Coping with Marginality and Salinization for Sustainable Food
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Salinization is a major problem affecting over 62 million hectares of land worldwide and costing $27.3 billion annually in lost crop yields. Marginal lands, which make up a large portion of the world's agricultural lands, are particularly vulnerable to issues like salinization due to their poor soil quality and lack of access to resources. The International Center for Biosaline Agriculture is working to develop innovative solutions like integrated soil management practices and salt-tolerant crop varieties to help improve food security and livelihoods in these marginal areas affected by salinity and water scarcity.
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Coping with Marginality and Salinization for Sustainable Food
- 1. Coping with Marginality and Salinization for Sustainable Food Security Dr. Ismahane Elouafi Director General International Center for Biosaline Agriculture GSP General Assembly May 23, 2016
- 2. Actual Status of Land “…the majority of the world’s soil resources are only in fair, poor or very poor condition and conditions are getting worse in far more cases than they are improving.” FAO-ITPS report “Status of the World’s Soil Resources”, 2015
- 3. Land Degradation & Arable Land Arable Land In Percentage
- 4. Salinization
- 7. Cost Of Salinization Year Irrigated area (m ha) Salt affected area (m ha) Loss from salt affected areas (in USD) 1995 227 45.4 12 billion 2002 277 55.4 14.6 billion 2002 (+inflation) 19.1 billion 2013 (FAO-AQUASTAT) 310 62 27.3 billion
- 8. Salinization In Central Asia
- 9. What Is Marginality? “an involuntary position and condition of an individual or group at the margins of social, political, economic, ecological and biophysical systems, preventing them from access to resources, assets, services, restraining freedom of choice, preventing the development of capabilities, and eventually causing extreme poverty.” Gatzweiler et al. 2011 Marginality is:
- 11. Why Marginal Environments Matter
- 12. Why Marginal Environments Matter (cont.)
- 13. Why Marginal Environments Matter (cont.)
- 14. Projected Water Scarcity Scarcity of water in dryland countries to produce crops, forages and fuel wood. Increase in water withdrawals by 2025 50% Developing Countries 18% Developed Countries By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be under stress conditions.
- 15. Projected Change In Water Stress By 2030 In High Emissions Scenario
- 16. Climate Change Impact On Agriculture
- 17. Smallholders
- 19. Innovative Solutions: Advocacy & Policy • FAO promotes sustainable soil management since 1950 • FAO as a source of knowledge and information • GSP has created a unified voice for soils. It emphasizes the central role of soil resources as a basis for food security and ecosystem services • Voluntary Guidelines for Sustainable Soil Management
- 20. Innovative Solutions: Integrated Approaches To Reclamation Physical Leveling Scraping Subsoiling Sanding Planting Method Biological Green Manuring Mulching Biosaline Agriculture Hydrologic al Leaching Flushing Irrigation Drainage Chemical Amendment Soil conditioning Fertilizers
- 21. Innovative Solutions: Key Technologies Land Management Technologies Soil Surveying and Mapping Integrated Nutrient Management
- 22. Innovative Solutions: Biosaline Agriculture Brackish and saline water Marginal and saline land Irrigated/supplementary irrigated agriculture Salt-tolerant plant production systems
- 23. Crop Diversification: Using the Right Crop
- 24. Use Of Non-conventional Water Resources Treated wastewater Brackish water Reject water from mining Sea water
- 25. ICBA - Agriculture For Tomorrow Climate Change Impact and Management Crop Productivity and Diversification Natural Resources Assessment and Management
- 26. A unique Center of Excellence looking at Agriculture for Tomorrow Thank you For more information and ICBA publications visit: www.biosaline.com International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA) is an international, non-profit organization that aims to strengthen agricultural productivity in marginal and saline environments through identifying, testing and facilitating access to sustainable solutions for food, nutrition and income security.
