Hagar El-Didi • 2017 IFPRI Egypt Seminar: How to make Agriculture Climate Smart in Egypt?
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This was presented at the IFPRI Egypt Seminar held in partnership with Bibliotheca Alexandrina
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Hagar El-Didi • 2017 IFPRI Egypt Seminar: How to make Agriculture Climate Smart in Egypt?
- 1. Climate Smart Agriculture – Concept and a roadmap for research Hagar ElDidi IFPRI Egypt May 9, 2017
- 2. What is CSA? • An umbrella term presented by the FAO in 2010, which addresses food security and climate change jointly • Three objectives 1. Sustainably increasing agricultural productivity to support equitable increases in farm incomes, food security and development; 2. Adapting and building resilience of food systems and farming livelihoods to climate change at multiple levels; and 3. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, where possible And…enhances achievement of national food security and development goals • Not one size fits all (context specific) • Ex: is agricultural intensification climate smart?
- 3. CSA: Is there anything really new? • The first two pillars are not controversial and taken by themselves not new • However, for CSA reduction of emissions is just a co-benefit: increasing sustainable productivity requires a more efficient use of inputs and therefore a likely reduction of emission intensity (emissions per unit of output) • A systems framework that considers geographically-specific solutions for the whole value chain • Can potentially initiate dialogs that rarely happen across ministries and reinforce the importance of a multi-objective approach in agricultural policies
- 4. Recap GCMs – Downscaling – Crop Models Impact on economy (CGE) Impact on ag. sector (optimization) Macro level CSA policies Sector level CSA policies Farm level CSA practices CSA strategy Impact on subnational level and farmers
- 5. Contextualizing CSA - Egypt • Arid climate • Water scarcity and irrigated agriculture • Soil salinity • Temperature rise due to climate change • Sea level rise • Changes in rainfall Regional characteristics and CC key transmission channels • Adaptive (high yielding / water saving) crop varieties • Sustainable intensification • Conservation agriculture • Land leveling • Early warning systems • Etc. Past research, successes, findings
- 6. Roadmap and Research Questions
- 7. Research inception: Climate impact assessment and mapping • RQ1:What are the expected impacts of climate change on agricultural yields, water availability, farm incomes and rural poverty? • Effects on different regions, groups and crop production patterns • First, we need to take stock of the agricultural scene as it is • Analysis of economic and technical efficiency of agriculture production and use of water resources by, different crops, farming groups and agro- ecological regions • Identifying a farming typology for Egypt will allow specific recommendations of suitable climate-smart practices for different groups
- 8. Creating a database A holistic, disaggregated database to analyze agricultural growth, productivity and efficiency in Egypt Datasets and sources: • Data on national and subnational outputs (area, production and yields of different crops) • MoALR; CAPMAS • Data on national and subnational input use and cost of production per crop • MoALR; CAPMAS; MoWRI • Data on agricultural households’ assets, production and income • ELMPS (ERF)
- 9. Identification of suitable CSA techniques, technologies and policies • RQ2:What are the climate smart technologies and strategies to mitigate the impacts of climate change for the different farming groups? • Farming household typologies • By crop • By farm size • By income diversity • agriculture only vs. mixed households • By level of crop diversity • By crop-livestock mix Share of agriculture-only rural households by governorates in Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, 1999 and 2012 Source: El-Enbaby et al., 2016
- 10. Water use per governorate and per crop New Valley Matruh Red Sea Aswan Giza Menia Qena Assuit South Sinai North Sinai Suez Suhag Behera Cairo Beni Suef Fayoum IsmailiaSharkia Dakahlia KafrEl Sheikh GharbiaAlexandria Menoufia Luxor Port Said Qalyoubia Damietta Cubic meters total_irri No data < 5000 5000 - 25000 25000 - 75000 75000 - 100000 100000 - 175000 >1750000 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 cubicmeters/feddan Feddan water requirments for main crop groups
- 11. CBA and policy implications of selected CSA practices • RQ3: What are the expected costs and returns to alternative climate smart investments? • The transition to CSA is afflicted by barriers that we know too well: risk, uncertainty, imperfect markets, up-front investment costs, limited access to information, physical conditions such as soil fertility and access to water, etc. • What is the enabling policy environment needed to increase uptake of CSA?
- 12. Next Steps • Agriculture production data analysis, continued • Typology of farming households • Utilizing existing climate change models to identify effects on crop yields and water availability • Identification of suitable CSA techniques based on typology • Cost-benefit analysis of recommended CSA strategies • Expanding partnerships
- 13. Thank you
Editor's Notes
- A concept presented by the FAO in 2010, which addresses both food security challenges and climate change jointly So this is not entirely new concept .In other words, it is A set of practices for Sustainable agricultural development that takes into consideration CC risks and mitigation. But it is context specific. What is regarded as CSA is one country and region may not be the case for another. Whether or not a particular practice or production system is climate smart depends upon the particular local climatic, biophysical, socio-economic and development context, which determines how far a particular practice or system can deliver on productivity increase, resilience and mitigation benefits. So, ex, is ag intensification CS if we take the case of Egypt? (Egypt is already usually the example given in this region for already having achieved a high level of intensification, so while there are gains to focus on making this already present intensification more sustainable, intensification may be not be the suitable focus for CSA here– because then we are crossing the thin line of sustainable intensification and resulting in resource degradation)
- The first two pillars are straight forward and not entirely new on their own. However, for CSA reduction of emissions is just a co-benefit: increasing sustainable productivity requires a more efficient use of inputs and therefore a likely reduction of emission intensity (emissions per unit of output) – but that may not mean reduction of overall emissions of the farm. Also, this pillar will change in weigh on a global level depending on the country and it’s level of income (for a country like Egypt, there would be higher emphasis on sustainable use of resources, and less on GHG emissions) Also, The contribution of thinking in terms of CSA is that it is a systems framework, so we should think about it as broader than just the farm level, rather it spans the whole value chain, to the landscape level.
