Agham
New Approaches toward Agricultural Productivity in a Changing Climate
Posted on January 15th By Ranell Martin M. Dedicatoria, SEARCA TU-KMD
Climate change is now a reality – and its most common manifestation is the extreme variability of weather conditions. Over the past months, the Philippines have been hit by typhoons more intense than what have been normally experienced. These disasters take a great toll on the country, especially on the agriculture sector. And needless to say, farmers suffer the greatest loss.
For a highly agricultural region like Southeast Asia, it is an irony that farmers are among the poorest people in the region. Researchers of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) explain that the poor are more severely affected by disasters brought about by climate variability because they are located in areas more vulnerable to floods and other forms of climate disasters, which in turn often disrupt agricultural production, hence their livelihoods. The variability and unpredictability of the weather trap the poor in a vicious cycle of poverty. The poor are often caught unaware, having no access to information needed in order to prepare especially in times of adverse weather conditions.
Weather insurance is a new approach for managing production risk in agriculture that may work well in the Southeast Asian region. The concept of weather insurance is simple, says Dr. Milton Boyd, lecturer at the University of Manitoba-Canada, in a seminar given at the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) based in Los Baños, Laguna Philippines. Farmers get paid when there is bad weather; the payment is based on weather indices measured at a weather station.
He notes that weather insurance is less costly and more flexible as opposed to crop insurance, which is the more common trend used in the region. Crop insurance is an “all risk” approach because farmers only get paid when there are crop losses. This variable is expensive to measure. With weather insurance, no losses are measured because the data needed can be obtained as long as there are weather stations in place. This way, there is also no cheating regarding farmers’ losses.
Dr. Boyd explains that weather insurance is most useful in areas where there are smaller farms with higher insurance administration costs. It is also applicable where no government stabilization programs nor crop insurance subsidies are available.
Other key agricultural adaptation techniques already used by farmers include crop diversification, use of drought resistant varieties, and planting of rootcrops. However, just like weather insurance, these techniques need area-specific real-time cumulative rainfall (and other key variables such as temperature, wind, and humidity) data to determine optimal planting dates. Only then can such adaptation measures serve their purpose — to avoid losses for the farmers.
The bigger challenge is that there are only a few weather gauging stations in Southeast Asia, which constrain the use of objective and transparent approaches based on weather indices. Dr. Felino Lansigan of the Institute of Statistics, University of the Philippines Los Baños, points out that there are statistical issues on the seasonal climate outlook especially in the less developed countries of Southeast Asia.
“Weather forecasts have to be localized or downscaled to a particular smaller area such as a province or municipality,” he says. Also, forecasts should be expressed in daily or weekly time periods rather than months. Such seasonal climate forecasts will provide an opportunity for agricultural stakeholders to plan their activities accordingly and for local policymakers to provide more appropriate and area-specific production interventions and programs.
Like any other development program, weather-based index risk management approaches require institutional and policy support to achieve their potential of being useful tools in managing climatic risks in the agriculture sector. As the need to adapt to the changing climate becomes more pronounced, new approaches to managing agriculture risks become imperative.
All these and more are concerns being studied and addressed by SEARCA, a regional capacity-building institution. SEARCA, which celebrated its 43rd anniversary on November 20, was established by the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) in 1966 and envisions to be a “Leading Enabler in the Science and Practice of Agriculture and Rural Development in Southeast Asia.”
Tags: Agham, climate change, Dr. Felino Lansigan of the Institute of Statistics, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), University of the Philippines Los Baños
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