Women plant rice in Nepal. More than 2.4 billion people get key nutrients from rice, wheat, maize, soybeans, field peas and sorghum. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 7 2014 (IPS)

Rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels will make many key food crops like rice and corn less nutritious, a new study shows.

Important food crops will contain lower levels of zinc and iron by mid-century without major cuts in CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels, an analysis of field experiments conducted on three continents has found.“Higher levels of CO2 helps plants grow faster but it is mainly in the form of increased starch and sugars." -- David Wolfe

“Two billion people already suffer from low levels of zinc and iron. It’s an enormous global health burden today,” said Samuel Myers of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, co-author of the Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition study published in the journal Nature Wednesday.

Deficiencies of zinc and iron have wide range of impacts on human health, including increased vulnerability to infectious diseases, anemia, higher levels of maternal mortality, and lowered IQs.

More than 2.4 billion people get these key nutrients in their rice, wheat, maize, soybeans, field peas and sorghum, Myers told IPS.

Myers and colleagues assessed new data from 143 experiments growing crops at CO2 levels that are 100 percent greater than the pre-industrial average. At current emission rates, CO2 in the atmosphere will be 100 percent greater around the year 2060. Wheat grown at those concentrations has 9.3 percent lower zinc and 5.1 percent lower iron than those grown at today’s CO2 concentration.

“We found significant effects from higher CO2 for all of these crops but some cultivars [seed varieties] did better than others,” he said.

The nutrition content of many food crops has already declined over the past 100 years, Myers acknowledged. One reason is that plant breeders have favoured rapid growth and yield while ignoring nutrition. Add to this the reality that CO2 levels today are 42 percent higher than 150 years ago.

“Higher levels of CO2 helps plants grow faster but it is mainly in the form of increased starch and sugars,” said David Wolfe, a professor of plant and soil ecology at Cornell University in New York State.

“There’s more carbohydrates [starch and sugar] but less protein, nutrients and other effects,” Wolfe told IPS. Wolfe was not involved in the Harvard study.

This is resulting in what some call “hollow food”, that is, food with insufficient nutrition. It is suspected of playing a role in the rapid rise in obesity, as people may be eating more in order to get the nutrition they need, said Ken Warren, a spokesman with The Land Institute, an agricultural research centre in the U.S. state of Kansas.

Crops take minerals, trace elements and other things from the soil every year. All that modern agriculture puts back into the land are some chemical fertilisers which do not replace all that has been lost, Warren previously told IPS.

A 2006 analysis of British government nutrition data on meat and dairy products revealed that the mineral content of milk, cheese and beef had declined as much as 70 percent compared to those from the 1930s. Parmesan cheese had 70 percent less magnesium and calcium, beef steaks contained 55 percent less iron, chicken had 31 percent less calcium and 69 percent less iron, while milk also showed a large drop in iron along with a 21 percent decline in magnesium.

Copper, an important trace mineral (an essential nutrient that is consumed in tiny quantities), also declined 60 percent in meats and 90 percent in dairy products.

Modern high-yielding crops and intensive farming methods were believed to be responsible, according to The Food Commission, an independent watchdog on food issues that published the study.

The measured impacts of high levels of CO2 on food crops in the Harvard study did not replicate the higher temperatures and extreme weather conditions expected mid-century. Other studies have shown that high temperatures stress plants and while the extra CO2 results in larger plants their yield was much lower, said Cornell’s Wolfe.

Growing food will be much more challenging with climate change, especially in California, the Southwest and parts of the Great Plains, according to the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment released Tuesday.

Four years in the making, the assessment is the definitive scientific statement of current and future impacts of carbon pollution on the United States.

The projected increase in temperatures will dry out soils, making it impossible to grow food without extensive irrigation. The entire region is already in a decade-long drought that is likely to worsen. Warmer temperatures also increase evaporation rates, drying out soils even more and making irrigation less effective. Groundwater resources are also in serious decline throughout the region.

“California and the Southwest face huge water challenges,” said Wolfe, one of the 300 scientists who contributed to the assessment.

“California has the perfect climate for growing food right now but it won’t if gets hotter,” he said.

There is little doubt California and the rest of the U.S. will get hotter unless CO2 emissions decline there and around the world. While the western half of the U.S. gets drier the eastern half, and particularly the Northeast, will get heavier rains and more flooding.

The Northeast will see increasing droughts in the summer. But when the rains come it will be in form of deluges, Wolfe said. Over the past decade the region has experienced wildly erratic winter weather. In 2012, an extremely warm winter allowed fruit crops to bloom four weeks early, only to later have a hard frost that killed the blooms, resulting in losses amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Unpredictability is the biggest challenge for farmers,” Wolfe said.

He added that he’s an optimist but sees a future with higher food prices, beyond what the poor can afford, and a great deal of disruption in farm communities. U.S. farmers are going to need help to adapt, in terms of education and funding.

“We have to get beyond crop insurance. Change is risky for farmers and many don’t have the funds to adapt to what is coming.”

Korean rice farmers protesting in Seoul against any new imports under an agreement with the World Trade Organisation. Credit: Ahn Mi Young/IPS.

By Ahn Mi Young
SEOUL, Apr 24 2014 (IPS)

Rice, a staple of the South Korean diet, is stirring up a bowlful of worry for Seoul. Under a promise to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the government has to make a tough choice on rice imports by June this year.

It can either allow foreign suppliers to sell rice in its market – that is, open up its rice sector to the world – or it can continue to import a fixed quota of rice annually from countries like the U.S., China and Thailand.To open up its rice market or to stick to an import quota – the decision will not be easy for Seoul.

While opening up the rice market would bring competition for local varieties of the grain – and in turn invite the wrath of Korean farmers – the second option would mean allowing a huge quantity of foreign rice despite little domestic demand for it.

The government’s dilemma comes at a time when rice consumption is falling in the country. South Koreans no longer have the “peasant diet” – a full rice bowl, a bean fermented soup and the spicy vegetable dish kimchi. They often dine out and opt for other menus. Often, women on a diet cut down their rice intake.

An average South Korean who used to eat 130 kg of rice a year in 1982 and 112.9 kg in 1992 ate only 67.2 kg rice in 2013, according to agriculture ministry data.

Despite such a trend, the government has to take a decision soon.

In 1993, when the Korean government tried to open up the rice sector, tens of thousands of angry farmers gathered across the nation to protest. “Opening up the rice market is like giving away the country’s food sovereignty”, their slogan said.

The government then promised farmers it would not liberalise the rice sector.

WTO instead allowed South Korea a concession in the form of minimum market access (MMA) norms. This system meant Seoul would have to permit a specified quantity of rice to be imported under an annual quota.

Thus, in 1994, South Korea began to import four percent of its annual rice consumption. In 2004, this agreement was extended for another 10 years, with the condition that the annual quota of imported rice be increased by 20,000 tonnes each year.

As a result, rice import under the quota jumped from about 225,000 tonnes in 2005 to 408,000 tonnes in 2014. The current quantity imported under the quota amounts to about 10 percent of the country’s total rice production, which was 4.23 million tonnes last year.

The major sources of its rice imports are China, the U.S. and Thailand, and it also buys from India, Vietnam and Cambodia.

But few South Koreans buy foreign rice, because of their strong preference for the “delicious” homegrown variety. Most of the imported quota rice is sold to food, liquor or confectionery companies but these too increasingly use more of Korean rice because of consumer preferences.

Seoul’s agreement with the WTO on the current import quota expires at the end of 2014. It must decide by June so that it can notify the WTO of its decision by September. Seoul has said the WTO is unlikely to allow any further delay in opening the rice market.

A senior official at the agriculture ministry told IPS: “If we open up, we will try to impose a 300 or 500 percent tariff on imported rice. Then the price gap between imported and domestic rice would be big enough to keep our farmers unaffected.”

Such a proposal from Seoul would have to be ratified by the WTO. “The key issue would be how high the tariff on imported foreign rice can be,” agriculture minister Lee Dong-Pil said at a press meeting in March.

