“Climate-Smart Agriculture” .. imperative practices for adapting to climate change

In the village of “Burj Nour Al Hummus” in Dakahlia Governorate, which occupies the northeastern part of the Nile Delta in Egypt, Ibrahim Al-Sahiti planted this year four acres of his land with drought-resistant rice seeds. Previously required by the production process.

Al-Sahiti, who lives in his village of the Aja Center, was introduced to climate-resistant rice seeds - or what he called "seeds" - with the help of the Field Crops Research Institute of the Governmental Agricultural Research Center, to provide him with several advantages, the first of which is shortening the time of the agricultural cycle to ranges from Between 120 and 125 days, after the traditional harvest took 150 to 160 days, it also saved a third of the amount of water it used, while also saving labor.

Al-Suhaiti sums up his experience with these seeds, as “the farmer is now sowing dry seeds in dry land effortlessly, then the land is irrigated with water lines so that the work is completed within two hours a day only.”

In 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched the SAIL project at the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture, to help Egyptian smallholder farmers promote what are known as climate-smart practices, with a total funding of $94.6 million. The project extends until 2023, encouraging The project will teach farmers to pilot soilless hydroponics - an innovative technology to reduce water and increase productivity - and to use alternative crop varieties, convert traditional irrigation systems to drip or sprinkler irrigation, and use solar-powered harvesting equipment.

Climate Smart Agriculture

The "FAO" defines climate - smart agriculture as an approach to preparing the actions necessary to transform agricultural systems to support food security in the light of climate change, seeking to achieve three main goals, namely, increasing productivity sustainably, adapting to and resilient to climate change, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Produced by farming practices.

The World Bank considers that the climate-smart agriculture approach is an integrated approach to the management of natural lands, which includes agricultural lands, livestock, forests, and fisheries related to food security and climate change. Therefore, 52% of the World Bank’s financing for agriculture targeted practices that seek to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. .

In a case study conducted by the "FAO" in 2021 in a number of countries on climate-smart agriculture, it said that the agricultural natural resources in Egypt are under constant threat; Because of climate change and increasing human pressures, as sea level rise will reduce the cultivated area around the Nile, and it is expected that temperatures will rise and the gap between available water resources and actual needs will increase, and expectations have shown a significant decrease in wheat production, in the period between 2012 and 2040 with a percentage ranging from 11 to 12%, from 26 to 47% for rice, and from 40 to 47% for corn.

Rice Productivity Improvement Initiative

Bassiouni Zayed, head of research in the Rice Research Department at the Field Crops Research Institute, says: The goal of developing new crops is to obtain “climate-smart” varieties that withstand negative environmental changes that affect crop productivity, such as high temperatures, soil dryness and salinity, and lack of The water that we are often forced to irrigate with agricultural wastewater and treated water despite its high salinity levels.

Zayed heads the research team in the "Improving Rice Productivity Under Climate Change and Salinity Conditions" initiative, funded by the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technology.

"Zayed" with his colleagues conducted research to develop new varieties capable of withstanding the three climatic conditions, and then began to cultivate them in some fields in areas suffering from the effects of climatic changes in the governorates of Kafr El-Sheikh and Port Said and others, and they also used in parallel to provide water new methods of cultivation called "Cultivation on lines or terraces", the result was good.

For more tests, the researchers resorted to some areas in the city of Farafra in the New Valley, to evaluate the new varieties in light of the combination of the three effects resulting from climate change in this soil, which are high temperature, drought, salinity and irrigation at intervals. They also experimented with drip rice cultivation, and the initial results were grater; As an acre produced between 2 to 2.9 tons of rice, and consumed only 1,800 to 2,000 cubic meters of water, which “Zayed” considered an achievement, given that it is known that rice cultivation takes place through flood irrigation, and therefore requires the use of large quantities from the water, which prompted them to decide to continue their experiments.

So far, the initiative has produced several varieties that are characterized by their ability to adapt to climatic changes, but the most tolerant of them are "Giza 179", "Sakha Super 300", and "Salala 9399".

"We are also working on producing agricultural varieties that do not need nitrogen fertilizers, which in turn cause the production of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, and we also used one of the organic compounds extracted from the Moringa plant as a fertilizer to reduce the harmful effects of the materials," Zayed added. chemicals, and the results were good.

At a time when farmers are concerned about a change in the crops grown and the traditional methods to which they are accustomed, continuing to think - at the same time - about the possibilities of additional cost or loss, the center works to introduce them to the new varieties, by planting them with "indicative fields" and comparison of productivity Old varieties with new ones, introductory seminars on harvest days, inviting farmers and agricultural extension agents to evaluate the quality of the crop and its advantages, in addition to using agricultural media channels to promote the dissemination of this trend.

For its part, the center encourages them to use the new varieties; Because it will save them time, money and labor, and guarantee them high productivity. He also explains to them how smart practices contribute to mitigating the contribution of the agricultural sector to climate change; Because it reduces methane emissions from rice fields, and the cultivation of high-yield varieties has a higher capacity for photosynthesis, which absorbs more carbon dioxide.

Agriculture sector and greenhouse emissions

In Egypt, the agriculture sector occupies the second place in terms of the production of greenhouse gases with 14.9%, while the energy sector occupies the first place with 64.5%, followed by the industrial processes sector and then the waste sector, according to Egypt ’s report to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in 2018, This is the most recent statistic so far.

