But how do we best support and empower small scale farmers to adapt to climate change and build resilience?
Today, in honor of World Food Day, Peter Gubbels, Groundswell International’s Director of Action Learning and Advocacy for West Africa, shares a few key principles from his field experience and reading of the literature that should guide advisory services to small scale farmers in developing countries for adapting to climate change.
- Build on existing local knowledge and innovations already developed by farmers.
- Identify innovative farmers and empower them to be a resource for learning and inspiration.
- Identify existing projects that have already succeeded in enabling farmers to adapt to climate change, and showcase these as a learning/training resource for changing farming practices.
- The best and most effective source of information and guidance to help farmers learn new techniques is another farmer from the same agroecological area who already has experience or has been trained). Invest heavily and strongly in “farmer to farmer” learning and exchange. This involves many field visits, farmer forums, and local workshops.
- Do not use a pre-determined “package” approach of supposed climate adaptation techniques. This is the old, outdated, “transfer of technology” approach, which is highly unsuited for promoting adaptation of agriculture to climate change. This is because most “climate smart” techniques need to be adapted to local ecosystems. The underlying principles are more important.
- Do not assert to farmers that given adaptation techniques are “the solution”; instead, foster a strong spirit of community based testing, on farm experimentation of new techniques by innovative farmers, on their own land, under “real conditions”. This reduces risk of failure, and optimizes adapting the technique to local conditions.
- Support collective assessment of the results of local on farm experimentation.
- Support “community to community” sharing of results of adaptation of agriculture, again using the experimentation and innovation in the pilot villages by innovative farmers.
- Strengthen the capacities of farmer organizations/community structures to lead and manage their own experimentation and extension program. Support the training of local farmer volunteer promoters (who also set up demonstration plots).
- Do not start by providing “solutions” to problems. First lead farmers and rural communities to themselves identify or become more aware of the problems from their own local perspectives; then ask them to analyze the causes of these problems, and then enable them to look for solutions. Next, test their proposed solutions under local conditions, and then work to spread them.
There are many other principles for guiding small scale farmers in adapting agriculture to climate change – especially about gender change and equity reach in adaptation of agriculture to climate change – but the ten principles above are foundational.
Please feel contribute your own experience in the comments below about “what works” in spreading techniques for adaptation of agriculture to climate change.
[1] ETC Group, Who Will Feed Us, 2009.
Source: Groundswell International | 16 October 2015