April 3, 2019
Othman Al-Sheikh, Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation, Egypt
This blog has been translated from Arabic to English. Here is a link to the original blog in Arabic.
Climate change has become a matter of major concern at various levels in Egypt. Attention is now being paid to a range of scenarios associated with the rising levels of the Mediterranean Sea and the correlation between the sea-level-rise and the potential inundation of some coastal areas across the Delta of Egypt, as well as the prospective impact on agricultural productivity in quantitative and qualitative terms.
Several studies[1] have suggested that climate change is an inevitable outcome of anthropogenic activities, which have disrupted the proportions of gases in the atmosphere. According to official statistics[2], Egypt accounts for 0.6% of the total greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate change is not an issue for debate in scientific forums only. Rather, it is a matter of concern for every Egyptian, owing to the correlation between weather variations on one hand and productivity of farmland on the other hand, which is in turn the corner stone of food security at the household level.
Authoritative reports[3] have shown that 17% of Egyptians are vulnerable to low levels of food security, with the majority concentrated in Upper Egypt (Figure 1). This proportion of population is likely to increase against a backdrop of intensifying weather volatilities.
Consequently, the Executive Agency for Comprehensive Development Projects at the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation has launched a number of workable models of climate resilient villages in Upper Egypt, in conjunction with the World Food Programme (WFP). The project is being carried out under the title ‘Building Resilient Food Security Systems in Upper Egypt’.
The purpose of the Project is to provide access to mechanisms of resilience and adaptation to climate variability across various sectors of agricultural production, in tandem with reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.
Participatory Approach
Community mobilization around the issue of climate change adaptation and mitigation plays a significant role in urging community members to embrace the concepts and rationale of the project. Consequently, several awareness activities have been carried out, including mobile village theatre, using comic, but realistic formats. The theatrical performances served as an opportunity to raise the awareness of farmers of mechanisms for mitigating the effects of weather variations on agricultural productivity. The impact of such activities was clearly evidenced in the high numbers of farmers who are willing to carry out climate change adaptation interventions.
Field-based Training is Better than Theoretical Training
Extension fields have provided a range of more climate-resilient varieties of wheat, in addition to practices of agricultural terracing and scheduling of irrigation and fertilization with guidance from competent specialists at the Field Crops Research Institute. As an outcome of this intervention, productivity per feddan has increased by between 20 and 30 percent. This is in addition to higher resilience to successive heat shocks that occurred in first semester of 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016, where the average temperatures have risen by five to seven degrees relative to the usual rates at such times.[4]
Restoration of a Collaborative Spirit
Fragmented agricultural holdings are common throughout Egypt in general and in Upper Egypt in particular. This has resulted in lower productivity due to lack of access to high quality inputs for production or agricultural mechanisation necessary for improving land properties. This is compounded with the loss of approximately 10% of land area owing to border areas that are left fallow.[5] Therefore, the project has sought to carry out all of the activities mentioned above under the ‘Consolidation of Fragmented Agricultural Holdings’ initiative.
This initiative is mainly focused on encouraging farmers to remove the boundaries separating their land holdings, with each holder retaining their property boundaries, as delineated with iron signs. In that sense, all farming activities are undertaken collaboratively within larger farming groups, with each group combining an average of 70 farmers, while individual farmers are responsible for managing their farmland until the harvest season. Consolidation of nearly 2,000 feddans has been successfully completed over the past three years. Follow-up surveys and impact assessments have indicated that disengagement from the idea of land consolidation ranges between 20 and 30 percent.
Early Warning System
The early warning systems and alerts on unusual weather variations are among the most significant ways of mitigating the consequences of climate volatility. Bearing this in mind, the project has launched an early climate alert system, which is a simple web-based application that is made available and accessible to all farmers.
Irrigation Water Supply Modalities
The irrigation water is one of the most important inputs of agricultural production. Several studies indicate that increasing demand for irrigation water is associated with the exceptional heat waves that affect the plantation of crops.[6]
Income Diversification
Given the limited land areas cultivated in Upper Egypt, a significant proportion of Upper Egypt’s villagers do not have their own farmland (Figure 2). In that sense, the project targeted this group of population through credit-in-kind activities with focus on goats and ducks. Thus far, one thousand male and female borrowers have benefited from these activities, with efforts being currently underway for scaling up.
Shifting Towards More Productive and Climate Change Resilient Rural Communities
The Egyptian government, in collaboration with several national and international agencies, seeks to scale up and expand successful models of climate resilient communities in a total of 500 villages throughout Egypt.
[1] Smith, Joel B., et al. "Assessing dangerous climate change through an update of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “reasons for concern”." Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences 106.11 (2009): 4133-4137. [2] "Climate Analysis Indicators Tool (CAIT) Version 2.0. (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 2014)". World Resources Institute. Retrieved 2017-06-12. [3] Food Security And Nutritional Status In Egypt Worsening Amidst Economic Challenges, the government’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics & World Food Programme (WFP) (CAPMAS). [4] Hafez, Y. Y., and M. Almazroui. "Study of the relationship between African ITCZ variability and an extreme heat wave on Egypt in summer 2015." Arabian Journal of Geosciences 9.6 (2016): 476. [5] Dyer, Graham. Class, state and agricultural productivity in Egypt: study of the inverse relationship between farm size and land productivity. Routledge, 2014. [6] Harrison, Matthew, et al. "Adapting irrigated and dryland farming systems to climate change and extreme weather events: is simplification or intensification more effective?." 17th Australian Agronomy Conference 2015. 2015.