Globally, between 2007 and 2016 agriculture and land use contributed 23 percent to carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous gases, according to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Agriculture in Egypt produces this percentage of emissions through “enteric fermentation” processes, animal manure treatment, flooded rice cultivation, agricultural soil management, and burning agricultural residues in fields.

The issue of "Climate-Smart Agriculture" was the focus of this year's United Nations Climate Conference, as one of its sessions on November 2 discussed the issue of "food security and the transition to innovative food production."

There are challenges facing the transition to climate-smart agriculture in Africa, said Benjamin Franklin, one of the speakers at the session, Cocoa Farmer and Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of Fair Trade Africa, a non-profit organization that supports farmers. the risks associated with climate change, adding in statements to Al-Ilm that it is important to ensure that farmers receive fair wages and a good standard of living; Because the agricultural market is not fair in bearing the costs of the climate crisis, he calls for targeting climate finance to scale solutions that help farmers learn climate resilience.

According to the organization, only 2% of climate finance goes to small farmers in low-income countries, yet 80 percent of the world's food comes from 500 million family farms, so the foundation's demands are not just to switch to smart agriculture, but to take Broad climate and environmental measures achieve economic and social justice for farmers, to get their fair share of policymakers' promises to invest the $100 billion annual commitments previously set at the Paris conference.

Project "Scala"

In parallel with the SAIL project, Egypt - represented by the Ministry of Agriculture - signed a few months ago an agreement for the "Scala" project with "FAO " and several partners, targeting the impact of climate change on agricultural crops, and an attempt to generalize some climate-smart practices in 12 countries, including Egypt. .

Fatima Al-Zahra Abdullah, a climate adaptation expert at FAO and a member of the project, says: The goal is to support Egypt in translating agricultural needs into the national adaptation plan to climate changes, so the project will help disseminate climate-smart methods and train the private sector to switch from old agricultural methods to contribute With the public sector in climate adaptation.

She added, in statements to Al-Alam: "Climate changes affect in several ways, the lack of rain leads to a lack of water availability, and high temperatures affect crops directly, as well as increase the growth of pests and spread plant diseases, for example agricultural insects have a one-time breeding phase. In a year, and with the increase in temperatures, they multiply several times, which was not the case before.. the world is not ready for this creep of insects.”

The encroachment of sea water also causes the salinity of agricultural lands, especially the lands of the delta; Because it is low and brittle, and thus becomes unable to produce crops with the same efficiency, salt also spreads in groundwater reservoirs and is unreliable for agriculture, so according to Fatima, Egypt developed seeds capable of tolerating higher salinity, and other seeds that are resistant to pests, as it began Field irrigation is used as an alternative to flood irrigation.

At the same time, she saw that "climate fluctuation" - that is, the instability of the maximum and minimum temperature during one day - has a strong negative impact on climate change as well, which affects some crops that need certain climatic conditions, so flowers fall before they can bear fruit, This is what destroyed the mango and olive crop in more than one year before.

An Egyptian study on the impact of climate change on food security, prepared by researcher Sarhan Soliman from the Agricultural Research Center in Egypt, and published in the Egyptian Journal of Agricultural Economics in 2019, had expected that some agricultural crops would suffer from a gap between their availability and consumption rates by 2050 in The expected effects of climate change on the feddan productivity remained, according to the strategy of the Ministry of Agriculture for the cultivated areas during that period.

The study forecasts the food gap by 2050, by 19 million tons of wheat, about 117.9 thousand tons of barley, about 15.35 million tons of maize, about 271.2 thousand tons of sorghum, and 2.29 million tons of soybeans.

In statements to Al-Alam, the researcher said that the food gap and increased consumption now make it difficult to rely on organic farming as a smart farming practice. Because in this way we will get less production at a higher cost to the consumer, and because the use of pesticides and fertilizers increases the productivity of the crop, and people will not stop much at quality if the price does not suit them.

Mohamed Fahim, head of the Agricultural Climate Change Center, believes that climate-smart agriculture includes all agricultural practices that take into account the relationship of climate with plants, including simple practices that depend on knowledge of the weather.

"The center provides farmers with some smart climate recommendations, for example, if there is an expectation of an increase in the amount of rain within a few days, what is required here is to stop irrigation, and to drain water from the bottom of the plants so that the soil does not become saturated and suffocate, and if there are winds laden with dust in an area that is cultivated Onions, for example, it is possible to spray plants as a precaution, because the dust creates minute wounds in the plant and is an entry point to infecting it with diseases, and therefore we cost less pesticides and protect the plants.” The problem, and at the same time, are natural practices that are usually practiced by the farmer and do not represent an additional cost. We have been doing this for twenty years, but we have classified them and other practices under this term recently.”

Fahim believes that the recently developed field crops such as wheat, barley, corn, cotton and rice have become mainly oriented to climate adaptation, and in addition to saving time and water, they sometimes allow the plant to pass its critical stages of fertilization and growth away from high temperatures, for example in the old days. Wheat was still planted in the month of June and at this time goes through a stage of growth called the "dough phase", so with high temperature it is severely affected and its productivity decreases, but now the problem can be avoided.