Friday, November 4, 2016

Climate-smart agriculture not an oxymoron


“Is climate-smart agriculture [CSA] an oxymoron?”, Lisa Schipper, a researcher, questioned in regard to a new farming concept outlined in the 5th Asia-Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum in Sri Lanka recently.

The concept of CSA was invented by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2010 to sustainably increase productivity, resilience (adaptation), reduce/remove greenhouse gases (mitigation) and enhance national food security and development goals.

The concept has been introduced with a more sophisticated political approach, through a new initiative called the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture. In a new twist, the Global Alliance provides for new ways of green washing “climate-smart” industrial agriculture, with the active involvement of private corporations such as Syngenta, Yara, Kellogg’s and McDonald’s.

The scheme may let agriculture remain a parking lot for poor farmers in Africa and South Asia, but it should not to be continued in the ASEAN region.