Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cides and nitrogen fertilizers), transport, and tillage and irrigation systems, could
produce declines in agricultural productivity, so exacerbating the pressures to ex-
pand the area of cultivated land at lower levels of productivity. Climate hange will
impact agriculture in many ways, some positive and some negative. The already sig-
niicant hallenge of producing more food using fewer inputs is exacerbated by the
need for agriculture to adapt to climate hange, while also reducing greenhouse gas
emissions arising from agriculture in order to mitigate climate hange (Smith and
Olesen, 2010). Resilience to climate hange will need to be a key property of sustain-
able agricultural systems in the coming decades, particularly in those regions pro-
jected to experience severe ecological shits due to a hanging climate.
Social capital and gender
Social capital describes the importance of social relationships in cultural and eco-
nomic life and includes suh concepts as the trust and solidarity that exist between
people who work in groups and networks, and the use of reciprocity and exhange to
build relationships in order to ahieve collective and mutually beneicial outcomes.
Social capital is seen as an important pre-requisite to the adoption of sustainable
behaviours and tehnologies over large areas, as well as a precondition for the sus-
tainable management of certain resources and tehnologies. Farmer participation in
tehnology development and participatory extension approahes have emerged as a
response to suh new thinking; farmer involvement enables novel tehnologies and
practices to be learned directly and then adapted to particular agro-ecological, social
and economic circumstances (Godfrey
et al.
, 2010).
Changing agricultural researh and development from the current bias toward
male farmers to gender-equitability is not merely an issue of political correctness or
ideology, it is a mater of development efectiveness that can beneit all of society.
Creating gender-equitable agricultural researh and development systems is a trans-
formative intervention, leading to opportunities, commodities, relationships and ser-
vices that ultimately hange the way people do things. By understanding both the
constraints and opportunities for women in agriculture, it will be possible to develop
new ways to address their needs and enhance their contributions in order to improve
agricultural productivity, food security, and poverty reduction (Meinzen-Dik
et al.
,
2010).