Currently domestic rice sells for 162 dollars per gamani (80 kg). If South Korea imports the cereal at 60,000-70,000 won (56-65 dollars) per gamani and imposes 400 percent tariff, imported rice will cost about 280 dollars per gamani.

“Then even fewer companies would buy imported rice,” said a senior agriculture ministry official on condition of anonymity. “This may explain why major rice exporters like China or the U.S. may secretly want Seoul to maintain the current import quota system.”

The government also believes that settling for an import quota yet again – and thereby buying greater quantities of foreign rice – will not help the country. “Another delay will not benefit South Korea,” minister Lee said, referring to a growing stock of imported rice.

Talk of opening up the rice market has already spurred farmer protests.

Hundreds of them gathered in Seoul on Mar. 13 to oppose free import of foreign rice. “As we plant rice saplings in our fields, we also sow the seeds of worry in our heart,”, said a placard at the demonstration. “We will never accept an opening up of the rice market” read another.

There are 1.15 million farmers in the country and 494,352 of them are engaged in rice cultivation, according to 2012 data from the Korean Statistical Information Service.

Last month about 10,000 farmers gathered near a Seoul building where trade officials from South Korea and China were meeting for a bilateral free trade deal that would allow these two countries to increase trade between them by reducing or removing tariff on imports.

“Once a free trade deal is made between Beijing and Seoul, how can Seoul impose 300 percent tariff on Chinese rice?” asked Lee Byong-Gyu, who was leading the farmer group.

To open up its rice market or to stick to an import quota – the decision will not be easy for Seoul.

A rice delivery in Port-au-Prince on Sept. 24, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 10 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Haiti has been receiving food aid for half a century – over 1.5 million tonnes from the U.S. alone during the past two decades.

Recently, however, international aid agencies have raised a cry of alarm. Some two-thirds of all Haitians – almost seven million people – are hungry. About 1.5 million of them – twice as many as last year – face “severe” or “acute food insecurity.” Why?“They call the programme ‘Down with Hunger,’ but to me, it’s a ‘Long Live Hunger’ programme.” -- Haitian farmer Vériel Auguste

A new five-part investigative series sheds some light on the issue by considering the structural causes, as well as by taking a look at the inefficiencies and what one government official calls “the perverse effects” of food assistance.

Haiti’s agricultural sector has long languished, ignored by its governments and by foreign donors. Agriculture represents about 25 percent of the country’s GDP, and until recently it employed – directly or indirectly – up to two-thirds of the population.

Yet for several decades there has been little investment. The Ministry of Agriculture usually gets less than five percent of the government’s budget, and until recently, foreign funding for food aid far outstripped – and sometimes more than doubled – funding for agriculture.

In 2009, a mission from U.N. High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis deplored “the abandon of agricultural sector and of national production for the past three decades” and also criticised the government and various foreign government and non-governmental agencies for “multiple strategies and programs, which are sometimes contradictory” and for the “endless conferences that do not deliver any concrete results.”

Other issues – like the land tenure system, deforestation and other environmental degradation, and lack of adequate seeds, fertiliser and roads – all play a part in declining agricultural output.

But the sector has also had to contend with an influx of more-cheaply produced, and sometimes subsidised, foreign food – especially U.S. rice – beginning in 1995 when the Haitian government slashed tariffs under pressure from Washington and the international financial institutions.

Whereas the country imported less than 20 percent of its food in the early 1980s, Haiti now gets over 55 percent from overseas, mostly the U.S. and the Dominican Republic.

Since the 2010 earthquake, the government and foreign donors have launched programmes aimed at redressing these wrongs. Roads are being built and canals dredged, and various projects aim to help farmers up their productivity.

But in Grande Anse, one of the most verdant and productive provinces, agronomists are worried.

“Grande Anse was the breadbasket for the other provinces,” Vériel Auguste said. “But not any more. We are losing that potential.”

As he stood in his demonstration garden, where he grows root crops, grains and trees in an effort to inspire members of his cooperative, Auguste said that nearby, other gardens sit empty.

“People leave their land,” he said, because of the lack of technical support and because their crops cannot compete with cheaper foreign food. “Not far from here are a series of beautiful fields with good land! They are closed. The people have left.”

Earlier this year and for most of 2012, not far from Auguste’s plot, stores advertised a food aid programme that he and many others say has helped drive people from their land and increase the woes of Haiti’s farmers.

A food aid “test” reviled by farmers

Although it only provided food to 18,000 families in this country of 10 million, a Haitian government-approved CARE programme that delivered “disaster relief” food vouchers offers a glimpse of how food aid can be a double-edged sword.

Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the “Tikè Manje” (“Food Voucher”) programme distributed vouchers redeemable for mostly U.S. products like rice, oil and beans up through August 2013. It was supposedly meant to assist victims of Hurricane Tomas, which hit farmers’ fields in November 2010.

Instead, it did not start up until 11 months later, and only got into full swing in 2012, one year after the storm hit. It was expanded from 12,000 to almost 18,000 beneficiaries after Hurricane Sandy hit the peninsula.

Asked why it was allowed to start one year after Tomas, when U.S. and Haitian agencies deemed that hunger was abating, the director of the government “Aba Grangou” (“Down With Hunger”) programme admitted that the region had “probably already started to recuperate”.

“But since it had already been set up, the U.S. government decided to implement it,” Director Jean Robert Brutus said.

Haiti’s CARE office gave an additional reason. CARE said the programme was a “test” of a new food voucher system, which uses the Jamaica-based Digicel telephone company to transfer credit to beneficiaries. Digicel and the Haitian government both get paid every time a transfer is made.

The programme “is simply a test in certain regions to see if we can implement the programme everywhere in the country,” coordinator Tamara Shukakidze explained in a March 2013 interview, while the Tikè Manje was still running.

At the time, CARE was hoping to be a contractor for a future USAID-funded 20-million-dollar “social security net” project that would include food vouchers, according to CARE spokesman Pierre Seneq.

Farmers and agronomists like Auguste are still livid over the voucher programme because participants were given U.S. rice and vegetable oil rather than locally produced breadfruit and other traditional foods.

“They call the programme ‘Down with Hunger,’ but to me, it’s a ‘Long Live Hunger’ programme,” Auguste said.

Dejoie Dadignac, coordinator of the Network of Dame Marie Agricultural Producers, said her federation of 26 organisations was shocked.

“At every little store we visit, even ones that used to sell cement or tin sheeting, we see a sign: ‘USAID,’” Dadignac said in a September 2012 interview. “In their radio advertising, they say they are giving people plantains and breadfruit, but that’s not what we see. We see rice, spaghetti, oil, while our products are left out.”

Queried on the issue, CARE spokesman Seneq said future programmes would source local foods and thus “contribute to the economy rather than promote foreign food”.

On Sep. 27, USAID announced that CARE was awarded a contract for a new food voucher programme for 250,000 people. When asked where the vouchers would be distributed, and if the new programme would source U.S. or Haitian food, Seneq promised details but then never fulfilled that pledge.

The new programme is funded in part by a USAID food aid budget, Food For Peace, that requires most of the money be used to purchase and ship U.S. grown- and produced-goods. No other food aid programme in the world has those restrictions.

The current administration proposed changes, but because the 2013 Farm Bill – which covers food aid, farm subsidies and food stamps – has not yet been passed, those changes have not been implemented.

Merilus Derius, 71, said he thinks the younger generations are dissuaded from farming because they lack the means to prevent environmental degradation, but also because of cheaper or free foreign food, which are now more desired than products previous generations ate.

“Before, farmers grew sorghum and ground it. They grew Congo peas, planted potatoes, planted manioc. On a morning like this, a farmer would make his coffee and then – using a thing called ‘top-top,’ a little mill – he would crush sugar cane and boil the sugar cane water, and eat cassava bread, and he would have good health!” he said. “When you lived off your garden, you were independent.”

Read the entire Behind Haiti’s Hunger series and watch two videos, shot mostly in Savanette and on Grande Anse, here.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Dr. Marco Wopereis. Credit: AfricaRice

By Busani Bafana
COTONOU, Benin, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Thanks to food riots in several African cities fuelled by high rice prices between 2007 and 2008, sub-Saharan Africa is growing and eating more rice after governments were forced into ambitious production programmes.

