A global team of researchers, including Rajiv Ghimire and Meha Jain of the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability, has identified the key barriers to climate-smart agriculture (CSA) adoption in South Asia and suggested strategies to overcome them in a recently published study.
CSA practices will contribute to increased food productivity and food security for millions of smallholder farmers facing the brunt of climate change and other socioeconomic changes. CSA practices will not only help farmers adapt to climate change but will also help conserve soil, water and energy, and many of the practices and technologies have shown they can lead to increased yields.
It was identified that weak organizational capacities, inadequate targeted incentives and limited post-adoption follow-up as the significant barriers to CSA adoption in South Asia. The strategies to encourage CSA adoption in South Asia include information sharing through farmer-to-farmer peer networks, enhancing the management skills of custom hiring centers, targeted subsidies and crop insurance schemes, investment in extension services and incentives to the private sector, equitable dissemination of CSA information and post-adoption assessments.
These strategies are particularly suited for densely populated areas such as South Asia where arable agricultural areas are scarce. We should also understand that things might differ in different parts of the world. Even within South Asia, there are differences in policies, practices, incentive structure and overall sociocultural and biophysical characteristics. The four countries (India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh) we have focused on have different agricultural priorities and in some cases, there could be subnational-level initiatives.
