Tape #444 - Climate Change and Rural Livelihood: The Agricultural Connection

 

This interactive panel discussion but we now have the podium back in the middle of us and we can't sit all in a row so we'll just work with the arrangement.  I'm Carla Coppel and I work with the Department of Agriculture and run the climate change program with USAID  and we're all here to day to look a little bit at the connection between climate change, agriculture rural development and land use in particularly in developing countries.  And when we met prior to this panel to sort talk about how we wanted to frame and look at this issue as a group, the sense was that really what we needed to do is talk a little bit about the connections that exist between land use in agriculture to frame it, but then get down to the issues on the ground and particularly since this is a conference about women in agriculture.  How women need to be involved in this debate and this discussion and how agriculture has a role to play in staving off the threat of climate change and how we can minimize the impact of climate change on agriculture in rural development.

 

The reason why I'm up here today is that in June of last year President Clinton announced that the United States would renew its commitment to developing countries on the climate change issue and that we would devote at least $1 billion over the next five years to reducing the threat of climate change to developing countries.  Since then the agency has been putting together a climate change action plan and this is climate change initiative we recently published which outlines how we are going to be working.  If you want a copy of this, you can give me a business card of write down your name and I can have it sent to you. 

 

But the most significant element I think about the initiative aside from sector programs in the energy sector and the forestry sector, was the emphasis that was placed within the document and within our philosophy about climate change on how to improve our approach to development so that we promote climate friendly sustainable development.  That is we didn't want to approach development in a way or approach the climate change issue in a way that would change all of our development priorities and alter our program because ultimately we are a development agency not a climate change focus agency.  But we wanted to see was how can we do energy programs in a way that it is more climate friendly.  How can we reduce the associated growth in emissions that comes from promoting economic development.  How can we change our approach to agriculture such that agriculture is less threaten by climate change and agriculture contributes less to emissions of green house gases. 

 

And so what I would really would like to set as the objective for this session and I'd like there to be really a lot of discussion after we have had the presentations is to really consider that question, how can we change our approach to agriculture in rural development in developing countries such that it is more climate friendly and if you were setting the priorities for USAID as it looks at its rural agenda and work on forestry and on agriculture and natural resources management.  What would you say are those priorities that we should take into consideration first.

 

With that introduction let me tell you very briefly about our first speaker.  He's Jonathan Olsen and he is with the Center for Economic Growth in Agriculture Development in USAID.  By training he is a Geographer and he says that he is bureaucrat by necessity.  I don't know what means, but we can just leave that .... after it.  And he'll maybe give us a little bit of frame the issue a little bit for us in agriculture and natural resource management in climate terms before we move on to other speakers.  So Jonathan.  Thanks very much.

 

 

What I'd like to do is try frame the issue of climate change in developing countries for you and where I'd like to start because we want to be clear about what sort of backgrounds you all might have as to why for example a government like United States government should be concerned about the issue of climate change in developing countries. 

 

One of the things that I've worked on recently is [inaudible] World Food Summit and we're working on what the United States follow-up response will be to the World Food Summit and one of the things exercises we've had to go through is to work through why its in the interest of the United States to work on a question like development or food security both of  which is tied up the climate change issue.  And this is a listing of four rationales that we came up with.  The first one refers to the idea that developing countries are becoming by far the largest export market for the United States and as economic growth occurs in developing countries the demand for U.S. products or developed countries products increases.  So there is a strategic interest there.  Countries that have difficult problems with food security or access to natural resources have also been kinds of countries that you tend to read in the newspaper about internal civil wars, cross border fighting, migration, those kinds of  problems.  And again that’s the intervention in those kinds of problems is always very costly both for the people who are affected and for the countries that have to muster the response so to the extent that we can do things that prevent those kinds of problems we're ahead of the game.

 

There is also an issue related to U.S. food security in all of this in terms of emerging crop and animal pest and diseases.  And with climate change there will be shifts in the patterns of diseases and there will be different threats for different countries.  I got back to the emergency part of it is wrong. 

 

The next question that -- Just to put some numbers on the kinds of  world of development countries in the U.S. market and they are similar for all develop countries.  They now receive 40% of our exports, 50% of our agricultural exports in the agriculture sector.  This is the only expanding segment of the market and really a vital importance that we work to enhance the opportunities for economic growth in developing countries. 

 

Now the kinds of threats that are posed to developing countries directly and why they should be concerned about this particular issue.  Again, with changing climatic regimes you'll get changes in the incidence of  both human and animal and crop diseases.  If countries aren't able to adopt there will be an increase in food security or food insecurity problems.  Those countries that have coast lines may have difficulties with rising coast lines and changes in rain form regimes may create flooding problems or new erosion problems.  Depending upon how individuals within the country are able to adapt, they may be put into a position of simply having the mine resources, natural resources simply to feed themselves and the families.  Business of migration is one that’s a great concern to most countries because it tends to have a politically destabilizing effect.  You can look at the influx of refugees back and forth in Rhonda.  Mozambique has had problems.  Tanzania is now having traffic economic difficulties because in the period of, I think, from 1955 to 1995 every single year they had some new influx of refugees and now they have a huge problem in terms of how provide for these people and the kinds of competition that these huge pools refugees pose vis-za-vis the Tanzanians themselves. 

 

The last point is just that in all these kinds of issues the poor are the least able to fend for themselves and the poor would bare the brunt of most of the adjustment kinds of  problems if they go unabated.

