Unlocking the Potential of Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia - SAR-CLIMATE

Unlocking the Potential of Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia

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Dr. Arun Khatri-Chhetri (Photo by ADPC)

Dr. Arun Khatri-Chhetri is an Agricultural Economist on Low Emissions Agriculture with the International Center for Tropical Research (CIAT) based at the University of Vermont, USA. For the last 8 years, he has been working in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) program on climate change, agriculture, and food security (CCAFS).

From a practical point of view, what does Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) mean to the everyday farmer?

Farmers normally face three kinds of climate conditions – climatically good years, climatically normal years, and climatically bad years.

Given these very different types of climatic conditions, farmers need to adopt different technologies, and practices, and they should have access to different climatic services.

During the climatically good years, they always try to maximize their benefits by using different technologies and practices, and during the normal years, they try to maintain their normal rates of production.

However, when farmers face bad climatic conditions, they have to adopt a wide range of climate-smart agriculture technologies, practices, and services.

That is very much important and sometimes the agriculture system, crop system, and livestock system might fail, and they will need additional support like insurance and other social support systems.

Do you believe that CSA is an economically-viable approach for farming practices in South Asian countries?

A range of studies has been conducted in South Asia by my organization and a lot of other organizations to test and evaluate climate-smart practices in farmers’ fields. These studies show that CSA is an economically viable option for many farmers.

Changing utility practices, water and energy management, and the use of improved seeds, in particular, can maximize their economic benefits and also help farmers adapt to the impacts of climate change on the agriculture sector.

But we shouldn’t forget that all economically viable cases may not be scaled up. We need to look at three key issues in economic viability. One is the marginal return on investment, which is very low at the moment in the agriculture sector in terms of climate adaptation. Second is the uncertainty in return on investment, given the unpredictable nature of climate change.

Third is the competitiveness of individual farmers in food markets – individuals might not get a lot of benefits from adopting CSA, so we need to actively compare individual actions, social costs, and benefits.

The scaling up of CSA needs public investment and attention in order to become economically viable and scalable.

When farmers face bad climatic conditions, they have to adopt a wide range of climate-smart agriculture technologies, practices, and services.

What kind of policies are needed to mainstream CSA into the development planning process?

There are millions of smallholder farmers in South Asian countries and they each may need entirely different kinds of policies.

In my experience, there are a couple of policies that might help to scale up CSA, for example, government investments in the agriculture sector through subsidies.

Another initiative I’ve noticed is increasing private sector involvement in agriculture in the form of agri-business companies. Therefore, reforming existing agricultural extension systems and integrating the private sector through different tax and subsidy policies is another opportunity for policy reform.

Lastly, blended finance between public and private sectors can also help scale up CSA in the South Asian region. However, we are focusing a lot on the agriculture supply side instead of the consumer demand side, so we also need to implement reforms for promoting healthy and climate-smart family diets. This might help families and households support adaptation in the agriculture sector, particularly in smaller farming systems.

Dr. Arun Khatri-Chhetri spoke with ADPC as part of its ‘Climate Talks’ panel discussion on Climate-Smart Agriculture in South Asia.

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homolata

homolata.borah@adpc.net

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