Rice is the third most important source of dietary energy in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Cotonou-based Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice), a research organisation working to contribute to poverty alleviation and food security in Africa and which is supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

An analysis by AfricaRice conducted in March 2013 shows that  average rice yields in sub-Saharan Africa jumped by about 30 percent from 2007 to 2012, and are increasing at a faster rate than the global average. The rate of paddy rice production also shot up from 3.2 percent per year before the rice crisis to 8.4 percent per year afterwards.

Describing this as encouraging news, AfricaRice’s director general, Dr. Papa Seck, said it was crucial to maintain the trend because rice consumption was increasing in sub-Saharan Africa at an annual rate of five percent.

“Following the food crisis, numerous investments were made by governments, international agencies, and donor countries (through bilateral cooperation) to revamp the rice sector in sub-Saharan Africa,” says AfricaRice Deputy Director General Dr. Marco Wopereis.

In an interview with IPS correspondent Busani Bafana, Dr. Wopereis said that while it was difficult to capture all investments made at regional and country levels, two regional projects have made a big difference.

He cited the two-year, five-million-dollar Emergency Initiative to Boost Rice Production in Ghana, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal funded by USAID, which helped some 56,420 farmers across the four countries through access to subsidised seed of improved varieties, fertiliser and improved crop-management methods. Farmers produced 51,279 tonnes more rice in 2010, with their production costs reduced over the two years of the project.

The second main project involved improving access to rice seed and building a rice data system for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The 4.5-million-dollar one-year project funded by the Japanese government produced a total of 106.9 tonnes of foundation seed from 29 varieties across 20 countries and 668.4  tonnes of certified seed.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: With the projected surge in rice consumption, are current agriculture policies in SSA  conducive to promoting rice production?

A: Remarkable progress has been achieved in rice production. Rice production is now growing at almost six percent per year since 2008. However, with the surge in rice consumption, rice production will have to double the current growth rate to satisfy increasing consumption.

Q: What is the annual production of rice in SSA compared to its imports?

A: The 2012 USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) data give 12 million tonnes for milled rice produced in sub-Saharan Africa and almost 12 million tonnes of imported rice. So, in 2012 annual rice production was close to 24 million tonnes with half of it imported.

Q: What is the future of rice as a staple in Africa?

A: The future of rice as a staple in Africa is very promising. AfricaRice is convinced that the future of rice farming is in Africa. The continent has a great untapped potential, which can be seen in its vast stretches of land and barely used water resources (e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa has 130 million ha of lowlands of which only 3.9 million ha are under cultivation).

The competitiveness of local rice production in SSA is now an established fact. Besides, yields are growing now at an impressive growth rate higher than those obtained under the green revolution in Asia. Various innovation systems coupled with rice technologies dissemination and enabling policy environment will continue to further enhance the realisation of the potential.

Excerpt:

Women collecting water from a deep tube well in Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. Credit: A.S.M. Shafiqur Rahman/IPS

By Naimul Haq
CHAPAINAWABGANJ, Bangladesh, May 22 2013 (IPS)

Fahima Begum rises each morning at dawn and walks two kilometres to a small pond, the nearest source of fresh water. On her way she passes the rusty old hand-pumped tube well that used to supply water to her village in Bangladesh’s arid Barind region until the water table here dropped out of reach.

Using a ragtag array of pots, she carries back as much as her frail body will allow, knowing that it will have to last her family all day.

“When I came here 27 years ago there were plenty of freshwater ponds that served as our main source of drinking and cooking water - as time passed, they all disappeared.” - Laila Banu
Susma Sen, also a resident of the Hamidpur village, located in the Chapainawabganj district, about 330 kilometres from the capital, Dhaka, echoed her neighbour’s lamentation, adding that she rations out her family’s water use for a few days to avoid making the grueling trek again the next morning.

“Finding fresh water here is like finding gold,” chimed in 52-year-old Johra Khatun, who lives in the nearby village of Gopalpur. These villagers say every drop of water they collect is precious, and used sparingly.

They are wise to be so cautious, given that this northwestern region is the most water scarce part of Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people that is bracing for severe water shortages.

Already, global warming has dealt a harsh blow to farming communities. Extremely hot temperatures, inadequate rainfall and prolonged drought have become a matter of routine in the 7,500-square-kilometre Barind region.

Average rainfall has dropped to less than 1,200 millimetres, against the national average annual rainfall of 2,300 mm, putting undue stress on a groundwater table that is accustomed to being replenished by heavy monsoon rains.

According to unpublished data disclosed exclusively to IPS, excessive extraction of groundwater by 8,000 electric irrigation water pumps in the last three decades has also contributed to alarming levels of water scarcity in Barind, which produces 60 percent of the country’s most important crop: rice.

The two rivers that once supported life and livelihoods here – the Jamuna and the Mahananda – have slowed almost to a trickle. Massive dams in India that siphon off huge amounts of water during the dry season have led to heavy siltation of these cross-border rivers. In Bangladesh, extreme silt deposits have resulted in island-like formations across rivers that locals call “chars”.

Sardar Mohammad Shah-Newaz, director of the Institute of Water Modeling, a leading research body operating under the aegis of the ministry of water resources, told IPS, “Our latest studies indicate that… if the water levels of the two rivers drop any lower, the groundwater level will further decline, thus forcing the region into an acute water crisis.”

Rural women walk up to two kilometres to find fresh water in some parts of Bangladesh. Credit: G.M.B. Akash/IPS

Nachole, a sub-district of Chapainawabganj, is one of the worst affected parts of the region, experiencing average annual rainfall of less than 1,000 millimetres in 2011 and 2012.

With a population of roughly 120,000 people, many of whom earn between 38 and 50 dollars a month, Nachole is teetering on the brink of disaster: about one-third of the 17,500 families who live here have no access to safe, clean drinking water.

Walking through the villages of Nachole, one is confronted with the dismal sight of dried out ponds, barren farmland, and withering crops. Though such scenes have become almost mundane, some residents still recall a time when these lands were lush and yielded plenty of food for the region’s 50,000 farmers.

Fifty-five-year-old Laila Banu tells IPS, “When I came here 27 years ago there were plenty of freshwater ponds that served as our main source of drinking and cooking water… as time passed, they all disappeared.”

The government responded by constructing some 5,000 tube wells here, drilling 200 or 230 feet into the earth to reach fresh water, compared to the average 30 to 50-foot-deep wells in the rest of the country.

“About 35 percent of those wells are now out of order,” Sakhawat Hossain, superintendent engineer of the department of public health and engineering (DPHE), told IPS.

“This significantly reduces access to safe drinking water in the area, particularly in the summer months.”

Now, organisations like the Barind Multipurpose Development Authority (BMDA), responsible for installing hundreds of tube wells in the region, are realising that long-term agricultural productivity cannot be achieved by pumping more water out of the earth but by restoring the delicate ecosystems that act as natural conservation and security systems.

“Our aim is to increase agriculture productivity by promoting biodiversity or encouraging farmers to use alternative crops,” BMDA Project Director Dr. Abul Kasem told IPS.

BMDA Chairman Mohammad Nurul Islam told IPS that in order to “overcome the challenges of…climate change, we strongly encourage farmers to grow crops that require less water, like wheat, maize, pulses, tomatoes, potatoes and other cereals.”

He is optimistic about initiatives like the government’s policy on biodiversity that promotes “crop diversification, which maximises use of farmland and increases farmers’ profit margins.”

Instead of relying on income from a single yield every season, as is the case with crops like rice, farmers with an array of crops can secure an income up to three times a year, he added. This amounts to roughly 300 dollars more every year for smallholders.

Farmers like Rafiq Hasan, who owns just two hectares of land in the Naogaon district, are starting to reap the benefits of this method, though he admits there are “more risks involved,” particularly with crops like potatoes that require cold storage facilities to preserve the surplus.

