African countries are facing dramatic population growth with unprecedented levels of natural resource exploitation, changing food preferences and a steady trend towards urbanization. These factors are exacerbated by increasing climate variability, which manifests itself in extreme weather events (floods and droughts) and the overall uncertainty of rainfall patterns over the annual cycle.
Climate change threatens to significantly reduce crop and livestock productivity and degrade ecosystems, putting risks to the food security and income of the most vulnerable populations and the well-being of future generations on the agenda.
Sustainable improvements in food security and nutrition amidst these constraints will require the development and implementation of adaptation strategies that can improve productivity, efficiency, profitability and equity in the distribution of benefits in agriculture and trade.
The Integrated Pesticide Production and Management (IPPM) program involves working with communities, farmer organizations, civil society, local and national authorities and other actors to build more resilient production systems at the level of the individual field, district, country or region.
Institutional development
At the agricultural sector planning level, the district and national levels, the program helps participants integrate climate change adaptation (CCA) requirements and strategies into current agricultural development initiatives, sectoral regulations and programs:
- improve the operability of country-level institutions and develop climate change adaptation policies, strategies and programs, moving from reactive to predictive and continuous preparedness;
- Engage partners and government programs in active testing of advanced tillage and agricultural technologies for different production systems;
- Widespread introduction of climate change adaptation requirements into agricultural regulatory frameworks and programs, and advocacy for experience-based planning;
- Creation of mechanisms for inter-sectoral cooperation and information on agrotechnical issues and food security in the context of climate change.
Informing and empowering farming communities
At the local level, the IPPM program uses Farmer Field Schools (FFS) to serve as a platform for community members to learn, research, adapt and adopt advanced agricultural technologies. Under this approach, the objectives of the farmer field schools are as follows:
- Facilitating communities to undertake self-assessment to better understand past trends, current status and possible future scenarios for managing different sectors of agricultural production (e.g. soils, crops, water, markets, labor, land use, etc.) in order to optimize the prioritization, planning and activities of individual farmers and communities as a whole;
- Demonstrating to farmers new adaptive approaches to soil and plant care that provide opportunities for improved management, including the use of early maturing crops, adjusting sowing dates, increasing the share of legumes and forage crops in the crop rotation, improving seed quality, improving the care of native perennial crops and overall diversification of crops, among others;
- Involving farmer groups in community, district and national regulatory consultation processes on climate change adaptation;
- facilitating the exchange of strategies and approaches to climate change adaptation by developing curricula for farmer schools that better integrate adaptation processes and lessons learned;
- building long-term adaptive capacity by training government technical services, civil society and farmer-organizers in approaches to organizing farmer schools.