Seeding Change: A Roadmap for Scaling Up Climate-Smart Agriculture in South Asia

After highlighting the importance of climate change in today’s time, Dr. Faisal Abbas mentioned that the changes in the temperature within Pakistan and around the globe are evident, leading to droughts or floods, and heatwaves which further affect the agriculture sector and therefore mentioned that climate change impacts human life in three ways, i.e. the human directly, human existence directly or indirectly, and the likelihood of human existence directly or indirectly.

Presenting on the role of Climate-Smart Agriculture in South Asia, Dr. Asif Ishtiaque mentioned that every year around 1% of the population is added to the existing population, which relies on agriculture. He mentioned that Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) is a set of strategies that focuses on increasing food production, increasing agricultural resilience to CC, and working on mitigation by reducing the agricultural contribution to climate change. To increase the use of CSA across South Asia specifically Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, following ways can be adopted

1. The identification of location-specific CSA as not all approaches are cost-effective for all regions such as laser land leveler which is effective for larger land sizes and therefore is effective for India and Pakistan, but not for Bangladesh and Nepal.
2. Enhancement of organizational capacities as government departments have inadequate resources but high potential and therefore increased (better) allocation of financial resources along with farmer’s peer-to-peer practice is required.
3. Introduction of transparent hiring centers and service providers as some of the CSA practices are expensive, thus instruments or services need to be subsidized along with ensuring the effectiveness of hiring centers by focusing on the issues of mismanagement, unskilled staff, elite capture profit mongering, and social marginalization.
4. Diesel irrigation is widely used, but if it is not subsidized, people will move towards solar irrigation therefore, targeted incentives or targeted subsidization is required to deal with insufficient incentives for CSA.
5. Focus on providing incentives to the private sector to deal with a positive feedback loop i.e. low adoption to low market demand to low supply and thus low supply.
6. Ensure post-adoption follow-up i.e. monitoring and evaluating CSA adoption over time.
7. As female farmers have increased over the years, but the agriculture extension departments are male-headed and thus dealing with females is difficult, therefore, equitable dissemination of CSA information is needed by hiring more female agricultural extension agents to ensure that farmers from poor and less socially connected backgrounds are accurately addressed.

Concluding his discussion, Dr. Asif mentioned the need for system-level approach that focuses on dealing with all the strategies together in order to ensure a prolonged, sustainable outcome. He also reiterated the fact that in the year 050, agricultural production will be insufficient due to the adverse impact of climate change. Hence, in this scenario, the CSA technologies will be of immense importance.

After Dr. Asif’s discussion, the floor was open for any questions the attendees might have. Dr. Fahim Khokhar remarked about the relevancy of Dr. Asif’s findings to the situation of Pakistan. He highlighted the issue of lack of fiscal space for farmers to adopt CSA methods and the different climates in different parts of the country due to which different strategies are required. Dr. Wajiha enquired about the stance of other countries on the financing strategies that impact agriculture as digital financial inclusion is an issue in Pakistan. In response, Dr. Asif stated that Bangladesh does not prioritize its agricultural sector and microfinancing is not much popular in the country. Governments of India and Bangladesh are prioritizing agriculture but CSA methods are not popular and more focus is on short-run benefits.

Dr. Zafar Mahmood gave the closing remarks and stated that the seminar was a great learning experience in the CSA forum. He stressed upon the importance of adopting CSA strategies in the South Asia and also on the role of private sector in the adoption and post-adoption of CSA.