Ranjan Kumar Das, a small farmer in Chapainawabganj who now plants chickpeas and maize alongside his rice, says he has noticed enhanced soil fertility as a result of crop rotation.

The national biodiversity policy also called for the construction of canals that crisscross this vast landscape, alongside of which trees have been planted in the hopes that their complex root systems will improve the soil’s water retention capacity and ward off desertification.

Water, too much and too little of it, will be the biggest climate-induced factor determining Sri Lanka’s future in an era of extreme weather. Credit: Amantha Perera

By Amantha Perera
UDAWALAWE, Sri Lanka, Dec 30 2012 (IPS)

Wild elephants are usually the primary attraction in the remote shrub jungles of Udawalawe, about 180 kilometres southeast of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo. But this Christmas season, the massive Udawalawe dam stole the limelight from the lumbering beasts.

By the end of December, heavy rains had brought water levels in the Udawalawe reservoir close to spilling point, forcing irrigation engineers to open the sluice gates.

Despite these efforts, the massive tank continued to spill over, creating a gigantic flood downstream.

People drove in cars, vans, motorcycles, lorries and even bullock carts to witness the spectacle, which was but a minor footnote compared to the impact of the rains elsewhere in this South Asian island nation.

Between Dec. 17 and 26, cyclone-level rains left 34 dead, nine unaccounted for and 328,000 stranded. Over 8,000 homes were damaged and roughly 4,000 were completely destroyed.

“No one expected this much rain,” Lal Kumara, deputy director at the government’s Disaster Management Centre (DMC), the main public body tasked with early warnings and post-disaster relief efforts in Sri Lanka, told IPS.

But someone should have expected the rains, based on the extreme weather events that ripped through the country in 2012, forcing Sri Lankans to come face to face with the disastrous impact of changing climate patterns. The end-of-year torrential rains were not the first time the country experienced unexpected floods, nor will it be the last, experts say.

In the first week of November, sudden rains brought on by Cyclone Nisha left over 200,000 people stranded, 15,000 displaced and nine dead. Over 5,000 homes were also destroyed.

Just prior to the November rains, much of the country had been hit by a 10-month-long drought. Close to a million people were affected, according to the International Federation of Red Cross Societies (IFRC), which recently launched a million-dollar international appeal to assist over 125,000 drought-affected people in Sri Lanka.

The drought destroyed 23 percent of the secondary rice harvest, the Ministry of Agriculture said, putting thousands of farmers at risk of starvation.

“More and more people are being forced to think about climate change and evaluate the impact,” Bob McKerrow, head of the IFRC delegation in Sri Lanka, told IPS.

The Northwestern Puttalam District provides a salient example of the extent of weather fluctuations within a matter of months.

During the December floods, parts of the district were submerged under eight feet of water, forcing 36,000 displaced persons to take shelter in over 60 government camps.

Yet just three months prior to the floods, people in the district were walking miles to dig holes in dried-out tank beds and wait overnight to collect the water.

“Water, the lack of it and too much of it, will be the biggest climate induced (factor) determining the way Sri Lankans live in the future,” W L Sumathipala, former head of the climate change unit of the ministry of environment, told IPS.

And though the signs are evident for all to see, hardly any action is being taken to mitigate the likelihood of future intense weather events.

The Meteorological Department still lacks the capacity to provide detailed forecasts, leaving the public to decipher cryptic notices, like the one that appeared on Dec. 20 stating, “There will be showers or thundershowers at times in the Northern, Eastern, North Central and Uva provinces and in the eastern slopes of the central hills and in the Hambantota district. Fairly heavy falls are also expected in some places.

“Showers or thundershowers will develop (in) several places elsewhere, particularly during the afternoon or evening,” the bulletin concluded.

Even officials at the DMC bemoaned the fact that they were not given detailed accounts of how much rain to expect, which would have enabled them to issue more precise warnings.

S H Kariyawasam, director general of the Meteorological Department, told IPS that the department lacked the technical and personnel capacity to give out such forecasts.

Erratic weather also continues to plague the vital paddy sector. In 2011, the country lost close to 17 percent of the total harvest to floods, followed by a bumper harvest the year after. The 2012 drought ignited fears of another lost crop, but heavy rains this month are forcing experts to rethink their forecasts yet again.

Initial reports said the rains had caused substantial damages to paddy storage facilities.

Farmers have yet to change their practices to accommodate the volatile weather, and paddy cultivation continues to follow the traditional cycle of planting and harvesting according to the two monsoons.

“Maybe if this trend continues we will have to think of adjusting the crop cycles,” said L Rupasena, additional secretary at the government-run Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Training Research Institute.

According to McKerrow, the nature of incremental climate change over decades, and sometimes generations, means people pay less attention to the patterns that they should. “Slow moving disasters are the hardest for people to understand,” he said.

But for those who gathered in close proximity to the gushing torrents under the Udawalawe dam, there was no doubt about the need for urgent action.

Uruguay is in the headlines of agricultural development news this week as it hosts the Second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD 2) from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 in the resort city of Punta del Este.

Leading agricultural researchers and organisations from around the world are meeting here to develop collaborative actions, increase capacity, and spur innovation in agricultural development. With a focus on partnerships they will be planning joint actions around a forward-looking agenda that looks at predicted trends, future needs, and sustainable solutions to inform current agricultural actions and priorities.

Beyond hosting this key global meeting, Uruguay has another important role to play as an example and source of lessons for developing successful agricultural strategies. The successful evolution of its rice sector is one such example.

Uruguay, a country of 3.3 million people, is Latin America’s top rice exporter. Credit: Irwin Loy/IPS

The Uruguayan rice sector is as unique as it is surprising, as it actually has the third highest production rate of rice in the world, averaging eight tons per hectare of dry paddy.

And it is thriving. With no special subsidies or protection from the government, it offers fair prices to farmers and stands up to fierce competition from other major rice producers such as the United States, Argentina, and Thailand. Using agricultural management practices to reduce its carbon and water footprints, it is also environmentally sustainable.

What is the secret to success for Uruguay’s rice-growing system, and what can the world learn from it?

To start, the Uruguayan rice sector targets a high-value export market. Strict production and milling standards are applied to ensure consistent quality. The number of growers is relatively small, under 600, and their plots are large, averaging 300 hectares on irrigated lowland.

And the system is based on a short and highly interactive value chain. Farmers are linked directly with the rice millers, who act as exporters. The two groups also share close connections with Uruguay’s National Agricultural Research Institute (INIA).

Furthermore, the rules regarding quality standards for rice are well-defined. Agronomists associated with the rice millers and representatives from INIA visit farmers’ fields frequently. They share advice and the latest advances, but also take in information from farmers regarding research needs or inputs.

Farmers benefit from other special features of the system, too. Collective insurance is arranged to protect them against hail damage. And the mills lend farmers up to 70 percent of the credit they need to purchase equipment for production. Farmers and millers sign a production contract every year, which includes a private agreement on the price the farmer will receive.

The transparency and integration of the Uruguayan rice sector model promotes stability and reduces uncertainty, boosting the system’s economic sustainability and competitiveness.

Likewise, the crop management and rotation practices of the system favour high yields and environmental sustainability. Here, too, there are important examples for the rest of the world. The substantial progress made in Uruguay’s rice yields is the result of a combination of improvements in sowing, seed, fertiliser use, water management, and weed control. Certified seed is used from improved varieties, and tilling is kept to a minimum to reduce the release of carbon stored in the soil into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

Water availability is the limiting factor for rice production expansion, and farmers have been constructing earth dams to capture rainfall runoff. Currently, more than 50 percent of the rice acreage in Uruguay is irrigated by these dams. The timing of planting is carefully calculated to maximise sun exposure during flowering and minimise cold damage during reproduction.

The land management practices include regular crop rotation. Two years of rice crops are rotated with three years of pasture land. This, too, helps reduce carbon emissions and rejuvenate land fertility.

Can the Uruguayan model be applied elsewhere? Elements of the system’s integration, quality standards, transparency, and crop management could serve as helpful models to be replicated across different production sectors. Specific countries may be good targets for this model, as well. Parts of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam might have good potential as there is government support there for developing a high-quality rice sector for middle-class markets.