 

[inaudible]

 

We'll make them drink a lot as they cross the border.  (Laughter)

 

This is a borrowed slide and I don't, the key didn't come out the way I thought it would.  But this is just to give you a sense of  the breathe of impacts that are forecast in climate change.  The greenest colors are the best colors and that's because in the heart of the latitudes things are forecast to get warmer and more agriculture can take place.  In the tropics you've got the more yellow and red colors and that's where the greatest negative effect will be felt from higher temperature and loss of rain fall.  Incidentally that there's most of the developing countries are.  So they are going to bear a lot of the negative effects. 

 

In terms of  the internal discussions we had at AID on coming up with climate change strategy, a little of the history might be interesting.  The little of the history is that as people came to look at the problem because of the kinds of contribution that agriculture can make to climate change program, agriculture was viewed as just another source of climate change problems initially.  And it took a while to come up with some understanding of what a reasonable relationship would be between the environmental interest and the agriculture interest. 

 

[another speaker]  Can I ask a question?  [inaudible]

 

Some of it is emission from animals.  A lot of it has to do with the over use of fertilizers and what happens is lot of the run off or in other words where the excess fertilizer get release back into the earth in some other form.  It doesn't necessary go as carbon dioxide but it goes as other gases which are much stronger green house affects. 

 

What we finally came to realize was that if you look at that number there soil is a very large sink for carbon.  Much larger than forest trees those sorts of things which is where people have traditionally looked for storing carbon.  [inaudible -- another speaker talking]

 

Well in fact in developing countries one of the main problems is little or no fertilizer use.  People are too poor or the distribution system or the credit systems aren't there.  [inaudible - another speaker talking]  Well, pardon me I didn't [inaudible] Yeah that's true. 

 

I mean that’s part of our coming to our senses was that agriculture could actually be a contributor toward solving climate change problems because of [inaudible - another speaker talking]

 

Yeah, we use to have people from our office from there.  Well we might have done our work faster if you [inaudible]. 

 

[another speaker]  I think that one of the other reasons why agriculture contribute to emission of green house gases is that a lot of the agricultural places in developing countries are places which store more carbon therefore when you convert from to agriculture land you are releasing an enormous amount of carbon into the atmosphere that is no longer being stored and sequestered in those trees.  So that is a big part of the reason why.

 

[inaudible - person speaking not at microphone]

 

To add to what you are saying there's a international research center on agricultural policy and they did a forecast of what food security issues there might be for the year 2020 and one of the concerns they pointed out was in most of the world except Africa but particularly Asia one of the biggest threats to food security is competition for land for purposes other than agriculture. 

 

[inaudible - person speaking not at microphone]

 

Well I'm not sure about that.  I think that if you were to go to Africa the population generically in Africa is doubling.  I forget what it is. 

 

[inaudible]

 

I think there is some arguments that just in general that better nutrition even in the poorest countries has made extended longevity and perhaps supported increased birth rates and you have in part because of better nutrition, better health services, you got people living longer so you are accumulating more people but beyond that I'm not [inaudible].  Go faster.  Ok.

 

There's been some econometrics work done about the impact of climate change might be in developing countries.  And for countries in general there is this concern that as agri-climatic regime shift so will the opportunities for agriculture or the intensity of agriculture be shifted.  And in general there will be consequence [inaudible] in terms of how well regions can adapt and change given what sort of new resource regimes they have.  And without any organized effort to adapt, just about every area except these northern latitudes which will get warmer and more rain, will end up themselves have a reduced capacity to produce food.  However, counting extension institutions, AG research institutions, the sense is that for most countries or for the developing ones there will be the capacity to adapt and perhaps at the end of the day at least in terms of  food production, there might be some modest increase in the ability of develop countries to produce food given climate change.  The countries that are in the worst shape on this would be the poorest countries because they have the weakest institutions in terms of being able to drive this adaptation process.  They have very poor extension, [inaudible] research that’s directed in country focused on specific national kinds of problems.  And there's some concern that this is especially difficult problem and is going to be especially difficult problem because over the last 10-20 years well not 20 but 10 years certainly, developing countries themselves have begun to put less emphasis on these kinds of agricultural institutions in their public spending helping to undermine their capacity and then the daughter countries have also really drastically over the last 8 years reduced their funding going into the agriculture sector.  So you have sort of as climate change takes hold an increasing need for these institutions to lead the adaptation process and at the same time you have this precipitous drop in the kinds of funding that would be used to build up the capacity of these kinds of institutions.

 

I guess the last thing I could add is just to give you some sense of the kinds of climate change activities that the office that I work in is working on funding just to give you some feel for what's possible.  And certainly the core business of AID is institution building capacity building and that will despite the budget drops that's still a great importance to us.  And then to the extent that agricultural research leads to productivity gains.  You have less pressure on the land, less pressure to cut down forest and those sorts of things.

 

Two other areas we have collaborative research projects on soils and livestock and they are called crisps.  The soils crisp is looking at no till agriculture and the methodology around that and the ability to defuse those kinds of methodologies cropping methodologies to developing countries and those would increase the levels of carbons and crest ration.  The livestock crisp is looking at getting a better handle measuring the carbon flux in grazing areas and second phase of that project will then be to look at what kind of management techniques could be used to increase carbon secretion in grazing areas and then with the international system with AG research we also got a fair amount of research going into forestry in terms of commercial crops and crops or cropping patterns that could be tree crops that could be used by farmers in substitute for original stands of forest.  I can stop if you want.

 

[question from audience]

 

The closer you get to the polls the better off you will be.

