As world grows hotter, farmers race to innovate

In Guatemala, farmers are setting up “living fences” around fields, creating a buffer of roots to protect their soil during increasingly strong rainy seasons.

In Jordan, local Bedouin communities and authorities are pioneering resilient desert agriculture in a region that has been hit by longer and more intense heat waves.

And in Burkina Faso, William Kwende has been working to revolutionize shea butter production – by substituting renewable energy for traditional wood-burning methods that result in deforestation.

He has introduced an approach with 100% renewable energy, self-sustaining biomass burners, and a closed water system, which is curbing emissions while also reducing crop losses. 

At a time of global strain on food production, including an emerging famine in parts of East Africa, his story symbolizes the potential for using innovation to adapt to a changing climate. The business Mr. Kwende co-founded, called Serious Shea, is designed to promote reforestation and to secure fairer wages and independence for the local women at the heart of the process. 

A key part of the innovation: Serious Shea’s eco-processing centers transform shea tree biomass into natural biofertilizer and biochar, enriching soils that are at risk of desertification and reducing reliance on expensive imported chemical fertilizers. 

“People talk about water and food imports, but when you talk about food crises and adaptation, fertilizer is at the heart of it,” Mr. Kwende tells the Monitor on the sidelines of COP27, this year’s global climate summit, at Sharm el-Sheikh. “When it comes to reducing waste, cost, and carbon, fertilizer is key to this transition.”

Across the globe, innovative ideas like that are greatly needed. Extreme weather events are affecting the vital sector of food production – with the shifts especially hard for Indigenous communities and small-scale farmers. In Peru, rising temperatures have upended the livelihoods of alpaca farmers. In Pakistan, massive floods have sidelined several million acres from crop production. In Somalia and Kenya alone, drought threatens to push millions into food-poverty and starvation. 

The challenges have been exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, affecting global energy costs and supplies of grain, flour, and fertilizer.

All this has made saving and transforming the way the world feeds itself a pressing issue. With its own farmers suffering losses amid intense heat waves and drop in Nile waters, atop the food-security crisis in the Horn of Africa, Egypt has placed agriculture front and center to an unprecedented degree at the current “conference of parties,” or COP.

“All of these converging crises are making people realize that food is something that we absolutely need to pay attention to in a climate context in the next few years and decades if we want to reach a 1.5 degree [C] future, create a sustainable future, ensure food security, livelihoods and promote biodiversity,” says Chantal Wei-Ying Clément, deputy director of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). 

“Food systems are so cross-cutting that if you are not dealing with food systems, you are missing a huge piece of the puzzle.”

Seeking water, from Mexican orchards to the Andes

Agriculture experts say some of the solutions will involve mass-produced technologies such as battery-operated farm equipment. But it will also involve the rise and transfer of hundreds of local, homegrown solutions emerging across the world, many of which advocates say can cut carbon, improve resilience, and be replicated elsewhere. 

In Mexico, where last summer eight of 32 states experienced moderate to extreme drought and where half of all municipalities in the country face water shortages, some farmers turn 2-liter soda bottles upside down over saplings to capture morning dew or dig holes and line them with organic materials like leaves, to retain rainfall around young trees.

To the south in Peru, Alina Surquislla’s family has never seen anything like the current effects of rising temperatures in their three generations of alpaca herding. 

“There’s no water; the grass is turning yellow and disappearing for lack of rain,” says Ms. Surquislla. Alpacas are dying out at worrying rates. Speaking over a Wi-Fi satellite connection while walking at nearly 16,000 feet above sea level in the Apurimac region, she says, “More and more the feeling is that there is nowhere to escape.”

For now, she says the answer for herders is to go to higher and higher elevations in search of water and grazing.

New experiments, old traditions

Water is also scarce in Jordan. There, local Bedouin communities and authorities are scaling up pioneering desert agriculture in Al Mudawara, a border region near Saudi Arabia that has been hit by longer and more intense heat waves in the past few years. 

Since 2019, under a directive by Jordan’s King Abdullah, each family in the area has been tending to 6-acre plots of yellow corn and green onions, watered from an underground aquifer. The crops have proved resilient to more frequent 120 degree F temperatures, sprouting up into green waves amid reddish desert sands that have not been utilized for agriculture in modern history. 

Now over 4,000 acres of corn stalks stand 3 feet high and onions sprout in Al Mudawara. These provide alternative sources of income and living for Bedouin families, many of whom have been forced to abandon traditional camel shepherding due to the mounting costs of imported animal feed. 

“It has been a successful project. This is encouraging a lot of young people to go into agriculture,” says Abu Fahed al Huweiti, former director of the Al Mudawara Agricultural Cooperative that has steered the project. “It has given a new hope for people here.”

Other solutions date back centuries. 

In Tunisia, amid the lush fig and olive groves of Djebba, clinging to the tops of the Gorraa mountain, farmers continue a centuries-old terraced farming that has helped them cope with massive heat waves and drought that has hit much of Tunisia. 