- General Circulation Models I’d like to spend a moment here to recap where this talk fits in in terms of our seminar. We have seen some of the General Circulation Models (GCMs) and climate change downscaling models to see effects on Egypt in general, and we also have crop models that show the CC effects on different crop yields and production, etc. These models are used to do several impact analysis research. Using CGE modeling we get the economy wide impact as explained by Perry, we have optimization models to explain the sectoral level effects, and we have household models to see the impact on the subnational level and on the farm level, especially the socioeconomic impact…and this area in red is where this ppt and upcoming research will contribute. These will help us identify suitable farm level CSA techniques and practices that would contribute to defining the suitable overall CSA strategy for Egypt.
- As CSA is context specific - for Egypt, climate smart agriculture techniques would be those that make sense to adopt in an arid region (so for example, rain harvesting has limited potential here except for very few regions). (This was touched upon by the other presenters so I will not dwell on it, but) Egypt is also characterized as we know by water scarcity and this might be exacerbated by climate change. We also expect temperature rise, sea level rise, and rainfall changes. And we already have issues with soil salinity in some areas. So these would be the things we need to look to tackle using suitable CSA techniques. ‘climate smart’ strategies and technologies will have an important role to play in helping producers to adapt to changing weather patterns and adopt more sustainable farming methods that protect fragile natural resources. The good news is we are not starting from scratch. Some work has already been done in Egypt to identify and recommend climate smart agriculture techniques suitable for the country, including adaptive crop varieties, salt tolerant, drought tolerant and water saving wheat and rice varieties for example have been tested and widely adopted. Also there are recommendations for sustainable intensification, conservation ag (or no till agriculture), land leveling, and utilizing technologies to develop early warning systems to notify farmers of weather conditions and advice, etc.
- So what is it that we plan to do? We plan to take it some steps further, and focus on rigorously analyzing potentially adaptive and climate smart strategies for different regions and different farming groups within Egypt, subnational level and household level analysis. I’d like to share with you briefly our research roadmap.
- We have three main research questions. The first question is related to understanding the effects of climate change on yields, water availability, farm incomes and rural poverty. (we already heard good insight on the effect of climate change on yields and water from the previous presentations, and we plan to build upon such available results from climate change models to inform our research). So doing an assessment and mapping of what the patterns of agriculture production are and focus on analyzing the effects on different farm groups and governorates. So first we need to take stock of the agricultural scene as it is. S0 now we are doing efficiency and productivity analysis for the agricultural sector in Egypt. The analysis focused on economic and technical efficiency of agricultural production and in particular on the efficiency and sustainability of the use of water and land resources. Given that every technology, practice, or input developed to enhance sustainable agriculture in Egypt results in a broad and complex range of impacts, exploring the heterogeneity of these impacts can help refine research investment priorities and related policies, for different groups. This is why we are working on identifying a farming typology for Egypt, and this analysis will help evaluate what works and for whom to give more specific recommendations for resource management practices, policies, investments, and regulations might enhance uptake and adoption of various CSA methods.
- We have been collecting data to create a holistic disaggregated database of agriculture production in Egypt, to analyze growth, productivity and efficiency of the sector. We are using national data on the governorate level of agricultural output per crop., and also governorate level data on input use per crop, for example fertilizer, seed, cost of labor, land leveling, harvesting, etc. In addition, we are using the agriculture module from the ELMPS survey for household level data on farming households’ assets (like land, ag machinery and livestock) as well as household agri production and income. We have started to look at the data and there are different very valuable dataset, but they are not easily accessible and not always consistent so that is a challenge.
- Later on, we will turn our focus to identifying suitable CSA techniques, technologies and policies to mitigate impacts of climate change on the different farming groups. Usually, traditional typologies in literature on Egyptian agriculture differentiates between small and large farmers , or subsistence farmers vs commercial farms. We would like to take it a step further and do rigorous quantitative analysis involving more specific farmer typologies in order to end up with specific and practical recommendations for each group. So these would include differentiating farmers by the type of crops they grow, by farm size, but also by income diversity (for example, our recent IFPRI research showed that only around 25-30% of households depend only on ag, and as we can see from the figure, these households are more concentrated in upper Egypt and rely fully on ag, so they will be more harshly impacted by cc.
- From our initial looks at the data, we can see that farmer focused on growing certain crops will be affected differently with changes in water availability. We can see that fruits, vegetables, wheat and cotton growers may be better off with less water than farmers focused on growing crops with very high use of water like rice and sugar cane.
- As we mentioned, Egypt already has success stories in adopting ag. intensification, crop genetic improvements (ex. raised bed wheat sowing, heat resistant rice – early harvesting for water saving, etc.) which shows also that farmers are willing to take recommendations and try new techniques. So the question here is why we do not see the trend picking up by enough farmers– in other words what hinders small farmers from adopting climate smart techniques in agriculture? So our 3rd RQ is What are the expected costs and returns to alternative climate smart investments? Cost benefit analysis of the uptake of the different CSA techniques is under researched. The transition to CSA is afflicted by barriers that we know too well: risk, uncertainty, imperfect markets, up-front investment costs, limited access to information, physical conditions such as soil fertility and access to water, etc. But this kind of thing is not quantified in Egypt yet. These will help find the enabling policies for the uptake of such practices successfully.