 

[inaudible]

 

I think they don't have enough data to do that. 

 

For South Africa.  [inaudible]  I think it's just a data problem. 

 

[inaudible]  Ok do you want me to sit down?   Thank you.

 

Applause.

 

I think John takes my direction personally.  Our next speaker is [inaudible] and she is with the Environment Center at the US Agency for International Development.  She is a fellow there focused on sustainable agriculture and her background and she is a Botanist with extensive field work in the tropics.  And really what she is going to start to focus on following on Jonathan's sort of overall introduction is how we can look at agriculture research and what role research has to play. 

 

I get tongue tied when I talk in front of groups so I'll do my best to ignore the fact that my voice is being amplified and get through this without falling over.  Anyways, basically what I'm here to talk about is impartial of what the USAID global climate change initiative is all about.  As part of that initiative USAID is trying to go out to its partners and encourage research and activities revolving around global climate change issues.  And the topic that I'm going to talk to you about today is an initiative that we've taken with the CGIAR.  The CGIAR which I'm going to call the CG for myself is the consultative group for international agriculture research.  It has an annual budget of about $315 million.  It has three basis goals and those are poverty alleviation, food security and natural resource management.

 

Basically the research is undertaken at 16 agriculture research stations.  Those are hub sites.  There are secondary research sites around the world.  And these sites have different specialty.  In this particular system the CG system, agriculture is very broadly defined.  So you have here equan which is aquatic resources having everything from coral reefs, fresh water fishes, marine equo systems, etc.  Erie which is rice research, CIFOR which is forest, emme which has been irrigation management but now have an expanded mandate to deal with water, equisac which semi agriculture research, ecardo which is dry land, equiqua which is agri forestry, erie livestock, IITA  tropical agriculture, igri which is policy for plant to medic resources, [inaudible] extension policy working with the national agriculture systems, [inaudible] is rice research in Africa, [inaudible] is potato and root and tuba crop, fiet is tropical agriculture again, syemic is basically wheat and mage research and [inaudible] here in Washington, D.C. is good policy research.

 

So the project that I'm working on is again because USAID is trying to develop partnerships and its partnerships focus on global climate change research.  Essentially USAID offered and the CG accepted for USAID to extend it services in terms of  preparing inventory for the CGIR on activities that the CGIR is currently undertaking that have an implication for global climate change both mitigation and adaptation and I will explain to you the difference in those two things in a minute.

 

The goal this inventory is to provide data that will help the CGIR access its strength and weakness in global climate change research where it might have a comparative advantage to focus further work and also how to formulate a global climate change research strategy if it should decide to do so in the future.  Basically what I'm going to do for the rest of my talk is talk about the data we have collected and basic trends that we see in ongoing CGIR research activities that relate to the issue of global climate change so that you can see and perhaps we can discuss how it can tweet and how this research agenda can be promoted in the future.  I need to tell you though in this discussion none of the CGIR are basically designed to deal with global climate change in mind.  So therefore I'm going to talk to you about what they do and try to tell you the implication for global climate change research, but basically it would change if it would have to change their focus and adapt slightly to be more relevant to the issue if they were to decide to focus on the strategy in the future. 

 

So basically today I'm going to talk about mitigation activities or research activities that are designed to minimize the potential for global climate change and what that means is reducing emissions of green house gases or also promoting increased carbon secretion.  The second area that I'm to talk about are adaptation strategies.  And those strategies involve research on issues on what you would do if we have global climate change so that you decrease the vulnerability or make it so that populations and specifically people working in agriculture can adapt.  So I may not have enough time and I don't whether the subject of my talk is at a slightly different level than the answer whatever but I think you're a big mix and so I'm just going try to go for it and see how we do. 

 

But basically, I'm going to start with the list of activities and if I run out of time or I see that we want to talk about other issues then what I will do I can just stop quickly.  So therefore, let's go into the first activities which is reducing methane emission which is a mitigation activity.  Agriculture accounts for about 50% of the total anthapogenic emission of methane.  And where that happens is in large livestock and rice production systems.  With each of those systems contributing about half to the total of 50% of all anthapogenic green house emissions of methane.  Methane is a by-product of  rhumetdigestion and scientists estimates that up to 75% of methane emissions can be eliminated if you improve the diet of remanent and this is especially true in developing countries where the lack of nutrition for the livestock is particularly acute. 

 

At Ellrie the livestock center there are several products that focus on the improving the diet of livestock.  However, they're not actually measuring the improvement in methane emissions, but that is something that they could do in the future.  The rice institute which is in the Philippines has studied rice cropping as a methane source since 1993.  And their experimental results are very interesting.  They have totally perimeterized the issue, they know exactly what they can do for production systems that would be beneficial in terms of mitigating methane emissions.  However, there is a little bit of a trade off because a lot of those technologies that they have implemented would decrease yield.  So at this particular point in time, what Erie is trying to do, it is trying to examine the economic viability and social acceptability of some of the projects having to decrease methane emissions.

 

Now I will talk about research that has to do with land use change and carbon emissions or [inaudible].  Emissions are emitting carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and cesecretration is keeping it locked out either in the soil or in the biodia whatever.

 

Ok so agricultural activities in general contribute only 5% of the carbon dioxide emissions.  But the reason that feels like such a small percentage is because most of it comes the huge enormous amounts of fossil fuels that we are burning today.  So 5% may seem like little, but in terms of  absolute quantity that's actually quite a large amount.  If, however, you add in and there was a particular question about this, the other activities that have to do with langis change and as far as conversion you are actually talking about increased 18% in addition to the 5% that is emissions from agricultural systems.  So in terms of an unofficial estimate of the amount of carbon that was emitted in the fires in Indonesia last year, it is said that more carbon was released in those fires last year than total fossil fuel consumption in all of Europe.  So we are talking about a lot of carbon here. 

