Interventions for better livelihoods and readiness of irrigated farming communities under climate change

摘要

The recent report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed again that the climate variability and change impacts will be felt globally,but the dry areas will be particularly more affected.The first impacts are already being felt: scarce natural resources are further depleted; temperature extremes are affecting crop and livestock productivities; and droughts have become more severe and frequent.Crop varieties grown today may not produce sufficient yields in the changed climate of tomorrow.Better adapted,more stress-tolerant varieties,and new crops and cropping patterns,will be critically needed.Furthermore,climate models predict that the total area of cultivable land in dry areas will decrease or shifted.Together,these factors will exacerbate food security problems in most developing countries in the dryareas.Through a regional project funded by The International Fund for Agricultural Development(IFAD),several interventions that are adequate to specific agroecologies and local communities are being evaluated in Egypt,Sudan,Eritrea,Ethiopia,and Yemen.The overall objectives are to help up-surging the resilience of small farmers to climate change impact on water supply availability; improve food and feed availability; and improve the livelihoods of farmers.These interventions include new improved,water efficient,and multi diseases tolerant cereal and legume cultivars,improved water and irrigation technologies as well as better integrated crop-livestock management approaches.This paper reports preliminary results of introducing improved wheat cultivars on raisedbed technology as an intervention in Assiut Governorate of Upper Egypt and improved wheat cultivars and early sowing date in lower Atbara area of Sudan.The interventions at the farmers' field in Egypt yielded water saving on average 25％and increased wheat yield up to 24％compared to the farmers' traditional practices.While in Sudan,farmers obtained an increased wheat yield by 144％with the same amount of applied irrigation water at the reference site.Some economic outcomes reported by the authors suggest a set of proposed interventions to be pursued in attempts to achieve a triple wins: cope with climate change,improve food security,and improve the livelihoods of poor-resource's farmers of dryareas.