A series of cement-lined canals crisscross down the hill through the terraced farms, carrying water from natural springs fed by winter’s snow to groves of figs, pomegranates, quince, and olives on a rotating basis of collective water-sharing. 

This ingenious method of traditional Berber farming provides timed irrigation of entire land plots, allowing local farmers to grow not only trees but also herbs and diverse flora and fauna, feeding livestock and chickens – all from the same measured water delivery. 

It is this biodiversity and careful water management that has made Djebba the most resilient of Tunisia’s farming regions.

“We in Djebba keep using the same old techniques because it has shown success. It is an inherited model of coexistence and represents the ideal use of available water resources,” says Fawzi Djebbi, Djebba farmer, activist, and head of the annual Djebba Fig Festival. 

“Here we use the water as a collective resource from the mountains. This water belongs to all of us.” 

One key need: transferring best practices

Knowledge- and expertise-sharing has also been critical to speeding up farmers’ adaptation to the pummeling effects of severe weather events. 

The CCDA, an Indigenous and small farmers movement for land rights and rural development in Guatemala, is working with many of their 1,300 affiliated communities around new techniques to help farmers adapt. This year’s rainy season has been one of the longest and heaviest this century, for example.

One technique is planting trees and plants with deep roots around crop plots. The plants are a buffer against erosion, provide shade during the hot and dry season, and sometimes include edible plants as well.

“Setting up living fences helps the conservation of the soil, among other things, for people to keep producing,” says CCDA coordinator Marcelo Subac. “The farmers we accompany and others who have … implemented changes see the difference.” 

Global organizations are seeking to spread helpful practices and information.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been teaming up with Vodafone to get early warning systems and messages to rural farmers across Africa to better prepare for projected climate trends and to provide advice on mitigation measures. 

Other information-sharing projects include smartphone apps Mufeed and Muzaraa, which alert farmers in Egypt and Jordan, respectively, on more modern agricultural practices, weather warnings, and tips to become more environmentally sustainable. 

At COP27, calls for action

The importance of farm adaptations worldwide is clear enough on the basis of food security alone. It is also a climate action imperative. Agriculture is responsible for about 20% of greenhouse gases, and currently only 3% of climate financing for adaptation goes to agriculture. 

This year’s climate summit included the first designated food and agriculture day in the 27-year history of the conference – an event Saturday where Mr. Kwende from Burkina Faso participated. 

Behind the scenes, Egypt’s veteran diplomats have been pushing for increased climate financing to the adaptation of agriculture in developing countries to make them more resilient and sustainable.

In its key policy as chairing the presidency of COP27, Egypt announced last week the Sharm El Sheikh Adaptation Agenda, an ambitious plan to scale up climate resilient agriculture that increases yields by 17% and reduces farm greenhouse gas emissions by 21% without increasing the expansion of agricultural lands globally by 2030.

It also aims to halve food production loss and per capita waste, boost alternative proteins to equal 15% of the global meat and seafood market, and extend smart early warning systems to reach 3 billion people.

On Saturday, Egypt and the FAO announced the Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST) initiative to develop sustainable farming and food production by improving access to finance, knowledge-sharing, and policy support with U.N. agencies acting as facilitators between developing countries and international finance institutions and donors.

“Words are no longer enough”

One glaring shortfall remains amid the rising focus on local solutions and knowledge-sharing: funds.  

The Sharm El Sheikh Adaptation plan requires an estimated $140 billion to $300 billion in combined public and private financing per year.  

However, the international community has yet to live up to the $100 billion in global climate financing commitment agreed to in the 2015 Paris accords, a number widely recognized as a tiny fraction of what is now needed to help communities face and adapt to the current effects of climate change. 

Some lending bodies, such as the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO, have already started to back local farming innovations and climate-resilient and climate-sustainable farming in the developing world. 

However, Egyptian and other African negotiators warn that some aspects of adaptive agriculture – such as expanding renewable energy or improving water infrastructure – are not profitable ventures on their own and will not attract investors or lenders looking for a return. 

Meanwhile, the major presence of big agriculture and large food corporations at COP27 – speaking at panel events and hobnobbing with government ministers – is raising fears among environmental experts that the discussion over adaptive agriculture is being steered toward expensive high-tech innovation that only modestly cuts carbon and is monopolized by big ag rather than true agroecology and local, sustainable, and enduring solutions. 

One point of broad agreement: With famine, drought, and geopolitics colliding, world governments and finance institutions must act fast. 

“We are heading to crop failure in many parts of the world in the next six months,” warns Mr. Kwende of Serious Shea. “Real change will be measured by specific indicators. Commitments and words are no longer enough without action.”

Taylor Luck reported from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt; and Al Mudawara, Jordan. Whitney Eulich reported from Mexico City; Ahmed Ellali from Djebba, Tunisia; and Sandra Cuffe from Guatemala City.