 

Ok. What happened in those particular areas, policy makers was trying to understand what happened and there are a lot of different opinions and I don't think the final solution is out.  But a lot of the problem came because the conditions produced by El Nino created a condition of drought and so it was actually a very propitious time for the farmers to decide to go out and burn land in order to have increased amount of agriculture because land was already dry.  A lot of it was small farmers, but also large amount of it was for larger plantations. 

 

Within the CGIR there is a project called the alternative to slash and burn.  And one of the main focuses of this project is to work to try to do research to look at the different alternative land use type to see whether which ones have the potential to sequester significant amounts of carbon, which one reduce green house gas emissions, which ones might flood forest stations and subsequent land degradation and they do this at the same time with trying to provide maximum economically terms and food security for farmers. 

 

In the forestry sector Seafor the Forestry Research Institute has implemented and developed ideas of  reduced impact harvesting.  And it has discovered that if they implement their guidelines for reduced impact harvesting, that the results yield a 50% increase in carbon secretion by residual vegetation and a 25% reduction in soil impact caused by logging equipment.  In addition, Seafor the Forestry Center is also promoting [inaudible] management of secondary forest in order to encourage carbon secrestation but more importantly to lessen development of pressures on primary forest.  I think I'll skip very quickly what they are doing carbon secrestation in semi arrid lands and grasslands.  What I'll do is just say very briefly that it was mentioned in John's talk, but that has to do with research a particular institutions that are having to do with how we can manage to make sure that there's more carbon secreted in the soil and that's to reduce impact that's through no till kinds of methods, it's through minimizing soil erosion, it's through crop residues, etc.  And that is happening in a number of different research sites.  And most importantly, in lands that are very marginal or already degraded. 

 

Moving very quickly to adaptation activity.  This is a whole new kettle of fish.  We're not talking about green house gas emissions anymore, what we're talking about is if in the next century we experience climate change scenarios, due to the fact that we have been, you know, promoting this kind of emission in our atmosphere.  What can we do to decrease the vulnerability especially as John told you these developing countries are going to be much more vulnerable than any other places in the world.  So it's harder in this sense to have a direct link to global climate change because the science is still not very good now.  They still don't know exactly what the climate change scenerios are going be for a specific locality or region.  Majority scientists in the world believe that there will be global climate change, however, the problem is they cannot tell you exactly what the effect is going to be in a particular place.

 

So in terms of what these centers are doing.  So the first one is particularly important.  The Sekii Art Centers maintain very large gene banks of genetic resources.  There are approximately 600 thousand assession of crop plant varieties and cultervars in exissue collections within the CDIR.  In addition, there are collections of  forge, animal, acquatic and forest genetic resources.  Researcher are also developing inventories, data bases and monitoring systems that catalog the current status of resources, measure genetic diversity, monitor genetic erosion, and these data bases cover everything from fish to reefs, to trees, etc.  The reason that this is important is because we don't even have base line information in a lot of these equo systems so we even be able to monitor what genetic erosion will be.  What affects of the climate change are evident because we don't even know the entirety of the way that that equo system is constructed at the present time. 

 

Researchers at the centers are very actively involved in germ plasm breeding and improvement strategies and the focus or the target of  these strategies are to make sure that you have this kind of flexibility for the future in that you are breeding for increased tolerance of environment stress like drought or emergent of pest and diseases or heat.  So with their breeding the flexibility required for the future.  Researchers are also promoting a broader diversity of crops and the utilization of under utilized crops and they're developing monitoring and early warning systems for the loss of  genetic resources.  In case there is a flood, drought which is happen in  wars in Africa this has already happen when they have gone in and actually been able to resupply the genetic resources that has been lost due to the conflict.  Just very quickly I don't think I have time because I'm probably running out of time and I need to give my colleagues time to talk.  There is irrigation and water management, emergent of pest and disease and integrated coastal zone management.  And these are important because basically more water scarcity is forecasted for the future.  And that is partly because supplies are so scarce right now.  So global climate changes only suppose to exasperate the problems and there is ongoing research very minimal and rudimentary, but there is ongoing research and how we are going to solve water issues in the future.  Pest and disease.  These have to do with the pest and diseases associated with agriculture whether they be mosquito and snails that cause schistosomiasis in irrigation systems whether its the tsetse fly which causes sleeping sickness in cattle and in humans.  With those crop, pest and diseases and all of these are the levextor or the disease of  pest itself will be just like crops and the other thing influence by changes in climate.

Integrated coastal zone management has to do with the huge problems that are going to happen when you have sea level rise.  And it's not just the fact that the coast are going to be inundated.  It actually will affect fishery.  It will affect fresh water supply.  Hugh array of things, coral reefs may be destroyed.  Mangroves which are major nurseries for fishery will be destroyed.  And it's not necessarily clear to any of the researchers whether these systems are going to able to recover. 

 

So anyway I think I have overused my time and if anyone has a question about any of these things when are all finished I will be happy to entertain them.

 

Applause.