Editor's Notes
- Abstract: Increasing marginality of agricultural production systems is emerging as the major constraint to enhance productivity at the farm level, thus resulting in enormous food and nutrition security challenges and placing productive land into degradation. Marginality or marginal environments include bio-physical constraints, and/or social and economic constraints. The FAO-ITPS “Status of the World’s Soil Resources” report’s conclusion was that “the majority of the world’s soil resources are only in fair, poor or very poor condition and conditions are getting worse in far more cases than they are improving”. Zooming on salinity per se shows that about 20% of the global irrigated agriculture is affected by salinization. This situation causes an annual loss of about US$38.4 billion. To cope with this situation, biosaline agriculture (BA) may be considered one of the viable options. The BA is an integrated approach that includes physical, chemical, and biological reclamation methods, as well as integration of production systems. The success of BA lies in the use of diversified non-conventional (usually salt-tolerant native species) production systems combined with proper management systems to improve farm profitability. This is a potential niche that can improve food security in marginal and saline environments and subsequently improve food security at large.
- Soil threat as outlined in the newly published FAO-ITPS report “Status of the World’s Soil Resources”
- Salinity is accumulation of salts in the soil. It affects irrigated lands and water-logged lands with poor drainage. As water at the surface evaporates, it leaves behind traces of various salts. It can be resolved by flushing fresh water through the soils (“washing” them), or building drainage systems (expensive infrastructure) lack of water or no drainage infrastructure means that it is difficult to reverse salinization once it has begun.
- Best available data is from the 1990s. Since then, data is available for only places with good monitoring (USA) or relatively well documented irrigation systems (North Africa). The scope of the problem is unknown & likely exceeds available estimates.
- An average of 2,000 ha of irrigated land in arid and semi-arid areas is degraded by salt every day. Today about 62m ha (20%) of the world’s irrigated lands are affected. Source: UNU, FAO; FAO, IIASA, 2008
- Yield reductions from salinity can be extreme. There are estimates that in Central Asia (where up to 50% of the irrigated lands are salinized) salinity costs farmers about 2.7 billion USD per YEAR (Qadir et al. 2014).
- Definitions have come from various disciplines: resource management, ecology, social sciences, economics. Some folks think about poverty as a result of personal failures, others think about systemic barriers to improving incomes as examples. Gatzweiler et al. use marginality to define a framework that integrates different ways of thinking about poverty and its causes. “Terms which relate to "marginal" areas are frequently used interchangeably and often without definition. The difficulty in formulating a clear definition stems from the fact that "productivity" varies according to the type of land use. A tract of land that is "marginal" for crop production may be well suited for grazing. "Fragile" lands may be sensitive to degradation under cultivation but may be sustainably used for forestry. Furthermore, productivity is not only based on the biophysical characteristics of land, but also depends on the socio-economic parameters of a specific environment. Technologies may be known but the necessary incentives, institutions or inputs may be missing…” CGIAR Research Priorities for Marginal Lands, 1999.
- The six dimensions of marginality Health: <= 50% of children stunted Economics: GNI < 1005 per capita Infrastructure: > 10 hours to major cities Geography: Soils unsuitable for agriculture Politics: Political stability rating (World Bank)
- In 2015, about 795m people were undernourished globally Of these, 707m live in Southern Asia, Eastern Asia, South-Eastern Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa (89% of the total) Source: FAO, 2014-2016 1.4bn poor people live on less than US$1.25 a day. 1bn of them live in rural areas where agriculture is their main source of livelihood. On average, over 25% of GDP comes from agriculture in low-income countries and is much higher in many places. Source: IFAD-UNEP, 2013; World Bank 2011-2015
- 2015 was the warmest year since modern record-keeping began in 1880. 15 of the 16 warmest years on record have now occurred since 2001. Source: NASA, NOAA; WMO Climate-smart agriculture requires a new thinking about cropping systems with heat- and drought-tolerant species. Increasing the biodiversity of the plants used for agriculture is an important part of adaptation to climate change.
- Around 1.2bn people, or almost one-fifth of the world's population, live in areas of physical scarcity, and 500m are approaching this situation. Another 1.6bn, or almost a quarter of the world's population, face economic water shortage. Source: UNDP, FAO; WRI Aqueduct, 2014. Water is not water is not water. What kind of water are we talking about? We must think about non-traditional sources of water. Water usually refers to just fresh surface or ground water. However, ground water is brackish in the UAE and salinity is an issue in many places due to salt water intrusion along coasts. Ground water is being mined (extracted faster than it can be recharged). So other sources are needed. Waste water from urban sources can be re-used for agriculture (grey water or black water). Urban waste water has been tested on vegetables at ICBA and bacteria counts were below regulation limits except for tomatoes. In the UAE, desalinated water provides all urban water uses, and many farmers use reverse osmosis units at the farm level. Sea water can be used to irrigate some halophytic crops so must be included as a potential alternative water source.
