Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
13.3 ADAPTATION AND COPING
Globalization, changes in land use, including land grabs, changes in political regimes,
and increasing inequality in wealth and income, compound climate change. Predict-
ability, never high, becomes even lower. Yet agriculturalists persist, often doing the
same thing they have always done because they are not in a position to consider alter-
natives. There are two responses to climate change: coping and adaptation. Coping
tends to mine the soil of carbon, while adaptation has the possibility of renewing it.
13.3.1 C
opiNg
Coping approaches impose agricultural systems adapted to one context on a totally
different context. Coping approaches clear land for industrial input crops: palm oil,
soybeans, and corn, among others. Land grabs can be seen as a way of responding
to declining soil quality and water availability in one area to capture that soil and
water, often through crop production and export (Woodhouse 2012). Coping utilizes
immediate market responses over long-term ecological responses. These coping
approaches disadvantage smallholders, biodiversity, and soil quality.
Coping is generally individual and reactionary and does not involve planning,
sometimes leading to actions that can exacerbate community vulnerability to climate
change. That is called “erosive coping” (Van der Geest and Dietz 2004; Warner et
al. 2012). Warner and colleagues illustrate this in the Budalangi Division in Kenya,
where coping in response to a devastating flood caused temporary relocation, which
took children out of schools, resulting in the loss of social capital. Households sold
their traction animals to buy food, reducing the amount of land they could farm in
subsequent years.
13.3.2 a
daptatioN
Communities and households that adapt see change as constant. They build on internal
capitals first to change farming systems and diversify their livelihood strategies. They
are mindful of the changes and what is happening with their soil, often by taste or smell
or feel. And they seek alliances with market, state, and civil society actors to constantly
innovate. Warner et al. (2013) see national governments and national market institutions
joining forces to provide resilience-producing insurance schemes to share risk, particu-
larly if they provide
ex ante
mechanisms to reduce vulnerability and prevent risk.
Communities and households that cope view extreme events and warmer weather
as temporary. They look to infrastructure and technological solutions (built capital).
They keep doing what they have been doing, only more so—use more pesticides,
cultivate the land more often, and put marginal land into cash crops. Coping is often
supported by state policies that subsidize inputs and offer a high level of crop insur-
ance for a limited number of crops planted by certain times. Even those “copers”
who acknowledge that climate change is occurring are convinced that technology
will solve the problem—better engineered seeds, better “chemistry” to put on the
crop, more extensive use of groundwater for irrigation. Sociologists refer to this as
ecological modernization
(Mol 2001; Horlings and Marsden 2011)
.