 

I think Jonathan Nelson have given you a sense of the wide range of issues that relate to or connect climate change in agriculture.  Ultimately, what I think most of you are concern with and what you at US Agency for International Development is concerned with is how we translate those concerns into activities and programs on the ground.  If we want to decrease emission of green house gases from agriculture how do we change the behavior of agriculturalist.  If we want to make sure that farmers are going to be protected if there is a change in terms of the amount of rain fall in a given year, how are we going to make [END OF SIDE 1 OF TAPE]

 

SIDE 2 OF TAPE

 

to respond to Emil what types of policies adjustments are they making, what sort of practices are they conducting.  So I'll begin at that level and will move down a little bit.  I guess one thing I'd like to make clear is that clearing land for agriculture is important for families to live since there are more families out there.  There are better ways to do these things, but given the technologies that many households and third world or where of today, there's just too many people for the land.  And until they move out of their agricultural stage where their primarily based on agriculture.  We are going to be confronting these problems.  I might also begin with the fact with what we are working in at Virginia Tech is one of the crisp and I'm not sure if you know what a crisp is.  I didn't think so.

 

A crisp is a collaborative research support program.  It is USAID funded research where faculty from American Land Grant Universities are working with researchers around the world to address problems of agriculture and natural resource management.  In particular the one that I'm working on is the sustainable agriculture and natural resource management crisp.  And that fits very closely in with issues of climate change.

 

Another project activity which USAID has been funding is the famine early warning system.  And this is an example of how the US government is helping to support governments around the world in preparing for climatic change.  As farmers those of you with farming experience know that the climate changes quickly and you never know for sure what's going to be coming next.  Whether forecast can help and they have helped.  In fact it was estimated by OECD that accurate forecasts of El Nino in the last year or so estimated to have an impact on agriculture in the southern United States being able to adjust to practices in production.  It was worth about $260 million.  So the famine early warning system is attempting to do this only the example I will describe is from Southern Africa where you've got several countries who are working on who are prepared to collaborate in this program.

 

In the summer of 97, last year, it was recognized by experts that El Nino effect was going to have some dramatic effects over the coming year and it was going to effect how the availability of rain fall in Southern Africa.  So they brought together a group of Southern African countries about 9 or 10 of them to start prepare both in terms of famine relief supplies.  But more importantly to prepare farmers to plant in certain ways to plant earlier in particular and to plant different crops as necessary to adapt to the drought conditions that were predicted.  The governments were slow in some ways to respond, but having experienced droughts in 91, 92, 94 and 95 they were prepared to do something.  And so they slowly the institutions started pulling themselves together to act.  They came together and developed a coordinated regional forecast for the Southern African region.  And each of the governments went back then with developing extension recommendations to transfer the farmers as to how to best cope with the drought as well as conducting media campaigns to raise awareness.

 

Two observations of this can be made.  The first observation is probably after the fact, one can see that early on this was the prediction, red being the highest level of drought and the lower level of droughts towards the green. This was the forecast.  The observed rain fall for the year as of April 98 shows significantly different result.  This result differences is important when you're trying to convince people that an early warning is important.  Fortunately, the early months of the season were as predicted.  And so the governments got themselves in motion and started to establish practices to adapt to the potential drought situation.  But one of the things that we have learned in this process is to be careful about predictions.  Which is repeated lesson that we all seem to learn slowly.  But that is one of the important ones that there are probabilities to prediction and not a hundred percent.  And people need to adapt in that fashion. 

 

In terms of decision making at the national and at the foreign level, some countries seem to develop plans and structures of  preparedness faster than others and mobilize the mass media an extension to inform farmers.  The first response was for farmers to reduce the acres planted and seed earlier.  But as rains came later in the season, many farmers expanded their acres under cultivation and in many times in different crops later growing crops.  Another lesson that is learned in this process as that the market liberalization policies that are being promoted around the world today have helped to shift crop resources from one location to another.  That it is now possible to more easily when crops are doing well here in Botzswana or Angola here that those can be moved to famine regions or deficit production regions in  Zambia or Mozambique and with the market liberalization is freeing up trade so that those commodities can move more quickly.   And that's reducing the problem there.  So that's the national level types of responses that are beginning to be thought about and worked on. 

 

On another level most developing countries today have or about to enact national environmental action plans.  I was just leading a delegation of Senegalese through the country and we stopped off in Washington, D.C. last week and we visited our extension service and they asked about the United States' national environmental action plan.  Where is your unified plan of action on the environment?  We don't have one.  But many countries throughout the world today are developing such unified plans to come to terms with these environmental concerns.

 

Let me shift gears down to the rural level here and talk about how the rural population in the third world and in Africa in particular view global climate change or global warming issues.  There was a survey --

 

Yes [question from the audience - inaudible]  Well I mean you do believe the weather report sometime right?  Well some of the farmers there used their own methods also to determine how the climate how the season is going to be and act on those basis as well.  This was an added push to say that this would be a year to plant early.  But let me get back to mono cropping a little bit further down the line.  And I'll come back to it.  And if you are not satisfied hit me again about it.  But I'm going to address that.

 

There was a study conducted, a gallop poll, gallop was actually involved doing it throughout the world to learn about environmental attitudes of the populations around the world.  And they asked them a series of questions about whether the most serious problems that they are confronted with and to get a gauge on how important environmental issues were including things like global warming.  Unfortunately, when I repeated the study in Senegal in the pre-test of the questionnaire, questions on global warming were eliminated because they were irrelevant to the population of concern.  It just wasn't a meaningful issue to them whatsoever and so it was removed from the questionnaire.  But we do have some other indicators that give you a sense of where the rural Senegalese men and women are in terms of their level of concern over different types of social problems. 

