Shifting to sustainable intensification in agriculture. How to be climate-smart

MANILA: ICRISAT tweets: "How can sustainable intensification make farming climate-smart?" on 17 October 2014 at 1:53 AM. Early bird. Will this early bird get the worm?

The worm is sustainable intensification of agriculture, Sinag, my acronym. It just happens that the word formed is Filipino. In Tagalog, sinag means halo around the heads of images of saints, lamp, moon, ray of light from sun, stars; it also means glimmer (tagalogtranslate.com). It signifies knowledge or wisdom. In Ilocano, sinag is a prefix that indicates how many strands are twisted together to make a rope; thus, sinagdudua means made of 2 strands (Carl R Galvez Rubino, books.google.co.in). It signifies strength. Very useful metaphors, as we shall see later, after we get to know what sustainable intensification of agriculture actually is. Has ICRISAT gotten Sinag right? If it hasn't, it is a sin against agriculture!

So what do we know about the subject? In their paper published in 1999, Thomas Reardon et al delimited (not defined as they claimed) sustainable agricultural intensification using 2 criteria: "(i) an environmental criterion: the technology protects or enhances the farm resource base and thus maintains or improves land productivity; and (ii) an economic criterion: the technology meets the farmer's production goals" (Development Support Review vol 17, 1999, pp175-193). To simplify: Land productivity and production goals only? That is saying that Sinag is limited to higher production – which it is not.

In their paper published in 2014, Bruce M Campbell et al are saying that sustainable intensification (SI) in agriculture essentially means lowering environmental impacts while increasing food production from existing farmlands, increasing animal welfare and human nutrition, all the while supporting rural economies.

Mr Campbell, that's achievable.

Differentiating it from SI, Campbell et al are saying in the same paper that climate smart agriculture (CSA) means increasing productivity, incomes, food security and development; increasing adaptive capacity at multiple levels (from farm to nation), and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing carbon sinks.

Mr Campbell, that's a tall order.

The ICRISAT tweet "How can sustainable intensification make farming climate-smart?" is actually smarter, because it implies that SI should be CSA – and vice versa. And that's exactly how we should look at Sinag, as an agriculture that is sustainable and climate smart. Sinag = SI + CSA.
But how do we make the light of Sinag shine on everyone? Each one inspired by ICRISAT, we need several supportive structures and systems, as follows:

Supportive Model. 

This must be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. And I certainly believe we already have one, courtesy of ICRISAT & Partners – the Adarsha Model. I love it because it's a village model, and I believe that it takes a village to change a village for the better for everyone. Adarsha is a name the villagers gave to the place where they resurrected themselves from dark thinking to bright, from helplessness to hope. I believe so much in Adarsha that I have mentioned it in 68 of my ICRISAT essays (my latest is "ICRISAT Recommends. Global Ideas for Global Partnerships," 20 October 2014, iCRiSAT Watch, blogspot.com). In Adarsha in 2007, there were 465 ha and 274 families (04 October 2007, blogspot.com). Let me now quote myself there (because I don't think I can improve on it):

I gather that the Adarsha watershed was selected as a project area by ICRISAT & partners precisely because it had all the negatives: lack of rains, frequent droughts, low harvests, infertile soils, no irrigation, no villagers conserving water on their farms, little incomes. If they could make a difference here, they could make a difference anywhere.

Later, for those who don't know, Adarsha was the project that astounded a World Bank team visiting on 18 April 2010. "This is a very prosperous village," the team said. "Are we sure we are in Kothapally? This village stands out from our normal imagination of a village in Asia or Africa" (see my essay "Adarsha Revisited. Impacts of CGIAR research," 20 August 2010, iCRiSAT Watch, blogspot.com). You better believe it. I have not seen and yet I have believed.

Supportive Policy. 
This must come from the national government as well as the local government units. Much of ICRISAT & partners' success in India can be attributed to the advocacy of the national and state governments of that country. For instance, the State of Karnataka advocated Bhoochetana, land rejuvenation, supported it in full, putting the money where the mouth was, and it went on to improve the lives of 3 million farmers of Karnataka. I have written about Bhoochetana 28 times in my dedicated blog (the latest is "ICRISAT Recommends," cited above).

Supportive Science. There must be method to the madness of inclusive development, especially technologies and systems. ICRISAT & partners have these technologies that decrease cost (such as micro-dosing of fertilizers, alternate furrow irrigation), that increase returns (such as crop cultivars that yield much despite some stresses like drought), and decrease environmental degradation (such as chickens to control insect pests instead of insecticides that pollute the soil and water).

Supportive Philanthropists. Sinag needs funding from generous souls who would derive little from big grants and yet have their hearts full when they hear that even a little went a long way.

Supportive Businessmen. As is the experience of ICRISAT, businessmen can help launch technologies that are meant to be farmer-friendly, like affordable bags of seeds and new products that need raw materials that farmers can produce. Like the Rusni distillery in India that uses sweet sorghum as raw material to produce biofuel.

Supportive Civil Society. By definition, "civil society" is "the elements such as freedom of speech, an independent judiciary etc, that make up a democratic society" (thefreedictionary.com). We must let the light of Sinag shine guarded by our freedoms. NGOs can lead in supporting Sinag.

Supportive Church. My contribution to the list. They don't usually include the Church as a patron of science and/or development, but it should be – it presents and represents the highest morals that man can aspire for. If we don't believe in an Almighty, then we can only rely on the milk of human kindness, and then again how do we measure that?

Supportive Peasants. The farmers themselves must be in the midst of action towards the improvement of their lives. We cannot sustain them if they remain mendicants; they need to learn to help themselves. They must become, like the Adarsha villagers, their own champions.

Supportive Groups. With the ICRISAT & partners' strategy called inclusive market-oriented development (IMOD), I have been proposing that cooperatives turn themselves into Super Coops to carry out IMOD for the members by the groups becoming the merchants themselves (see my "IMODest Proposal. A Coop Revolution for millions of poor farmers," 28 September 2013, iCRiSAT Watch, blogspot.com). I don't mean just collecting market information, just being market-intelligent; I mean the Super Coops should be the direct marketers of farmer produce, talking to direct consumers and not to traders – and giving the farmers access to credit when they need it, anytime. Only then can the coops, and therefore their farmer members, enjoy the values added from the farm to the table.

Supportive Social Media. Don't forget us, workers of words and ideas, texts and images, us turning the mess into the message. The best of us speak the language of your target users, the farmers. Science is too important to be left to the scientists who cannot speak the language of the masses.

Now to summarize:

Science support must be climate-smart, which means that the crops from continuing research can withstand either drought or waterlogging, higher temperatures or lower.

Beyond that, science support must be client-smart, which means that it must teach the farmers such things as how to save water and still produce more, how to deal with poor soils or abused soils, with over-cultivation and under-cultivation, with over-fertilization and under-fertilization, with over-spraying and under-spraying, with wasteful postharvest handling of produce, and with unprofitable marketing. I know the ICRISAT scientists and their partners have the solutions to these problems – I have already mentioned them above. That is to say, ICRISAT has gotten Sinag right.

To go back to our Ilocano sinagdudua metaphor:
To make a strong, unbreakable rope for modern agriculture, Sinag must be made of 2 strands: climate-smart and client-smart. With that, Sinag certainly means sustainable intensification in agriculture.