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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders and Traditional Farming Communities
  • Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:14:46 -0600


Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders and Traditional Farming
Communities
Miguel A Altieri & Parviz Koohafkan, Third World Network
http://www.fao.org/nr/water/docs/Enduring_Farms.pdf

Most climate change models predict that this global phenomenon will have
severe impacts on small farmers, particularly in developing countries.
Increasing temperatures, droughts, heavy precipitation and other extreme
climatic events could reduce yields by up to 50 percent in some regions,
especially in drylands.

However, existing models at best provide a broad-brush approximation of
expected effects on peasant farming systems and hide the enormous variability
in internal adaptation strategies and the inherent resilience of such
systems. Many rural and traditional farming communities seem to cope well
with climatic extremes. In fact, many farmers adapt and even prepare for
climate change, minimizing crop failure through increased use of
drought-tolerant local varieties, water harvesting, extensive planting, mixed
cropping, agroforestry, opportunistic weeding, wild plant gathering and a
series of other traditional farming techniques. This points to the need to
re-evaluate indigenous knowledge as a key source of information on adaptive
capacity centred on the selective, experimental and resilient capabilities of
farmers in dealing with climatic variability.

Understanding the agroecological features and coping/adaptation mechanisms
employed by traditional societies provides useful insights into the
relationship between the climate and agricultural systems in diverse
geographical and agroclimatic regions of the world. This booklet describes
the impacts of climate change on smallholder/traditional family farming
communities, and the agroecological features of indigenous agricultural
systems which could serve as the foundation for the design of resilient
agricultural systems and strategies for food security and poverty reduction
in an era of climate change.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DR MIGUEL A ALTIERI is a Professor of Agroecology at the Department of
Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California,
Berkeley, USA.

PARVIZ KOOHAFKAN is Director of the Land and Water Division in the Natural
Resources Management and Environment Department of the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, Italy.
(2008)




  • [Livingontheland] Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders and Traditional Farming Communities, Tradingpost, 04/10/2010

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