 

Ok we can see here that the priority issues for rural Senegalese men are the most serious being agriculture inputs, agricultural equipment, standard of  living, infrastructure rural infrastructure, rural communication systems.  These are the priority issues for the rural population in Senegal.  Environment on its own well its up there somewhere, but it doesn't take the highest ranking.  Over population is very low as a concern of their population.  Drought has position but it's not as important as having something to deal with drought or to be able to come to terms with those problems.  The soil fertility is not perceived as its major problem, its having the impotent capacity to produce agriculture crops. 

 

Rural women have essential the same set of priorities.  They're less concern about agriculture inputs and more concern about standard of living.  They're concerned about unemployment and infrastructure.  So how does these fit then in comparison to other countries looking back at the gallup survey in comparing.

 

Comparison between industrialized nations and developing nations, the gallup survey included urban populations.  Shows relatively similar distributions, possibly a little bit more concern about environmental problems in developing nations, but when you isolate it on just the rural population, what you find is that its a much less pressing issue.  And you see what is important to them is agricultural production.  How to make a living, how to survive in their environment.  In a question asking these men and women whether they would choose the environment over economic growth a majority would choose economic growth of rural Senegalese or the rural men and women.  It's seems that economic growth is less important for those interviewed in the cities. 

 

The point here is that agriculture production is the way that rural populations in the third world can deal with environmental problems.  If they can produce they can have the resources then to conserve.  If they can't produce their food to eat or produce crops to exchange for food they can't survive.  If they do do that though, they have got the basic means by which then to conserve natural resources to continue going on.  But they have to make it through the first year.  Those of you who are in agriculture recognize that a bad crop year if you have a crop failure it puts in the question next year.  In the third world it puts into question the lives of the family. 

 

Ok.  Primary responses.  What do they do in terms of response to climatic variability or the changes in weather.  Well, first thing that farmers have done and traditionally is probably one of the wisest things that we found that it is very effective is to diversify.  Minor cropping is not a real long term sustainable activity especially when you're on the edge.  You're risking everything on one thing and you're doing it over and over, creating conditions that are highly risky.  So how do you diversify.  Well one of the things you do in diversifying is to have land in different locations.  There are microclimates.  You know that if you have land in certain areas, you may get rain there while not in another place.  You diversify in terms of having small plots of different types of soil that will adapt to different rain fall regimes. 

 

The other major type of response is that for a long time, governments have been dictating as best they could to farmers what they could do with their land and this is very much the case in large parts of Africa as land has been nationalize or communally controlled with national level of decisionmaking over land decisions.  That is changing and that's probably one of the important policy issues that this moving forward today is the decentralization of control of decisionmaking over natural resources so that those who are living on it can make choices as to how they can best use that land and preserve it.

 

Are there any questions?  [inaudible]  Where in Africa?  [inaudible]  Yeah, you got a lot of corn, but you've got there is more up in West Africa.  I'm not certain that not much in Southern Africa, but there is [inaudible - speaker in audience talking]  Oh, ok  let me clarify something.  The vast majority of the world's farmers have less than five hectors, less than 10 acres and they have little plots of an acre or less that they spread out around their village.  That's the perspective.  It's a different world ok.  It's a very different dynamic, but what you would be doing would be spreading them out, but having smaller parcels that you would diversify.  That is one of the ways that these farmers are spreading their risk diversifying and spreading things out.  [inaudible - speaking from the audience]  There are extension services that need a great deal of support.  But traditionally farmers have been self-sufficient in most crops as we were before the 1930s.  Growing several crops and raising livestock.  We have under educated ourselves over the last 60 years in this country as farmers.

 

[inaudible - from audience]  There's also called farming in government in the United States.  But that diversification of renting plots of land spread out a major growing phenomenon in the United States does allow for that as increasing mono-cropping continues.

 

Hold on -- let me have the last speaker.  I think that the bottom line for a lot of you in this audience is what can local communities and what can women do and that's really what Marilyn Hoskins our next speaker is going to look at.  Some of the ways in which there are community responses and responses by women in agriculture and forestry and the role that they can play at that local level.  Marilyn is an Anthropologist.  She was formerly the head of the Forest Trees and People Program with United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization which focused on community forestry and local government issues and she is currently a member of the technical advisor group for policy environment issues to US Agency for International Development.  She is also one of my mentors.  I worked with her many moons ago in Italy with FAL.  So its a pleasure.

 

[inaudible - some discussion from audience]

 

Well I hope that we can get the temperature fixed so that's its easier to sit because this is a long afternoon and its hard to sit.

 

I have been working various issues in women in agriculture, internationally the theme of this whole program for a number of years.  And some 20 years ago in the literature you would find people writing about the fact that farming systems depend on trees.  It is not always obvious, I mean, you find  people growing irrigated rice, but if you look behind that you'd find that there are trees keeping the mud from coming down and filling up their irrigation channels.  If you are trying to control your soil or enrich your soil or control your water, manage it then trees are very important.  So that was one of the things that people begin writing about some 20 years ago.

 

Another thing they began writing about was that women was very responsible in many countries for lots of the agriculture and lots of the use of natural resources including trees.  They would cut wood in some countries, not in all.  They would cut wood for fuel for cooking.  They would bring fatter for the animals.  So they made a lot of decisions and even in those countries where women had no access to mobility, because of their cultural patterns, they were often making decisions about the use of seed or the other things within their compound.  So women were very very involved and what they did was different than what men did.  The resources they wanted and needed were different. 

