By Dr. Hemant R Ojha
A personal reflection on Global Science Conference on Climate Smart Agriculture, Oct 24-26, 2011, Ede-Wageningen, Netherlands
After forest entered the center stage of UN climate negotiation as REDD+, it is now time to think about agriculture. REDD+ was in part driven by the forest’s potential for carbon offset, as much as by the conservationist sentiment of people in the industrialized world. But, what can move the agriculture higher up on the climate agenda? I reflect on this by drawing on the Global Science Conference on Climate Smart Agriculture held in Waganingen, The Netherlands in late October.[i]
The conference took place at a time when media reports are filled with the news of people dying of hunger in the Horn of Africa.[ii] Studies indicate that the earth will have to feed additional 2.7 billion people by 2050, for which global food production has to increase at least by 70%.[iii] Agriculture will have to bear some of the worst effects of climate change. Agriculture sector also contributes to 10-12% of the total green house emission. So there is clearly a need to make agriculture smart in these three aspects – producing more food (and ensuring its equitable access), making agro-ecological system resilient, and also offsetting emissions. The conference clearly targeted these.
Just a few weeks ahead of COP 17 in Durban, scientists and promoters of climate smart agriculture gathered in global science conference in the agricultural capital of Europe – Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands. Co-hosted by World Bank, FAO, and a new inter-CGIAR center initiative called Climate change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS), and sponsored by Climate Compatible Development Network (CDKN) and other agricultural institutions, the conference brought over one hundred sixty scientists and stakeholders from around 38 countries to discuss the future of agriculture as the global climate policy community prepares to meet in Durban. The conference concluded with a five-
point declaration recommending further actions on research, policy and practice of agriculture[1].
As I understood, the main message coming out of the three day deliberation was that agriculture needs serious attention, implying the need for UNFCCC to consider a special agriculture work program that facilitates early actions. The agenda is being driven by cohort of influential institutions such as World Bank, FAO and CCAFS, which collaborated to hold the global science conference. These institutions have also done their homework separately – such as FAO working paper, World Bank paper, and a series of analyses and commissioned research by CCAFS.
Global Science Conference 2011
Despite such a consensus on the issue and the need for making climate-smart agriculture a global agenda, I sensed that the working approach still suffers from binary divisions between science versus practice, public policy versus market, and global versus local. As a farmer representative noted in a special address to the plenary, the scientific community still seems to be driven by disciplinary, scientific interests. Alongside the dominant academic discourse over climate and agriculture, I was glad to see that there was also a strong policy orientation in the debate. As CCAFS director Bruce Campbell noted in the plenary – ‘the policy space emerge for a short time – from one to few weeks and then goes away, and that is from now to Durban’. But there were also other viewpoints on this: FAO director of environment, climate change and bio-energy thought we should not be focusing so heavily and exclusively on Durban as there could be other equally important windows of financing opportunity for climate smart agriculture.
In a very informal interaction during the conference dinner, a World Bank agriculture officer told me – “we have made dumb investment in the past, but we want to avoid those. After all, the task in front of us is straightforward – we need to raise the incomes of farmers on the ground, and everything we do outside should be judged only on the basis of outcomes on farmers’ incomes”.
What I find interesting here is that there is a clear convergence of opinion of the WB official and the farmer: a clear target on income. If an investor and the ultimate recipient are in agreement of the goal of agricultural investment, then why do researchers and intermediaries make the matter more complex? The research community is generally set to explore multiple facets of the problem -from institutions, policy, technology to transformative adaptation measures. This means that although all share similar concerns, agriculture stakeholders seem to have very diverse views on what the problems are and what theories of change one should follow. For this reason, the consensus that has emerged to bring agriculture on the UNFCCC agenda could not be sufficient to ensure smooth and effective use of funds to address the agricultural issue in climate change.
What was worrying me was that agriculture was not unpacked for its all sorts of diversity. Agriculture in Somalia and Agriculture in US are not same. Bringing mitigation focused opportunities in Somalian agriculture can only aggravate food insecurity. It would have made more sense if different types of agriculture were discussed separately – so that the issue of access to food, finance, technology as well as the institutional roots of these problems could be better articulated in the global climate smart agricultural agenda. I participated in two sessions related to institutions and breeding. Both were important topics. But both indicate some form of systematic distortions in the way we handle knowledge in relation to our practical problems. As critical social science holds, institutions are only the regularized and stabilized forms of social structure. If we are talking about the possibility of change, then we probably need to think of how breaks with the existing institutions could occur. How new actors emerge, and what forms of interactions around knowledge and power could make the process more relevant. Using institutions as a handle reflects part of the problem, but misses more dynamic aspects of the change. This is one example of intellectual bias we are injecting into the policy discourse. Of course no concept is interest-free, yet it is possible to be able to capture more fuzzy, dynamic, and messy realities. Second session was on plant breeding – with the title on Breeding for 2030. There was an argument that breeding is not just about high yielding variety, it could also be about developing more climate resilient varieties. At some point, we were asked to list priority species for breeding, and our response was that it is actually the national policies on agriculture and climate change, that should define which are of priority on the basis of what they want to achieve through this in the respective countries and the regions. So we moved to policy aspect of the technical problem of breeding. Breeding technology is certainly important but as we experienced it was difficult to discuss without any policy context. Three key fundamental shifts are important here if agricultural community is to make real impact.
First, revisit research-practice linkages. The university-focused research sometimes tends to dilute the research. How to bring research more directly to bear on the problems of people? This requires institutional restructuring of University system as well, and Wageningen UR appears to be moving to this direction. We should not ignore or undervalue basic and fundamental research, but we should be smart on clearly aligning applied research with the policy and practical problems. This means climate smart agriculture cannot be achieved without climate smart science, as Lindiwe Sibanda (CEO of FANARPAN) spotlighted in the plenary.
Second, our knowledge development project must seek to capture the most uncertain, messy, unpredictable aspects of the social world. Third, how does this debate get regionalized and regional and local actors began to take lead on the regional processes? Global centric processes are important but not enough, if they do not lead to regional processes. Third, as we move up in the learning curve, we should think even more critically on how policy brokering could take place at all levels – from UNFCCC to regional agreements (such as African Union), national and sub-national processes remains a key issue.
[1] See Wageningen Science Statement at: http://www.gscsa2011.org/Home.aspx.
[i] See the conference website – http://www.gscsa2011.org/
[ii] See a recent BBC media coverage at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14248278
[iii] See Burney, J. A., S. J. Davis, and D.B. Lobell. 2010. Greenhouse gas mitigation by agricultural intensification. Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences, 107(26): 12052‐12057.
“Views expressed here are personal and not associated with any affiliated organisations”.
Hemant R Ojha, PhD
*Senior Research Fellow/Co-Founder, ForestAction Nepal
Email: hemant@forestaction.org
www.forestaction.org
*Research Director/Co-Founder, Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS),
Kathmandu, Nepal, Email: hojha@southasiainstitute.org
www.southasiainstitute.org
*Senior Fellow, Melbourne School of Land and Environment,
University of Melbourne, Australia.
Email: hemant.ojha@unimelb.edu.au
Skype id: hemant_ojha