The middle-class market in developing countries is set to more than double in size this decade, particularly in Asia. This could augur well for developing high-quality rice sectors in countries where production looms large already.

GCARD2 provides a rich platform to consider the lessons and models of Uruguay’s rice sector and their potential application in other regions.

Along with representatives from Uruguay’s national agricultural sector, the conference has drawn international partners such as the Latin American Fund for Irrigated Rice (FLAR), Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP), and International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), which have collaborated in the development of the improved varieties and management practices that have helped boost Uruguay’s success.

* Gonzalo Zorrilla is an agronomist and executive director of the Latin American Fund for Irrigated Rice.

According to the World Bank, the urban poor in Sri Lanka are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
PANSALGOLLA, Sri Lanka, Oct 28 2012 (IPS)

The old adage ‘nature is the great equaliser’ no longer holds true in countries like Sri Lanka, where the poor bear the brunt of extreme weather events.

Gamhevage Dayananda, a farmer from the remote village of Pansalgolla in Sri Lanka’s north-central Polonnaruwa district, can attest to this reality, as he and his fellow farmers struggle to survive alternating periods of drought and flooding.

Unexpectedly heavy rains in February 2011 forced engineers to open the sluice gates of large irrigation tanks in the area, flooding hectare upon hectare of farmland, including Dayananda’s modest plot.

He lost his entire rice harvest, no small setback for his family of four who depend on this crop for their very survival.

This year, Dayananda found himself facing another crisis when drought destroyed his crop and put him at risk of falling deeper into debt.

“One season it’s all rain, next it’s all sun,” Dayananda told IPS. “There is nothing in moderation, it is all in extremes.”

The trend of extreme weather events alternating year after year is unlikely to change, according to W L Sumathipala, former head of the climate change unit at the Ministry of Environment, adding that Sri Lanka is at the receiving end of changing climate patterns.

Last year’s annual report for the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) noted, “Climate-related emergencies, such as those linked to drought, floods, and storms, expose the poor and most vulnerable to hazards that have lasting consequences for the health, livelihoods, and well-being of people who have the least capacity to cope with and mitigate the effects of natural disasters.”

Widespread poverty

Currently about 8.9 percent of this South Asian island nation’s 21 million people live below the poverty line.

Of these, according to Abha Joshi-Ghani, head of the World Bank’s Urban Development and Local Government Unit, “the poor in urban areas are likely to be affected more by the changing climate patterns. They are the most vulnerable because they live in sensitive areas, on precarious land where no one else will settle.”

The British-based charity Homeless International estimates that 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s urban population of about three million can be found in slums.

Defence and Urban Development Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa was recently quoted as saying that shanty dwellers in the capital Colombo can be found “mostly on government lands”.

“Many of them are on the reservations set aside around the lakes, canals, roadways, and railway tracks,” he added.

The biggest threat to this population is the flash flood. Since 2007, the nation’s capital – along with other parts of the western region – has already been submerged more than two dozen times.

Some areas end up under water after just 30 minutes of heavy rain, as was experienced during the third week of October.

This situation can be traced in part to the capital’s compromised drainage capacity. But increasingly heavy downpours over the years have made matters worse, particularly since there are no signs this trend will let up anytime soon.

In its Second National Communication on Climate Change 2012, the environment ministry says that Colombo and the rest of the western plains can only expect more wet days ahead, with “intense” periods of rain.

By contrast, rice farmers are probably going to have to deal with long dry spells for some time to come. According to the environment ministry, the agrarian areas in parts of the east and northern provinces, including Polonnaruwa, will not only get less rain than they need, they will also experience higher temperatures.

The Central Bank estimates that a 0.5-degree Celsius rise in temperatures could reduce rice yields by around five percent.

Thus it should come as no surprise that an Asian Development Bank report last year identified climate change as the “greatest threat to food security”.

Local sustainable development expert Riza Yehiya also warned, “Food security fluctuations due to climate change will be accompanied by unsteady energy security, modern society’s greatest prerequisite (next to food and water).”

“The combined effects of this triumvirate – water, food, and energy insecurity – will render poorer sections of society extremely vulnerable unless social security for this sector is beefed up as part of the climate change mitigation programme.”

Last April, farmers in Polonnaruwa took to the streets after irrigation engineers stopped providing water because of the drought. At the time, the farmers said more than 16,000 hectares of paddy fields feeding off the Parakarama Samudarya irrigation tank were already in danger of going completely dry.

After being hit by floods in the early part of 2011, which destroyed over 16,000 hectares of paddy fields and roughly ten percent of the early harvest, rice farmers in the north and north-central regions are now facing the opposite end of that spectrum.

Severe drought during the first nine months of 2012 affected 1.3 million people, a rapid assessment by the World Food Programme (WFP) found.

Experts have estimated that close to 29 percent of an estimated harvest of 1.1 million metric tones will be lost, while 76,000 hectares, or 19 percent of the planted crop has already been destroyed.

“Preliminary findings indicate substantial livelihood impact on a broad spectrum of the population and a deterioration of food security,” according to the WFP Global Food Security Update for October.

Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, a prominent economist, believes that unemployment could be as high as 20 percent in some parts of the Northern Province, though no government data exists to support this view.

*This story was produced as part of IPS Asia-Pacific’s ‘Climate Change: A Reporting Lens from Asia’ series.

Chad has more than 400,000 square kilometres of arable land, but poor rainfall and a reliance on basic agricultural techniques have left the country with a grain deficit in the past two years. The government is turning to mechanisation in a bid to improve harvests. Chad became an oil producer in 2003. But despite the financial rewards raked in from this, the northern and eastern parts of this Sahelian country have suffered famine since 2010.

Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno, whose fourth term began in 2011, has put youth and the countryside at the head of his priority list. He wants to put an end to what he has called “the hellish cycle of famine”. But the cereal deficit has stubbornly remained at more than 500,000 tonnes a year since 2010.

A factory to assemble tractors was opened in N’Djamena in 2009.

The government has made tractors available to smallholder farmers to boost production in the 2012-2013 growing season. As part of the National Food Security Programme (PNSA), some 450,000 hectares of land were expected to be ploughed between mid-June and the end of August and a harvest of 900,000 tonnes of grain is expected.

A total of 914 tractors will till the fields at a cost of 19 dollars per hectare, said Yaya Mahamat Outman, responsible for monitoring and evaluation for PNSA, at the launch of the growing season in April 2012. The receipts from the ploughing will raise more than 8.4 million dollars, which will serve to keep the programme running, he added.

The N’Djamena-Fara district, just 40 kilometres northwest of the capital, N’Djamena, is one of the country’s prime agricultural regions. While fishing and livestock have been the principal economic activities of residents of N’Djamena-Fara, that has changed with the arrival of the tractors.

“With a tractor, even the laziest person can have a farm,” joked Othniel Djimadoumngar, one of the tractor operators assigned to work here. In total, five tractors are working in this area. Djimadoumngar ploughs between seven and eight hectares a day, while it would take several days to prepare even one hectare manually or with an ox.

But keeping the machines running has been a problem. “When a tractor breaks down, we have to fix it ourselves. When we call N’Djamena, no one responds. Even getting hold of base dressing, like NPK (fertiliser added to the soil while ploughing), is not easy. Sometimes you have to go to Douguia, a town 30 kilometres away, to buy them,” said Patrice Allarabaye, head of agriculture in the N’Djamena-Fara district.

Gisèle Bénaïdara Djasnebeye, an agriculture advisor, told IPS that her role in the district is to help producers to achieve the best yields.

“What you see here is a demonstration plot. We teach producers how to transplant rice. You always need to transplant in a grid of 25 by 25 centimetres, or 20 by 20, using a measuring tape. With this technique, if the plot is properly weeded and looked after, a farmer can harvest as many as 90 100-kilo sacks of paddy rice per hectare,” Djasnebeye told IPS.