 

And a third thing that they began writing about some 20 years ago was the fact that certain echo climates, certain micro climates were changed by stands of trees that single trees couldn't do.  Also certain products came from those micro climates.  Certain things that people needed for living.  Wildlife and a number of non-timber forest products.  So we've had 20 years of this sort of idea coming out, but of course when you start talking trees you change the time scale.  Trees don't grow the same length of time that a crop of potatoes does.  You change the issues about tenure.  Because if you have to have 20 years or you have to have a long period of time, you change the issues of tenure.  If you are going to manage a forest land or a woodland area, then you have to have issues of not only tenure cause that brings issues for men and women that are often different, but you have to have cooperation among people to manage and to protect an area.  So all of these issues begin to be developed. 

 

And we've developed tools.  We've developed things that interest women directly and indirectly.  For instance, we've looked at what does forestry have to do with food security and we have information on how to go out and look at nutritional issues in relation to planning forestry activities.  We've looked at gender analysis.  We have tools, good tools on how to go out and look at who uses which product at what season.  Who has access to it.  There are all sorts of gender issues that we now know that if we use gender analysis we're able better to plan so that all the people can be involved into the managing of the sustainability, the long-term value of the production system that people are talking about.

 

We've also worked on participatory methods.  And this involves women because if you are planning down in a community women have a better chance of being a part of it than if you plan somewhere in a governmental office. So when you develop participatory methods this affects women's participation and they're finding their own needs out of what is planned.

 

Tenure - we've really taken tenure apart in a way that gave us a whole better way of understanding them.  I mean, here in the United States we can have several bits of tenure.  We can have tenure for land, but you can have mineral rights that are tenure to your minerals that is different than tenure to your land.  Well, right.  Well the same thing is true in many countries of trees.  Like in some governments, they will say all of the mahogany trees belong to the government.  So if they grow on your land, you may want to pull them out when they are very little so you don't give space to them because they are not going to be yours and do you any benefit.  But they don't belong to you when they are little or when they are big.  But the same thing is true of men and women.  In some countries women are not allowed to plant trees nor are they allowed to cut trees.  Because that means something related to tenure.  And you have to find out then what can women cut and plant that are not considered tenure trees, but will solves their problems of saudering fuel or whatever it is that they need in that particular region.

 

So we've learned a lot about that sort of thing.  We have learned a lot about local technical knowledge and how we can really understand whats going on before we come in with an idea that worked in Ohio or Indiana and suggest that to people.  Your question earlier about who comes in and tells them what to do with the soybeans.  Well I use to live in Upper Bulgier which is now [inaudible] and they grew soybeans because they were told to and it replaced a crop that was very high in protein bean and it grew very well and then they came and they said what do we do with this stuff now.  And it turned out that they found a solution of fermenting the grain so they could use it in their sauces.  But it was a big question when you come with solutions that aren't planned from the local ground up. 

 

We've also learned a lot about communal management and we know that it works some places.  it still works some places and in some places it has been destroyed.  We've learned a lot about non-timber forest products.  We've learned about institutional incentives for participation and have field manuals for analysis of it.  We know how sometimes managing land is fostered by the policies and laws and sometimes it is absolutely destroyed by them. 

 

And I would like to mention one thing about Indonesia I've been working recently in Indonesia and there and one of the things not only was it was a climate change, but it was a political change that caused the fires.  There were a number of very well-to-do companies that were given large pieces of land and to clear those quickly the fires were very helpful.  Also there is a law that says that if you have a tree that has been planted by somebody you have to protect that tree if even you're a timber company or agricultural rice or wheat production company.  You have to protect that tree.  But if God burns it down you don't have to protect that tree anymore and you as a company can go ahead and work with the land.  We do know that we don't have all the answers yet as we were saying earlier we don't know exactly all that happened about the fires, but we do know that in certain areas where companies were working well with the communities, there were not fires.  So there is a lot of political and social and economic issues that are related to that as well as the help that El Nino gave in making it very [inaudible].

 

Ok, we know a lot about that.  Now I have some examples of projects where we've tried to involve people because we know we know that trees are important.  We know that women are part of  the equation and that women being involved as well as the men is going to help us with a more sustainable kind of environment.  So there had been a number of projects that have tried to do that. 

 

In India they have a program which is very famous right now.  It's called joint force management.  And we know that that done a lot of very positive things.  But it is a program in which the local community forms a group and the forest service comes in and they make an agreement as to how they're going to manage a particular forest near that community.  And they decided that they wanted women involved so that made the law that said to women had to a minimum had to belong to that committee.  But in fact socially, in most of the cases, the women have not said much of anything.  [tape skipped] 

 

to preserve it and have no use of it.  So its all mentally corridorent off  not to be used and the men are very insistent that the women live up to that.  But the women still have to cook.  The women still have to get the fatter for their animals.  What do they do?  They go to neighboring villages forest and they cut there.  And what troubles do they get?  They get the women of that village in trouble with their men.  So its a conflict between women that this is started.  It's nothing that people would have thought about probably at the beginning.  But now there needs to be a rethinking of how do you plan so that women have access to the resources they need.  And that is a program that has many positive things to it.  So this is an adjustment that will need to be made for women.  Also in areas where there had been plantations where the women are able to help cut and then to some of the management and get the trimmings as the trees grow taller and the project is older there are fewer things to cut.  And all of a sudden even those places where they try to plan for women, they have less resources as time goes on.  So there needs to be a flexibility that brings back in those issues that come up.  And find a way to solve them.