- Water scarcity is adding to biophysical marginality.
- By 2020, in some African countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture may be reduced by up to 50%. Global warming has resulted in annual combined losses of 40m tons for six major crops or US$5bn since 1981. Source: Altieri & Koohafkan, 2008; Center for Global Development; Lobell & Field, 2007, in Gornall et al., 2010. Estimates of impact are highly sensitive to assumptions made in the modeling but it is clear that countries with fewer financial resources, esp. in SSA, will suffer the worse impacts.
- Smallholder farmers: Manage over 80% of the world’s estimated 500m small farms Provide over 80% of the food consumed in a large part of the developing world. 1.5bn people live in smallholder households. Source: IFAD, UNEP, 2013; FAO, 2012 Also: larger farms tend to be on better land; smallholders are usually on more marginal land. Women are more likely to farm the smaller plots, and therefore are more likely to be on marginal lands. Even in MENA, 30 to 50% of farms are run by women and the numbers are higher in Asia and Africa, but only 5% of extension services are designed for them. FAO estimates that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20–30%. This increase could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5–4% and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12–17%, up to 150 million people. Source: Martini and Dey de Pryck, 2014; de Schutter, 2013; FAO
- Marginal land (looking back to the dominant land cover and use map, we can observe clear delineation) - Cultivated land is a leading land use (a fifth or more of the land area) in South and Southeast Asia, Western and Central Europe, and Central America and the Caribbean, but is less important in Sub-Saharan and Northern Africa, where cultivation covers less than a tenth of the area. Globally, about 0.23 ha of land is cultivated per head of the world’s population. High-income countries cultivate more than twice the area per capita (0.37 ha) than low-income (0.17 ha) countries, while middle-income countries cultivate 0.23 ha per capita. - In low-income countries, soils are often poorer and only 28% of total cultivated land is classed as prime. - Increasing marginality of agricultural production systems is emerging as the major constraint to enhance productivity at the farm level, thus resulting in enormous food and nutrition security challenges and placing productive land into degradation.
- Quinoa – high protein and high micronutrient content pseudo grain native to the Andes; has high potential to alleviate malnutrition in other parts of the world. Can tolerate a wide range of environments both in temperature and moisture/water. Poor tend to have unvaried diets that are low in protein, zinc, iron etc. and quinoa has higher levels than other grains. Global initiative on quinoa since 2006 – identification of salt-tolerant now tested in several countries (UAE, Egypt, Morocco, ex). Quinoa research in the UAE in collaboration with Abu Dhabi Farmers Services Centre. 4 high-yielding, salt-tolerant lines identified by ICBA staff, and ready for cultivation and up-scaling in the UAE and other countries. Currently in development of a 10-year scaling-up phase to reach MENA and Central Asia in particular.
- Salicornia is used as a vegetable (often pickled), animal feed, or a biofuel oil crop (seeds only). It grows in saline environments and can be irrigated with sea water. Research on using seawater to grow Salicornia for biofuel in collaboration with Masdar and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Also used as part of an integrated aquaculture system to re-use brine waste water from reverse osmosis units in the UAE that we want to field test in Morocco or Central Asia in the coming years.
- Assessment of NR – water, land, biodiversity Climate change - Adaptation to climate change, assessment of water resources availability, variability and impact using modeling, GIS and remote sensing, scenarios of climate change impact for policy and decision making Crop productivity e.g. Stress-tolerant crops: salinity, drought, and marginal environments Introduce new and alternative varieties of nutritious crops Provide best practices in land management, technical support, and advice Use of alternative water Hydroponics Biotechnology Plant genetic resources Aquaculture and bioenergy – integrated aquaculture/agriculture using saline water; salinity resistant bioenergy crops e.g. Salicornia Policies for resilience e.g. Technical assistance to develop strategies and frameworks Analyze policies and conduct socioeconomic studies on food and nutrition security; water and land management Assess opportunities for value adding to market chains