As the ploughing season draws to a close across the country, some 400 hectares of land will have been tilled in N’Djamena-Fara this year thanks to the tractors. The smallholders paid cash for the service. The rainfall has also been good. If the predictions are accurate, farmers in the district will harvest around 36,000 bags of paddy rice this season.

PNSA’s work complements that of the National Office for Rural Development, established in the 1960s and now the largest and oldest government structure to support farmers.

PNSA deploys extension workers and agronomists in the field to support farmers. Each year, it buys up stocks of staple foodstuffs direct from growers and resells them at subsidised prices during famine or the annual lean period, which runs from the end of June until the first of the harvest is reaped in the latter part of August.

This year it built up a reserve of more 20,000 tonnes of grain.

While rice farming, livestock and fishing are key economic activities in N’Djamena-Fara, it is also a major centre for growing fruit and vegetables. Thanks to the Logone river which flows through the district, many vegetables are available throughout the year, such as cabbage, cucumbers, spinach and carrots, as well as different kinds of fruit.

But N’Djamena-Fara, like many parts of Chad, has difficulties getting this bounty to the capital, despite its proximity. Most of the produce is delivered to Cameroonian merchants who cross the Logone which separates N’Djamena-Fara from Goulfé, a border city.

Mahamat Moussa Kach, sub-prefect of N’Djamena-Fara, told IPS: “We are so close to the capital, just 40 kilometres away, but paradoxically we are cut off from the rest of Chad.” He hopes that an 18-kilometre section of unpaved road will be tarred, as promised by the government, to allow them to transport their produce to the capital.

Kafoumba Koné sounds almost smug. “Our first rice harvest is in, and we’re getting ready to plant again,” he says, surveying his farm in southeastern Guinea. “Other farmers who have not yet tried NERICA are still preparing for their only harvest of the year.” Along with 24 younger associates, Koné harvested nearly 700 tonnes of an improved variety of rice from their 140-hectare plot in the Beyla prefecture in the southeastern corner of this West African country at the beginning of August.

The group earned 294,000 dollars from their crop of NERICA, the New Rice for Africa, an improved variety that’s proving to be well-matched to the low soil fertility in the region.

Roughly a third of their revenue has gone to pay off various creditors, but the balance, banked in their new account at a rural credit union, represents a handsome profit as they return to the fields.

Rice production in Guinea presently falls well short of the needs of its 10 million strong population. According to a report from the agriculture ministry, the country’s rice deficit is around 240,000 tonnes a year, forcing Guinea to import roughly a fifth of its annual consumption of 1.26 million tonnes from Thailand and Vietnam.

“It is time we begin to re-evaluate our dependence on imported rice. We need to increase our local output,” said Agriculture Minister Jean-Marc Telliano.

This year, Guinea’s National Agency for Rural Promotion and Agriculture Extension has made 500 tonnes of NERICA rice seed available to smallholders as part of a one million dollar project to increase output.

“This rice variety is a cross between African and Asian strains of rice. Rich in protein, it is prized by Guinean consumers, for whom rice is a staple,” said Ali Condé, director of the agency.

Farmers in Beyla and neighbouring Kérouané have enthusiastically adopted the improved variety.

IPS visited a farm in Kérouané at the end of August, where a group of 17 farmers are growing NERICA on 130 hectares of land. There is no shortage of arable land in this part of the country, and the local community readily granted the group access to cultivate this large area.

“We harvested around 645 tonnes of (unprocessed) paddy rice,” said Mohamed Dioubaté, head of the Kérouané collective. Some of the crop will go towards the farmers’ own use, but most will be sold to buyers from all over the country.

Dioubaté told IPS that a 100-kilo sack of rice sells for about 300,000 Guinean francs – 42 dollars – which means the group made a gross income of roughly 270,000 dollars from the past three months of work.

“The introduction of this variety of rice here in 2012 has been a blessing for us,” he said. “Now we can have two harvests a year which wasn’t possible before.”

“It’s even possible to get three harvests per year since the growing cycle for this rice is actually 90 days,” said Abdoulaye Sangaré, an agriculture extension worker in the region.

According to Sangaré, the new rice is perfectly adapted to conditions here, where farmers lack the resources to irrigate their fields or apply fertiliser and pesticides. NERICA is doing well despite low soil fertility and a dependence on rain for water.

The benefits of increased production are already being felt in the local marketplace.

“With the coming of NERICA, the price of rice has fallen in our region,” said Sarata Keita, a rice seller in Kérouané. “Now a kilo of rice costs between three and four thousand francs (less than a dollar) while the price was between five and six thousand in the past.”

However, the farmers complained about a lack of equipment and agricultural machinery that would let them work even more quickly and efficiently.

“We harvested the rice with sickles,” said local farmer Samouka Kourouma, “and threshed and cleaned the rice by hand. We would be happier if we had mechanical rice hullers and other equipment.”

Mohamed Ceesay, a 20-year-old farmer from the Central River Region in the Gambia, is a high school dropout. But thanks to an initiative to discourage local youths from emigrating to Europe, he earns almost half the salary of a government minister from his rice harvest.

The Gambian government has provided farmers in 10 of the country’s most-vulnerable districts with inputs such as power tillers, tractors, rice threshers, seeders, sine hoes and bags of fertilisers. Credit: DW / Manuel Özcerkes/ CC by 2.0

“In July I harvested 20 hectares of rice fields on my own farm, and our association harvested 100 hectares across the Central River Region. We earn more than what our ministers are earning today,” he told IPS.

He earns 35,000 Gambian dalasi or 1,170 dollars every three months or so – half of what government ministers in this West African nation earn. Their monthly salaries are around 667 dollars, which amounts to almost 2,000 dollars over three months.

Ceesay is one of 50 young farmers from “Operation No Back Way to Europe”, an association founded in 2008 that aims to discourage youths from illegally emigrating.

Indeed, some of the young farmers in the organisation have attempted to enter Europe unlawfully, but they were deported back to the Gambia. Edrissa Sane, 23, is one of them.

“Before, I used to ask my family to help me go abroad in search of greener pastures. I have tried several times by voyaging by sea on a small boat to Spain. I did not succeed because we were arrested and deported back to the Gambia,” Sane said.

But since he joined “Operation No Back Way to Europe” he has no desire to make the dangerous and unlawful journey to Europe again.

“I earn more than 30,000 Gambia dalasi (about 1,000 dollars) in just a few months. That is enough for me, rather than voyaging across the sea to lose my life,” the rice farmer told IPS.

Edrissa said that he regretted not venturing into farming sooner as he now earned a good living.

The chairman of “Operation No Back Way to Europe”, Bubacarr Jabbi, told IPS that the association was working with the Immigration Department and the Gambia Police Force to reduce illegal emigration.

Over the years, more than 200 Gambian youths have died while crossing the seas to Europe. At one point, more than 600 youths a year were attempting to emigrate unlawfully. However, according to statistics from the Gambia Immigration Department, only 60 attempted the journey in 2010/2011.

“We believe in action and therefore urged other relevant stakeholders to come to the aid of the youth in order to inform them about the implications of illegal emigration,” Jabbi said.

One of their initiatives to keep young people in the Gambia has been youth farming. “Operation No Back Way to Europe” has young farmers across the country, in the Lower, Central and Upper River Regions.

On about 2,000 hectares of loaned government land, the 50 young farmers grow the New Rice for Africa (NERICA) variety known for its ability to grow in dry lands. An additional 1,000 hectares of government land has been loaned to other farmers across the country.

And as the 2012 harvest approaches this September, the organisation has promised that its farmers will have a bumper crop. It estimates that they will produce 4,500 tonnes of NERICA.

Currently, the country has only 100 registered rice farmers who produce between 10,000 and 15,000 tonnes of rice a year.

The Gambia, Africa’s smallest country in the Sahel zone, was in the midst of a food crisis last year when the government announced a national emergency in March after declaring the 2011 crop season a failure. At the time, about half the country’s 1.4 million people were affected by food insecurity.

