In Achiyapar, a small village in India’s eastern Uttar Pradesh region, smallholder farmers have become increasingly used to seeing their rice crops decimated by searing drought. For these poor lowland farmers, the damage is incalculable. Rice is the community’s staple food and the crop is the farmers’ main source of income. But recently, as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) reports, a new drought tolerant variety has been helping farmers to increase their yields in spite of high temperatures and low rainfall.
Through the Stress-Tolerant Rice for Africa and South Asia (STRASA) project, coordinated in South Asia by IRRI, the village has received seed to grow the Sahbhagi Dhan (IR74371-70-1-1) variety on 100 hectares. One farmer reported that he harvested 5 tons/ha despite drought conditions, an exceptional result. Since it matures earlier, the new variety produces a harvest one month ahead of the normal schedule, enabling farmers to buy food for their families, as well as inputs for the next season and plant their wheat crop well in advance.
Be prepared
Planning ahead is crucial if countries are to combat what is generally accepted as the most damaging of all natural hazards. With widespread evidence that droughts are becoming more frequent and more severe, there are calls for more preparation before disaster strikes, as opposed to often poorly coordinated reactions after the event. Risk management measures, early warning technologies and mitigation initiatives to build more resilient crop and livestock production systems can all be far more effective in countering the impact of drought than response and assistance after the damage has been done, say experts.
The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has launched six learning sites in East Africa, where researchers and development partners are working with farmers to test climate smart agricultural interventions. The idea is to scale them up with the help of community trainers and farmers’ organizations. To date site specific practices identified for their potential include the introduction of knowledge and skills about seasonal weather information, sustainable land management with agroforestry, improved management of small ruminants and poultry, beekeeping, drought tolerant crop varieties such as cereals, legumes, root crops, and vegetables, and intensive crop production in green houses.
“We want to involve local farmers in the identification of needs and prioritization of activities when creating climate smart villages, as they carry vital indigenous knowledge on the local contexts of past and current adaptation practices in agriculture,” says James Kinyangi, Regional Program Leader for CCAFS East Africa program.
In February, two new CGIAR Research Programs — on Grain Legumes and Dryland Cereals – were launched to develop nutritious crops for the dryland poor, resistant to drought and other stresses. Both programs are led by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)
Bolstering resilience
Developing crops that are drought tolerant, or that escape the drought altogether by maturing early, is proving a winning strategy in some areas. For optimal performance, varieties can be targeted to specific farming systems, depending on locally prevalent stresses. Exploiting the drought tolerant genes of staples that have withstood harsh dryland conditions for thousands of years, breeders have scored a number of successes. Scientists using molecular markers and participatory plant breeding – which involves farmers in selection by asking them to observe plant performance – have succeeded in protecting crops from the ravages of drought and in some cases increasing yields.
Plant breeders at ICRISAT have made important gains in improving the drought tolerance of pearl millet. In southern Africa, some 34% of total pearl millet area is now planted with improved varieties. Early maturing varieties of pearl millet and sorghum are also helping farmers to bridge the hungry season. Farmers in 60 countries are using drought tolerant cowpeas, developed with support from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), while improved chickpea and pigeonpea varieties developed by ICRISAT are helping to combat the effects of drought in China, India, Nepal and Pakistan.
New varieties of barley, a crop highly vulnerable to drought, have been released in Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia, through a plant breeding program coordinated by ICRISAT. Meanwhile, in Sudan, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) reports that new high-yielding, heat-tolerant wheat varieties have made the crop viable on huge areas, where its cultivation was earlier ruled out by high temperatures. ICARDA breeders are also developing new varieties of bread wheat that combine high yield potential with high water use efficiency – giving bumper yields in good years and acceptable yields in dry years.
Improved crops and livestock
Research from ICARDA has identified the benefits of various drought management approaches for dryland areas, many of which are suffering from increasingly frequent and more intense periods of severe water scarcity.
“For example, the use of ‘raised bed’ farming for wheat in parts of Egypt during the past two seasons has resulted in a yield increase of 20%, using 20% less water,” said ICARDA Director General Dr. Mahmoud Solh in a recent report Strategies for Combating Climate Change in Drylands Agriculture, produced by CCAFS and ICARDA. For marginal lands, the Awasi sheep, a sturdy native breed that gives resilience to rural communities in the Middle East, offers considerable potential for use in countries of Central and West Asia, and East and North Africa, especially if combined with production of hardy drought resistant fodder crops, says the report. Projections from the recently launched CGIAR Research Program on Dryland Systems suggest that planned interventions will result in higher and more secure incomes for 87 million people in dryland systems, while improving the productive capacity of natural resources and reducing environmental degradation in nearly 11 billion hectares of dry areas.
Both ICARDA and ICRISAT will be participating at a High-level Meeting on National Drought Policy (HMNDP), convened by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and other agencies and organizations, to be held in Geneva from March 11-15. A central message will be the need to take pro-active measures to create more drought-resilient societies and for countries to develop national drought policies to prepare for what most scientists now agree is an inevitable increase in more frequent and intense incidences of drought.
No-tillage for better water retention
Conservation agriculture (CA) can do much to preempt the effects of drought, trials show, especially when combined with crop diversification. CA is a set of practices that includes eliminating tillage, keeping crop residues on the soil and rotating or intercropping, producing a soil structure that is better suited to water infiltration and retention.
Quoted in a blog for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), ML Jat, CIMMYT’s senior cropping systems agronomist, presented compelling evidence of the impact of CA in the Indian state of Haryana.
“The results of a large number of participatory field experimentations across the state suggest that CA-based cropping system management practices do not only help to produce more with less water, energy, labor, and cost,” he said. “But also restore natural resources and adapt and mitigate climate change effects.”
CIMMYT and partners have been helping maize farmers in Malawi to test CA as a way of combating increasingly scarce and unpredictable rainfall. The results, described in an article documenting the trials, are higher yields and healthier crops in conditions that wilt plants grown using conventional techniques. One of the farmers, Felix Twaya, of Lemu, Balaka, Malawi, has dramatically increased output using CA, from 7.5 kg bags of maize to 27 bags. Fellow farmer Daimoniz Miondo has doubled maize yields, despite low and erratic rainfall.
“I’m harvesting between 30 and 40 bags of maize now per acre, where I used to get only 15 or 20 bags,” he said.
For more information:
Climate smart agricultural interventions (CCAFS)
CGIAR Research Programs on Grain Legumes and Dryland Cereals
Improved crop varieties to boost food security (ICARDA)
Bread wheat: high yield plus drought tolerance (ICARDA)
Conservation agriculture is the way of future farming (CIMMYT)
Conservation agriculture in Malawi: “We always have problems with rain here” (CIMMYT)
High-level Meeting on National Drought Policy
The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)
Transformative technologies (IRRI)
The Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP)
STRASA project
Strategies for Combating Climate Change in Drylands Agriculture (PDF download 1.0MB)
IRRI, ICARDA, ICRISAT and CIMMYT are all members of the CGIAR Consortium
Photo: IRRI Images