South Asian Regional Workshop On Regional Land Cover Changes And Sustainable Agriculture In South Asia

Consortium for Scaling-up Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia (C-SUCSeS) is a four-year joint initiative between South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Agriculture Center (SAC), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the SAARC Development Fund (SDF). The program aims to foster partnership and cooperation between SAARC, National Agricultural Research and Extension Systems (NARES), IFPRI, and SAARC governments on the Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) agenda. The project also intends to support agricultural researchers’ to generate and facilitate delivery of technological solutions to smallholder and women farmers, with a specific priority on the intensification and resilience of smallholder agriculture, contributing, inter alia, to increasing water management efficiency, promote innovative, pro-poor approaches and technologies with demonstrated scaling-up potential, strengthen partners’ institutional and policy capacities, enhance policy engagement, and generate and share knowledge.

This report is FAO's latest assessment of the long-term outlook for the world's food supplies, nutrition and agriculture. It presents the projections and the main messages. The projections cover supply and demand for the major agricultural commodities and sectors, including fisheries and forestry. This analysis forms the basis for a more detailed examination of other factors, such as nutrition and undernourishment, and the implications for international trade. The report also investigates the implications of future supply and demand for the natural resource base and discusses how technology can contribute to more sustainable development. One of the report's main findings is that, if no corrective action is taken, the target set by the World Food Summit in 1996 (that of halving the number of undernourished people by 2015) is not going to be met. Nothing short of a massive effort at improving the overall development performance will free the developing world of its most pressing food insecurity problems. The progress made towards this target depends on many factors, not least of which are political will and the mobilization of additional resources. Past experience underlines the crucial role of agriculture in the development process, particularly where the majority of the population still depends on this sector for employment and income.

This book sheds new light on the remote sensing of agriculture in South/Southeast Asian (S/SEA) countries. S/SEA countries are growing rapidly in terms of population, industrialization, and urbanization. One of the critical challenges in the region is food security. In S/SEA, although total food production and productivity have increased in previous decades, in recent years, the growth rate of food production has slowed down, mostly due to land use change, market forces and policy interventions. Further, the weather and climate systems in the region driven primarily by monsoon variability are resulting in droughts or flooding, impacting agricultural production. Therefore, monitoring crops, including agricultural land cover changes at regular intervals, is essential to predict and prepare for disruptions in the food supply in the S/SEA countries. The current book captures the latest research on the remote sensing of agricultural land cover/ land use changes, including mapping and monitoring crops, crop yields, biophysical parameter retrievals, multi-source data fusion for agricultural applications, and chapters on decision making and early warning systems for food security. The authors of this book are international experts in the field, and their contributions highlight the use of remote sensing and geospatial technologies for agricultural research and applications in South/Southeast Asia.

Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Global environmental change occupies a central niche in the pantheon of modern sciences. There is an urgent need to know and understand the way in which global biogeochemical cycles have changed over different time scales in the past and are likely to do so in the future. Equally important, it is necessary to determine the extent to which natural variability and that induce by anthropogenic activities are bringing about change. A number of international co-operative scientific programmes ad dress these issues. Chief among them are the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the Inter national Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) for global change. This book is one of a series of IGBP syntheses drawing together findings in global environmental change over the past decade or so. One focus of IGBP activities is the System for Analysis, Research and Training (START). Co-sponsored by the WCRP and IHDP, START establishes regional research networks for global change science in developing countries, stimulates and carries out global change research in developing regions of the world, and builds capacity to undertake such research at personal, institutional and regional levels. Several regional global change networks have been established, and much regional research has been accomplished in the last five years or so. In this book, work relating to four of the older START regions, Southern Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, will be used as case studies to illustrate regional-global linkages in Earth System Science.

Agricultural development in South Asia (a comparative study in the green revolution experiences) is a pioneer work of its own kind and unique in nature. Its salient features are: It is a comprehensive and self-contained study covering an analysis of determinants of agriculture and agricultural attributes -- so, a cause-effect analysis. Agricultural development regions and agro-ecological regions have been delineated, and specific recommendations have been made for redressing the regionalimbalances in levels of agricultural development in the South Asian countries--so a planning-oriented study. The study is based on field truthing, personal communications, district-by-district data etc. The data have been presented in maps enlightening patterns and dynamics of agricultural inputs and outputs, and the cartographic work is of high quality. So far, no such in-depth study has been conducted, covering only the primary activity of the sub-continent and highlighting the green evolution experiences--so, a study related to the then and now as regards agricultural inputs and outputs. It will be a study of great relevance to the SAARC nations for planning purposes and making master plans for reducing regional inequalities in agricultural performance levels. Since this work is a pioneer attempt and is based on the field work and district-by district data covering the green revolution period (1967-68 to 1987-88), it is a work of its own kind and unique in nature. The greatest inequality in the use of agricultural inputs within the borders of South Asia is responsible for agricultural development differences. These range from the poverty in densely populated Bangladesh to agriculturally high-speed Punjab-Haryana region in Northwestern India. Moreover, South Asia includes the cold empties of the high Himalayan ranges where agricultural development has a special meaning. The agricultural face of South Asia has changed at a different rate because the diffusion of green revolution technology was not a universal scale. As a consequence, four levels of agricultural development were observed, such as: Very high level development with high speed change; High/medium level development with high/medium speed change; Low level development with low speed change, and Very low level development with very low speed change. Therefore, it is no longer desirable to write only a static geography of agricultural development of South Asia, and it is also equally important, above, all to examine, explain, identify and understand the recognisable ceaseless patterns of change in agricultural development levels.

The Regional Action Plan for strengthening family farming in South Asia has been elaborated through a participatory and multi-stakeholder approach in the framework of the UN Decade of Family Farming and in close collaboration with SAARC Agriculture Center, the Asia Farmer Association for Sustainable Rural Development and the International Cooperative Alliance – Asia Pacific. Consultations with farmers’ organizations, cooperatives and other relevant stakeholders at country level first helped identifying and prioritizing key interventions for the region along the seven pillars of the Global Action Plan. These initial inputs then contributed to the overall drafting of the contextualized pillars led by recognized experts from the region. The draft pillars were presented during a first regional virtual consultation on UN Decade of Family Farming: Formulating Strategies and Action Plan to Strengthen Smallholder Family Farmers in South Asia held on the 5–6 November 2020. A follow up regional consultation meeting on review and finalization of the Regional Action Plan for strengthening family farming in South Asia was then organized on 29 July 2021. The objective was to present, discuss and validate the draft Regional Action Plan for strengthening family farming in South Asia. This Regional Action Plan aims at facilitating and accelerating the process of developing national action plans through inclusive multi-stakeholder processes, not only putting family farmers at the centre but recognizing them as critical partners.