According to a United Nations Development Programme report, the country experienced an almost 70 percent reduction in food production, with 19 of the country’s 39 rural districts being the most affected because of low rainfall. According to the report, rice production in the country fell by 74 percent.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization office in Banjul said that vulnerability to food insecurity would continue to rise in the country, especially among farmers who faced an early and protracted lean season because of decreased income and household food stocks.

In addition, the prices of basic food commodities have skyrocketed over the last year. Many here cannot afford to buy a 50-kilogramme bag of rice that now costs almost 33 dollars when it previously cost 20.

About 70 percent of the population in the Gambia rely on farming for their livelihoods. Agriculture, however, only contributes 32 percent of GDP. Although almost half the country’s 10,000 square kilometres is arable, only about one-fifth of the land, some 2,000 square kilometres, has been cultivated.

However, the government says that agriculture remains the prime sector with which to reduce poverty, generate investment and improve food security. And this is the reason why it wishes to see further investment in the sector.

According to the agricultural director of Central River Region, Ousman Jammeh, the success of young farmers from “Operation No Back Way to Europe” is thanks to the support of the Gambia Emergency Agricultural Production Project or GEAPP.

The European Commission-funded project, run by the Gambian government, has provided farmers in 10 of the country’s most-vulnerable districts with inputs such as power tillers, tractors, rice threshers, seeders, sine hoes and bags of fertilisers – all for free.

Jammeh told IPS that since some farmers in the Gambia had been supplied with proper farming inputs, their production levels for the 2012 harvest should increase. The GEAPP distributed 3,000 tonnes of fertilisers to 600 villages, 300 power tillers, 367 seeders, 367 sine hoes and 367 threshing machines, and 525 tonnes of seed.

“GEAPP has the objective, due to soaring food prices, to enhance agricultural production in the country’s most vulnerable villages by providing access to inputs and machinery, and through the rehabilitation of 35 village seed stores and 23 seed multiplication centres,” he said.

Ceesay, who only started farming last year, is one of the farmers expecting an increase in his crop yield. He estimated that he would have more than 300 50-kilogramme bags of rice from his harvest. Last year he produced 200.

“This year, we had all the farming materials and inputs in place ahead of time and used them. (Not having inputs) was our major problem that contributed to our poor season last year,” Ceesay said.

Just two years ago, rice farmers on the Ruzizi plain in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo were content to harvest 2.5 tonnes of rice per hectare. The adoption of new techniques has seen their output rise to between six and eight tonnes, with smallholder farmers also increasing their local market share.

Behind the startling transformation here, 100 kilometres south of Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province, is the CATALIST programme of IFDC (the International Fertiliser Development Centre), a Dutch NGO which began training producers on protecting soil quality in 2007.

CATALIST – Catalyse Accelerated Agricultural Intensification for Social and Environmental Stability – promotes a set of techniques known as Integrated Soil Fertility Management [LINK: http://ifdc-catalist.org/drcongo.php]. ISFM is a sustainable solution for food security and higher incomes, according to Bernard Assumani, the provincial inspector for agriculture. Previously, he said, farmers were typically harvesting 2.5 tonnes of rice from a one hectare plot; with the adoption of ISFM, the same area can yield 7.5 tonnes.

Smallholder farmers who spoke to IPS confirmed the programme’s benefits. “The yield varies between six and eight tonnes per hectare,” said Louise Zawadi, a member of the Association of Women for Rural Development (AFEDER). “With rice selling for 80 cents U.S. per kilo, rice becomes profitable.”

Bigger harvests, growing market share

IFDC has spent two years working alongside eight local associations and two universities in Bukavu to roll out its programme to boost rice production on the Ruzizi plain.

Key to the ISFM approach is the use of mineral fertilisers, imported into eastern DRC from Tanzania. Two measures were introduced in 2010 to make the fertiliser more accessible: the government agreed to waive import duties while IFDC subsidised the cost of distribution. This lowered the cost of fertiliser from $1.80/kg to a dollar per kilo.

The subsidy has been discontinued, but it appears to have achieved its aims, as imported fertiliser is now more readily available in the region at a price that has settled at $1.25/kilo. Herman Mutabataba, who coordinates an association of distributors of staple foods and seeds, notes fertiliser is still more expensive on the Ruzizi plain than across the border in neighbouring Tanzania and Rwanda, where there is greater government support for farmers.

Some producers have set up associations to pool their efforts. One such smallholder cooperative, 315 members strong, harvested 86 tonnes of rice – worth 17,200 dollars – at Luberizi during the first growing season of 2011, according to coop member Mukeba wa Rusatiza. In addition to a share of these profits, producers also gained access to high quality seed varieties.

Locally-produced rice is gaining ground in a market previously dominated by rice from Tanzania and Pakistan. Large quantities of rice are being brought to market in and around Bukavu and Uvira, the province’s two biggest cities. Other farmers are now supplying the region’s only brewery.

The Bralima brewery, owned by international beverage giant Heineken, is an important partner in promoting increased rice production. In 2010, its Bukavu facility imported more than 60 percent of the 2,800 tonnes of rice it used for brewing beer. But Bralima committed to use only local rice, and within a year had replaced its imports with locally-grown rice – including a contract for 350 tonnes a year agreed directly with a smallholder farmers’ organisation.

Access to land

The Regional Council of Non-Governmental Organisations (CRONGD) has taken a leading role in the project. Delphin Zozo heads CRONGD’s involvement, and he notes that when the project started, more than half of the producers taking part were cultivating rice on small plots, often leased from their owners for a growing season.

Access to land is a continuing challenge for smallholders. AFEDER member Espérance Matumaini, from Luvungi, a village on the Ruzizi plain, complained that leasing land cost far too much.

“It costs 200 U.S. dollars to lease a hectare. As far as buying it outright, that depends on the quality of the site: that will set you back between 400 to 600 dollars,” she told IPS.

Jocelyn Matabaro, a specialist in land and natural resource issues and an independent consultant for IFDC, says that the CATALIST programme has made visible changes to land use. But, she told IPS, while waiting for an overhaul of DRC’s land rights system, temporary measures should be implemented at the local level to improve relations between farmers who rent land and big land owners.

Many smallholders have already invested profits from bumper harvests in purchasing farmland. Zozo said that out of a total of 15,000 producers on the plain, 12,500 have adopted IFDC’s methods. And more than half of those now practicing ISFM have bought their fields thanks to the encouraging returns. The typical size of plots has also increased, with many farmers expanding the size of their operations to plots of up to five hectares.

Smallholders have also learned how to better break down their production costs. Dieudonné Shukuru, one of the 350 members of a producers’ association – Organisation of Producers for Intensifying Agriculture and Development – in Luvungi, said the cost per kilo of rice had fallen from 45 to 20 cents.

According to CRONGD’s agronomist, Galilée Ibochwa, there are generally two harvests per year, but he stressed the problems that access to water poses in some locations. “Many dams are aging or have not been well maintained. At these sites, we have just one growing season,” he told IPS.

While ISFM has brought concrete benefits to the Ruzizi plain, farmers say there are still other obstacles to overcome: the lack of sophisticated threshers to process rice, as well as access to subsidised fertiliser and other support from the government, which allocated a meagre 0.6 percent of the national budget to agriculture in 2012.

Critical dependence on water makes Sri Lanka vulnerable to changing rainfall and temperature patterns. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jul 22 2012 (IPS)

For many Sri Lankans, the effects of climate change can be summed up in one word: rainfall.

“The biggest impact (of climate change) is rainfall or the lack of it,” W L Sumathipala, one of Sri Lanka’s foremost experts in changing climate patterns, told IPS on a scorching hot and humid day in Colombo.

“The availability of water can effect multiple things in Sri Lanka from crops to power generation to the currency,” Sumathipala, who formerly headed the climate change unit at the Ministry of Environment, added.

The last six months, with their merciless combination of scarce rainfall and blazing temperatures, have proved his statement to be true. The failure of the seasonal monsoon to deliver adequate amounts of rain have had a serious impact on lives, livelihoods and the economy.

In the north central districts, a vital region for the country’s staple rice harvest, smaller irrigation reservoirs have run dry, while their larger cousins, fed by rivers, have stopped issuing water to farmers because their water levels are too low.

