated only eight times,” a local farmer named Sher Khan told IPS.

Potatoes have become a major cash crop in the area, with 46 percent of irrigated land dedicated solely to their production.

In addition, farmers grow chillies in the summer, wheat in the winter and practice year-round horticulture with nectarines and peaches.

The water scheme has made farming viable once more – with just a single acre of land, according to Afaqi, the average farmer can earn a monthly profit of 1,200 dollars on potatoes, 1,500 dollars on coriander and between 1,000 and 1,500 dollars on wheat.

“With an initial investment of about 1.3 million dollars, combined with technical assistance from the PPAF and hard work by the farming communities, we have created a new economy that generates over six million dollars annually,” said Afaqi.

The programme has also spawned interest in local water conservation efforts, including bi-monthly monitoring of ground water resources at 40 different locations, he added.

Reports from quarterly inspections suggest the groundwater table is improving. Regular monitoring also serves as a kind of early-warning system, by alerting farmers about decreasing water tables ahead of cropping cycles.

For farmers like Akbar, the project has literally helped him and his large extended family – spread between 12 homes in Ucchali – achieve their modest dreams.

“All our children go to school,” he says, pride written all over his face as he conducts a brief tour of his humble brick home. The small, attached toilet at the back symbolises huge progress: “It means we no longer have to go out into the fields to relieve ourselves,” he said with a smile.

Many people in Cuba have avocado trees in their yards, for family consumption. Credit: Ivet González/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Dec 20 2012 (IPS)

During some parts of the year, a layer of salt can be seen on the ground in eastern Cuba, which makes it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to farm. Since agronomist Orlando Coto saw this with his own eyes, he has been searching for salt-tolerant fruit trees.

“The main causes of this phenomenon are associated with climate change, like drought and penetration by seawater,” said Coto, of the governmental Tropical Fruit Research Institute (IIFT). “Alternatives have to be found that come up with faster results than the traditional plant breeding techniques, to deal with this problem.”

Coto, a university professor, discussed with IPS the extent of the problem of saline soils in Cuba and a project of induced mutation to produce cultivars of avocado and citrus trees that would be more resistant to hostile conditions.

Q: What is salinisation of the soil? What causes it?

A: It’s the concentration of salt in the soil, a complex problem that has multiple causes. It can be caused, for example, by drought, whether due to lack of rainfall or high temperatures, the penetration of the sea in low-lying areas, the availability of nutrients in the soil, or the contamination of the aquifers because of the overuse of agrochemicals.

In the case of Cuba, the main causes of salinity in the soil are the lengthening of the dry periods and seawater intrusion, factors associated with climate change. As the amount of water available in the soil declines, the concentration of compounds like sodium and chloride – which are naturally found in the soil separately, but together make up salt – increases.

For that reason, farmers would welcome new cultivars of all kinds, especially fruit trees, that are tolerant of salinity and drought, and that would make it possible to save water and to use other irrigation methods.

Q: What parts of Cuba are hit hardest by this phenomenon?

A: Soil salinity is bad in the entire southern stretch of Guantánamo (at the eastern tip of the island), because of drought and because it’s very low-lying land, and the seawater penetrates through the aquifers. The entire southern portion of eastern Cuba is dry and thus tends to have high levels of salinity.

In this country, we don’t have any extremely dry or saline areas. The ones that have the driest, most saline conditions are the abovementioned part of Guantánamo and the region north of Santa Clara (east of the Cuban capital). The latter has a kind of clay in the soil that creates lumps, which make it difficult for plants to absorb water and nutrients.

In the 1990s, I took part in a multidisciplinary study carried out in the south of Guantánamo, where rapid changes were detected in the salinity of the soil, and in a smaller area, very different – that is, contrasting – concentrations of salt were found.

Q: What challenges does this ever-changing reality pose for research into new saline- and drought-resistant varieties?

A: So-called precision agriculture, which consists of applying scientific-technical advances in much more localised areas to obtain specific results for small farmers or agricultural businesses, is gaining more and more ground.

On the other hand, science requires time to come up with solutions, while the changes and the effects of climate change on crops are occurring faster and faster.

Q: What does the search for more tolerant varieties imply, in the case of fruit trees?

A: Fruit trees have specific requirements. Crossbreeding is nearly impossible, because of biological limitations, as can be done in the case of vegetables. In addition, they have a long juvenile period. Orange or avocado trees do not start producing until they are three or five years old on average.

Only after resistance has been transmitted for three generations (in vitro or in the countryside) can it be stated that a new cultivar has been found. In the IIFT we have been experimenting since the last decade with irradiation and in vitro culture of avocado seeds, through a method aimed at accelerating fruit improvement programmes.

Q: What are the goals of the study? Who participated in it?

A: We have worked since 2000 with the Centre for Technological Applications and Nuclear Development and the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences, among others in Cuba, and with financing from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is supporting the search for solutions against climate change in agriculture, specifically in terms of drought and salinity.

We started with the irradiation of avocado seeds, to obtain mutant seeds that might possibly be resistant to drought, salinity and a disease (Phytophthora, a group of plant-damaging pathogens) that affects the roots and the trunk of avocado trees, or others like papaya and orange trees.

We chose the only kind of avocado stock used commercially in Cuba. Lately we have incorporated citrus trees in the research in which induced mutation techniques are applied.

Q: How much progress have you made? How much longer will it take?

A: It has been a long process, but we already have the half-lethal dose of radiation to apply on seeds and buds, and we have also adapted an international methodology for improving avocados to our conditions here.

We have established an in vitro selection system where we simulate the average conditions of drought and salinity found, for example, in some soils in southern Guantánamo.

A group of possible mutants were obtained – they’re currently in the study phase – which in the in vitro conditions showed certain levels of tolerance of salinity. But it will still take at least seven years to obtain a cultivar.

Q: What problems to be solved has your centre identified, in order for Cuba to be able to meet local demand for fruit?

A: The main problem is the availability of high-quality, certified seedlings for the entire community of farmers. More knowledge about their cultivation also has to be disseminated through pamphlets and other printed materials, to which small farmers would have better access.

Excerpt: