Special Considerations for Agriculture

Projected changes in agricultural productivity in 2080 due to climate change

Climate change will tax the ability of the world’s farmers to meet the ever-growing demand for food and other agricultural products. These effects will be most strongly felt in the lower latitudes, where the poorest countries are concentrated. By 2020, for example, African farmers in some countries could see their crop yields reduced by as much as 50 percent. Similarly bleak scenarios have been forecast for other regions of the Global South.¹

Agriculture and how it is handled in global climate negotiations is extremely important to rural poor people. Two out of every three people who are chronically hungry live in a rural area of their country; they are predominantly smallholder farmers or agricultural laborers. Yet so far, global climate negotiations have paid scant attention to agriculture, either as a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions or as a potential contributor to mitigation. Agriculture has been regarded as a difficult sector to factor into the deliberations because of its sheer size as well as the difficulty of monitoring changes in land use and carbon impact. Global agriculture (including deforestation to make room for agriculture) accounts for 32 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.² To meet the ever-increasing demand for food, the world must double its agricultural output by 2050, adding new layers of complexity to the issue of agriculture’s implications for climate change.

Agriculture and forestry are also potentially significant carbon “sinks” for sequestering carbon. Depending on the land use regime followed, the sector could potentially move from being a net contributor to a net sink for greenhouse gases. For example, heavily-ploughed soil releases carbon dioxide and methane as once-buried organic matter is exposed. So techniques such as minimum tillage can play a significant role in tackling climate change. Other strategies include reducing deforestation, rehabilitating degraded lands, and improving water conservation and management. Agriculture thus serves as one of the most significant ways in which climate change adaptation can also serve mitigation goals. It is currently difficult to monitor and verify both above-ground and below-ground stocks of carbon, but this problem can be overcome with improved science and measurement methods. While additional work is needed to refine them, the technologies that would enable such monitoring either exist or will be available imminently.

In Fanwargu, Burkina Faso, Natama Alimata (third from left) and other women from the village earn their living as farmers, as do most women in Africa.

In Burkina Faso, villagers in Fanwargu are realizing multiple benefits from planting trees. Trees prevent soil erosion. They provide firewood, building material, and, for those bearing fruit or nuts, food and cash crops. They are a natural barrier for livestock while attracting birds and other wildlife, and they offer shade and places to rest from the scorching sun. Understanding the benefits that trees provide means managing them as sustainable resources. Sustainable management techniques include knowing which trees (e.g. young saplings) and how many trees should be left standing; gathering firewood from the ground rather than cutting off limbs; using income from selling fruit and nuts to buy charcoal instead of relying on the trees as the sole source of firewood.

Not all villages are as cognizant as Fanwargu of the benefits they can derive from trees or the value of afforestation. This is a case where public policy can create the right incentives and eliminate the wrong ones. In fact, the task of engaging developing country farmers in greenhouse gas mitigation is more one of administration, ensuring that rewards—such as payments for avoiding emissions—are channeled to the right parties. These are the smallholder farmers, many of them women, who depend on farming and forestry for their livelihoods. As a group, they manage vast areas of land and forest; they are thus critically important to natural resource management and carbon sequestration. So far, there is no significant plan or strategy to compensate and encourage them to trap carbon and use good land stewardship practices. One key factor in developing such a plan is the need to resolve land tenure problems. It is essential to ensure that land rights to forests and farmland are established, steering payments for creating carbon offsets to those who actually manage and use the resources. Establishing and documenting secure land tenure rights is especially critical for women.

The history of climate change negotiations points to the need to include greenhouse gas sinks in any ultimate agreement.³ The Waxman-Markey bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives includes strong incentives for private investment in tropical forest conservation. The bill sets aside a pool of money for this purpose that, by itself, would achieve a 10 percent reduction of U.S. emissions from their base level (defined as the emissions level in 2005).⁴ Forest conservation is one of the quickest and most cost-effective means of controlling greenhouse gas emissions. “The Waxman-Markey bill’s forest provisions provide a model for action by other countries,” says Glen Hurowitz, director of Avoided Deforestation Partners. If other industrialized countries adopt similar tropical forest conservation measures, says Hurowitz, “deforestation could be ended or even reversed—a huge global achievement that, until Waxman-Markey, seemed tragically out of reach.”⁵

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