The Parakrama Samudraya, a 20 square-kilometre tank in the Polonnaruwa District, was only eight percent full by the first week of July due to lack of rain.

“This is probably the worst (drought) we have had in recent years,” irrigation engineer R M Karunarathna told IPS.

The drought will almost certainly have a serious effect on the rice harvest. Farmers who depend on the Parakrama Samudraya and connected reservoirs have held public protests warning that as many as 40,000 acres of paddy fields may have been lost.

Further north, in areas that have recently emerged from three decades of civil unrest, the lack of water is threatening to undo some of the gains made since the war ended in May 2009, according to the latest United Nations updates for the country.

“The delay of the north west monsoon rains has caused severe drought condition in the country affecting the country’s agricultural sector (and) threatening to destroy the majority of expected yields from paddy, vegetables and other food crops. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, nearly 150,000 acres of cultivation lands are in danger of getting destroyed,” the updated warned.

The lack of water has also left the country’s power generation capacity almost entirely dependent on thermal power.

In an average year, around 42 percent of the country’s power supply can be met through hydropower, Thilak Siyambalapitiya, an energy consultant and a former engineer with the Sri Lanka Electricity Board, told IPS.

During years where the rains have been exceptionally high, between late 2010 and early 2011 for instance, the contribution of hydropower has been as high as 50 percent.

In fact in 2011 the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) recorded a rare profitable year, largely due to the high hydro generation component, Siyambalapitiya said.

“This year if CEB can meet something like 25 percent (of power needs) from hydro, we will be lucky,” he predicted. But even that may be optimistic: by early July less than 15 percent of the required power was met through hydro generation.

It costs about 13 rupees (about one U.S. cent) to generate a unit of electricity using hydropower, while thermal costs increase the unit production price to seven cents for coal, 11 cents for furnace fuel and 18 cents for diesel. “The cost differences are exorbitant,” Siyambalapitiya said.

To add to the woes, the Sri Lankan rupee has fallen steadily against the dollar since late last year.

In mid November 2011, the Central Bank stopped intervening to strengthen the currency and in the ensuing eight months, the rupee has weakened by about 17 percent.

“When the rains stay away and the hot weather patterns evaporate surface water, this is what we get,” Sumathipala said.

The phenomenon will likely continue; experts predict that water scarcity will play a crucial role in the coming years.

The latest Central Bank annual report said that temperatures have recorded an increase of around 0.45 degrees Celsius in the last two decades. A 0.5-degree rise can reduce the rice harvest yield by about 5.9 percent.

The Bank added this would be disastrous for the country’s 1.8 million people – close to 10 percent of the country’s population – who depend on agriculture for survival.

“Sri Lanka is vulnerable to the impact of climate change largely due to its critical dependence on water resources for biodiversity, food security, livelihood and power generation,” the report said.

The Second National Communication on Climate Change 2012, a report by the Ministry of Environment, also confirmed that the pattern of rising temperatures and falling rains would have a big impact on rice harvests and yields.

The same report revealed that while the dry zone will continue to get drier due to less rain and increasing temperatures, the wet zone is likely to get more rain than needed. It even suggested transporting excess water between the two zones.

The high concentration of rain in the wet zone increases the risk of flood-related damages as well as the spread of vector diseases like dengue.

In the last five years Sri Lanka has been logging an increased number of dengue victims during and after monsoon rains, especially in flat urban areas like the capital Colombo.

“The city of Colombo is vulnerable to (flash flooding) where the low-lying parts of the city go under water whenever there is high intense rain falling even for a few hours,” the report said.

Experts say that to meet the evolving nature of water availability, better coordination between public and private enterprises and experts is vital.

“Some the changes and patterns can be predicted, but we need better communication to be ready for them,” Malika Wimalasuriya, head of the Climate Change Unit at the Meteorological Department, told IPS.

(END)

Changing rainfall patterns are having a significant impact on Sri Lanka's vital rice harvest. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, May 16 2012 (IPS)

The year 2011 was one of extremes for the small Sri Lankan village of Verugal.

Lying on the island’s Northeastern coast, Verugal began the year with incessant rainfall. Between January and February of 2011, the East coast received a year’s worth of rain, which destroyed over 7,000 hectares of rice crops in Verugal and about 17 percent of the country’s annual rice harvest.

Some villages were cut off for weeks on end.

“I was working in a life jacket for over two weeks,” said Ponnabalam Thanesvaran, head of the Verugal divisional secretariat and the highest-ranking government official for the region.

Just as the rains abated around September, Verugal fell foul of nature’s wrath once more, only this time weathering the flip side of the coin: drought.

Thanesvaran told IPS that between September and October his main task was providing drinking water to remote villages, some of which had been cut off by floods just nine months ago. “It was incredible how, within less than a year, we had a flood and a drought,” he observed.

With next month’s United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, just around the corner, local experts are pushing for increased efforts to get the message on changing climate patterns out to the most affected and least informed populations – like rice farmers in rural Sri Lanka.

Countrywide pattern

Sri Lanka’s rice harvest fell from 4.26 million metric tonnes in 2010 to around 3.9 million metric tonnes in 2011, Nimal Dissanayake, head of the country’s premier Rice Research and Development Institute (RRDI), told IPS.

The bulk of harvest losses has been attributed to the floods, but Dissanayake said that the drought was also responsible for low yields.

From heavy losses in 2011, the country is slated to experience a record high harvest this year as extreme weather events ease, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said early this month in a harvest forecast.

“The world rice harvest for 2012 is expected to surpass the strong showing of 2011 as the erratic climate conditions caused by La Niña dissipate and farmers increase their plantings,” the forecast said.

Thanesvaran told IPS that many of the farmers in Verugal were expecting better crops this year, a sentiment similar to that expressed by others in the adjoining Polonnaruwa District, which also suffered grave losses during the floods.

“This time, all seems well,” predicted Karunaratne Gamage, a farmer from the rice-producing Madirigiriya area in Polonnaruwa, mainly because weather patterns have been stable.

But experts like Dissanayake feel there is adequate research to indicate that changing weather patterns have severely impacted rice production in Sri Lanka and should be dealt with very seriously.

Any change in rice production has, and will continue to have, an impact across the country. According to the Census and Statistics Department, a typical Sri Lankan household consumes 36 kilogrammes of rice per month, making it the single post popular food item by a wide margin. For rural families, rice is a staple for all three meals of the day.

Research by the Sri Lanka Foundation for Environment, Climate and Technology, which carries out extensive research and analysis on climate change and its impact on local crops, says that the influence of changing rain patterns on annual rice yields over the last two decades has been “significant”. Research shows that during the El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation (ENSO) periods, rice harvests were seen to fluctuate.

During the El Niño phase of rising temperatures, research indicate that rice production during Sri Lanka’s October-March harvesting season rose, while it fell during the secondary harvesting season from April- August.

This pattern shifted during the cooler La Niña phase, resulting in cyclones and floods, not only in Sri Lanka but in other parts of Asia as well.

Dissanayake believes this is because farmers in Sri Lanka use rain water for rice and rely on a weak water management system. “Last year’s secondary harvest was better, because the flood waters (helped) the planting,” he said.

“The problem is that farmers don’t understand the gravity of the situation. They are still used to waiting for the rains, and for the government to release water from the reservoirs,” he said.

Gamage admitted that, on the ground, there is limited knowledge of changing climate patterns and adaptation strategies.

“People know that there is something strange (going on) with recent weather patterns, but beyond that, there is not much knowledge or planning (around) possible changes.”

The RRDI has developed rice varieties that can withstand severe weather changes, but Dissanayake said they are currently being used only in areas that have been deprived of water for up to three months. He lamented that farmers have little or no interest in using new, weather-resistant strands of rice.

Regardless of rainfall, farmers continue to use seeds that take up to five months to mature during the main harvesting season, or three months during the secondary season.

Dissanayake told IPS that rice was considered a “poor man’s crop”, one that brings in meagre profits and fails to attract big business. As a result, “there is not much money invested in new technologies or (adaptation methods),” he said.

(END)