Climate-Smart Seeds?

Climate change challenges current practices and calls for innovative, efficient use of resources. 

Considering the impact of rapid and wide-scale agricultural transformations on the Earth System, it is important to discuss the future of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which lags behind all other regions in agriculture; ''80% of production gains since 1980 have come from the expansion of cropped areas rather than from greater productivity of areas already cultivated'' (Rakotoarisoa et al., 2012). Furthermore, the IPCC clearly demonstrates that the region will experience major yield losses under climate change.
  
The FAO's 2016 and 2017 State of Food and Agriculture reports both include ''adopting varieties resistant to heat and drought'' under the Climate-Smart Agriculture section. Let's take a look at Water-Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA):

Major agribusiness companies such as Syngenta and Monsanto 
have been promoting hybrids to confront climate change

Non-profit organizations engaged in agricultural development using hybrids

WEMA is a project undertaken by Monsanto, using a patented maize (corn) hybrid aimed at resisting drought and insects, approved for commercial release in Kenya, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa. WEMA is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). It is coordinated by the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), which qualifies climate change as a major challenge to smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa who ''have little resources to effectively manage''. But what resources do farmers need to become self-sufficient and resilient?

For whom is it a ''smart'' solution?

                                              The FAO's video campaign for Climate-Smart Agriculture

The FAO's youtube video campaign for CSA focuses on the importance of building the resilience of ''the men and women who produce our food’’. Perhaps smallholders are most vulnerable to climate-change and holistic, innovative farming techniques are required. However, the video does not mention agribusinesses and industrial agriculture (the main contributors to agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and therefore the main actors in mitigation) and focuses solely on small-holder farmers.

Denouncers of CSA (see BioWatch, ACBio, Green Social Thought) claim that with the pretext of helping smallholders combat climate change, ''under the guise of philanthropy'', TNCs such as Syngenta and Monsanto seek to establish a private sector-driven seed industry in Africa; ''hybrid seeds are capturing African markets at a rapid pace and represent an average of 57% of maize seed grown on the continent''.

''Using the language and even some of the methods of ecological agriculture, climate-smart agriculture provides a veneer of sustainability for interventions that continue to promote industrial agribusiness products and technologies”- BioWatch South Africa 

What do you think?

Climate-Smart Agriculture

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is a concept coined by the FAO in 2010 as an ''approach for transforming and reorienting agricultural systems to support food security under the new realities of climate change'' (Lipper et al., 2014). It has been extensively brought up recently.

Climate-Smart promotes the use of technology, such as Big Data
to increase farmer's adaptive capacities to climate change

More yields, fewer emissions 

The industrialization of agriculture, with increased inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, GM breeds, irrigation) and the expansion of land cleared for crops and livestock, has shaped global food production activity in a way that may imply massive environmental, social, and economic costs. Against this backdrop, CSA embodies a holistic approach to agriculture, one which has the potential to curb GHG emissions while enhancing productivity, drifting away from “business-as-usual’’ models. 

Why climate smart? 

Major organizations claim that food production will have to significantly increase to support population growth, which will have occurred mostly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. This implies rising energy, water, and raw material demands in a context of fragile biosphere integrity.

Climate Change Vulnerability Index 2017 - Source

Climate-change will not have the same impact everywhere. Countries with robust economies and political stability will be more resilient than countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (refer to map above), which suffers from recurrent conflicts and poverty. Since there is no "one size fits all" solution for the challenges countries (and localities) face, CSA seeks to provide context-specific practices. In this sense, let us briefly consider Brazil:

Rapid agricultural expansion driven by both domestic and international market demand have made Brazil a prominent player in international commodity markets. Brazil also plays a leading role on the environmental stage (it hosted two UN Conferences, the Rio-92 and the Rio+20) and has pursued climate-change mitigation policies that promote sustainable agricultural intensification. AS Cohn et al., (2014) and others have analyzed the potential of cattle ranching intensification (producing more per land unit) as a cost-effective strategy to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions through a more efficient use of pastures without increasing deforestation. However, the potential of mitigation in the livestock sector requires action in the Enteric Fermentation and Agricultural soil sub-sectors, regarding N₂O and CH₄ emissions.

Transforming the supply chain of major ''forest risk commodities''
with sustainable cattle intensification and soy production in Brazil's state of Pará (Source)

The majority of emissions from Brazil are derived from burning linked to deforestation of the Amazon Biome (Cerri et al., 2009). Bearing this in mind, two programs are worth mentioning: Low Carbon Agriculture and the Forest Code. In the first one, producers have access to low-interest loans as long as they implement activities aligned with national voluntary mitigation targets (in the case of pasture rehabilitation, for example, covering an area of 12 million hectares). The Forest Code, adopted in 1965, has been consistently updated. Most recently, and as an example of how technology is a vital tool for CSA, an interactive online platform has been made available by EMBRAPA (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) for the recovery of deforested areas and to expand forests which have been recovered (Negra et al., 2014). Furthermore, Brazil will implement an integrated crop-livestock-forest system in 5 million hectares. 

CSA policies at the national level must be matched by commitments made under multilateral agreements such as the UNFCCC, trade agreements and international donors pledges which clearly promote poverty reduction, as indicated in SDG 1: End poverty in all its forms and everywhere.