 

In Peru we had a project in Crusco and we had a case study done there and the women were very enthusiastic about the planting of trees for their community.  Even if they were planted in their potato fields which meant they had to walk further to get to their potatoes.  Because they hired the youth of their own village to do the planting and that way it kept their own youngsters home instead of sending off to the city.  And they liked this idea.  However, when the trees were bigger, the electric company came in and held an emergency meeting and said we want you to sell your trees right now so that you have the money to bring electrification to your village and they were in koohoose with some of the people in the forest department so they set the prices very low.  And the women didn't want to sell them.  But the women were very angry.  They did not go to the meeting.  They were not invited to the meeting.  And that was not what angered them.  Because they weren't use to going to the meeting.  They weren't included.  However, what they were angry about was that there was not an announcement about the issue so that they could talk to their husbands at home before the meeting, so that the husbands could carry the family decision to the meeting.  Now we know about this now and the way it works in Peru.  We need to take those kinds of things into consideration in future activities. 

 

In Tanzania they have a community that decided to reestablish a traditional environmental management plan that they have a little government group a traditional governmental group and they made decisions that related to their environment.  And there were no women in that group.  But the funders said, you know, why not include women?  And the men said why not?  And so the women were included.  Now what we need to know is did their opinions really make a difference?  or did people listen?  And what's happening to that group now.  But the project is over, so we don't know. 

 

In Jordan and in many countries they have activities to have different income creating activities.  Sometimes it makes money.  Sometimes it's funded always and subsidize.  It's not very money making.  But the question is if these women who are in these groups make enough money that they don't cut down as many trees which is what the idea is.  What happens to the demand?  Are people looking at the demand?  Somebody was using those tree products.  If was fuel in the urban areas, if it was charcoal, if it was something there.  Who is satisfying them?  We haven't any real understanding of the bigger picture when we're looking at activities to involve women in relation to the change of their use of the natural resources. 

 

In some humid climates there are groups of communities that have managed for generations and generations the use of forest and in come cases it's been very successful.  And in some cases it is broken down.  It's broken down sometimes because of pressures from the market.  But sometimes that makes them stronger.  Sometimes it's broken down by policies that governments have that the government now is going to tell you how to do it.  Sometimes the government makes policies that work but we don't understand well enough what's going to make it so that the women and the men and the communities can continue to manage forest when its successful. 

 

We are at a spot now where lots and lots of countries have changed their ideas.  They want to decentralize.  They want to have a new approach to the management of forest lands because they don't have the money to manage them themselves.  Not working they can't manage them.  They want to have them decentralized, but we need to this gives us an opportunity to really come in and have women involved and men involved.  Have communities really taking part in the decisions so that they can benefit.  But if we don't go back and become serious about involving women and involving men and listening to what happens in the local community, it isn't going to work.

 

Oh just one thing.  Some of the tools that I was talking about if any of you want to look at this, this is just one -- there are many many groups that are putting out tools, but this is program that Carla and I have worked with that has all sorts of documents that are available and how to involve women and look at nutrition issues and all that sort of thing.

 

[inaudible]  they use nonwood, forest products, but what and some people just use forest products.  What we use the non-timber forest products to mean was all of those products that you get from a forest besides timber.  Because timber usually have a marketing board.  It usually has a whole set of things.  But very frequently the rattan, the other kinds of  products, the wildlife, the other kinds of products may have generally speaking what policies do is if they's loosing some of those things, there policy is to keep people out.  And we need we have tools for getting data which takes the kind of data that we were hearing about that will look at the changes, what are the actual relationships and the biophysical, but it also incorporates what's happening to the people at the same time.  And all know that it's easy to burn a I've seen a gorgeous plantation of cashews burn because the government changed.  I've seen fences be cut because they were put up in the middle of pasture land and the herders need to get their animals in.  We know that unless we find ways of planting that involves the stakeholders, it isn't going to work. 

 

[question from audience - inaudible]

 

That's a very good question and yes they are two centers in particular are dealing with the issue of fire and that's the center Igraph which is doing the main hub for the alternatives to slash and burn and ICRAS, that is the agri-forestry center and also CIFOR that the forestry center and they've done a quite bit of policy analysis on why the fires, you know, were started.  And also that's continued to the recent fires in Brazil.  And also there [I don't know how to stop that] trying to implement policy and technology so that there will be alternatives.

 

Thank you.  To Keith Islum.  I'm from the Northern part of Australia and we have problems already with the ocean coming in with low lying flood plain areas and I just wondered whether you did have touched over it very lightly I think on sea rise.  Are there any rights of sea rise?

 

I'm not sure that I'm the right [another speaker - hold that thought].  I'm not certain that I'm the right person to point that that.  There [tape stops]

 

[tape starts again]  They've altered the estimates, but now they are saying that they're anticipating that, of course, it won't be equal all over the world, but that the estimates are that it will be between 25 and 95 centimeters within the next hundred years.  And it will vary in different places and they's doing studies with satellites and through area photography to try to determine in particular areas of the world they's going to have certain levels of rise and that has a lot to do with what they are going to do in coastal areas where 60% of the population is currently living not to mention in the future where fisheries are.  It's where a lot of our tourism is, etc., our coral reefs, etc. so it's a very very crucial issue and if you're interested in reading something about this, a good place to look for any of these global climate change issues is a organization called the IPCC and they have produced a lot of literature since 1990 until now on both mitigation activity which I said was the emissions scenarios and also adaptation, how the

 

[END OF TAPE]