As serious negotiations start in Bonn to thrash out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that expires in 2012, pundits are veering round to the view that agriculture should also be a vital part of the agenda of these talks. Their logic is simple: Agriculture affects climate change, gets affected by it, and can also help to undo it.
Perhaps none of the other subjects that are on the table, including the most controversial transport and energy issues, has that kind of an intimate link with global warming. The final treaty on the climate change is targeted to be inked in the 15th conference of parties (COP-15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to be held in Copenhagen in December.
The campaign for agriculture, to be reflected appropriately in the final agreement, is being spearheaded by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the publicly-funded global farm policy think tank. It has issued a series of policy briefs to bring home the importance of agriculture in stemming global warming as well as the need to equip it to withstand the adverse effects of climate change.
As pointed out by IFPRI Director-General Joachim von Braun in one of these papers, agriculture accounts for about 13.5 per cent of the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions against 13.1 per cent by the transportation sector. The forestry sector contributes adds another 19 per cent to the emissions. As such, agriculture is part of climate change problem and is also part of the solution, offering promising opportunities for mitigating GHG emissions through carbon sequestering.
Oddly enough, while the issue of forestry is likely to come up during the discussions in the run-up to Copenhagen, that of agriculture, which is practised by millions of farmers the world over, is unlikely to get that much attention. This is chiefly because most of the Annex-I countries (which have binding emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol) are unwilling to make firm commitments on GHG cuts in the new pact till they get some idea about their likely allowances from land-use, land-use change and forestry. But agriculture which will be the direct victim of the global warming-driven changed frequency and severity of droughts, floods and storms, apart from altered seasonal temperatures, is not that lucky.
What is needed is higher funding for agricultural science and technology so that cost-effective techniques can be evolved to not only predict the weather more precisely for farmers but also to enable the crops and cropping patterns to adapt to the changed climate without much impact on the output. Besides, funding is also needed for evolving technologies to curb emission of GHGs, notably methane, from the vast paddy fields and stomach of ruminant animals, such as buffaloes.
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Going a step further, technology can convert the challenges posed by climate change into opportunities for increasing agriculture’s capacity to sequester carbon and, in the process, aid reversal of the global warming process. Conservation agriculture, which involves minimum disturbance of land (zero tillage) and incorporation of crop residues back into the soil, can help sequester carbon in the ground, besides conserving scarce water.
Similarly, changes in the irrigation schedules and systems of paddy cultivation can help cut down methane emission from rice fields perceptibly. Farm animals, too, can be made to produce less methane by suitably altering their diets and introducing new enzymes in their systems to promote better digestion of their feed.
IFPRI feels that the next climate change protocol must focus on three points: a) an explicit inclusion of agriculture-related investments, especially as part of a global climate change fund; b) a deliberate focus on introducing incentives to reduce emissions and support technological change; and c) a solid commitment to establish comprehensive information and monitoring services in soil and land use management.
Thus, climate change negotiators need to realise that all efforts to check global warming will come a cropper unless harmful emissions from a sector as vast and vital for economy as agriculture are checked. Any laxity on this count will prove costly. If agriculture is unable to adapt to the emerging realities, more forests may have to be cleared to meet the growing need for food, fuel, fibre and fodder, and that would be ecologically disastrous.