Politicians make the policy. But it’s often left to business to implement it. For this reason RioPlus Business is featuring submissions from the private sector across the globe in the lead up to Rio+20.
Today we look at how a public-private partnership between IAI and Paraguayan farmers aims to raise crop yields and improve community resilience to climatic events.
By Clyde W. Fraisse & Norman Breuer
2011-12 was a difficult season for Paraguayan farmers.
A La Niña event with its colder than normal sea surface temperature along the equator in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, brought drier weather to most of the country. Initial estimates of the resulting crop losses by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock indicate that about half the soybean crop has been lost, reducing this year production to about 4.6 million metric tons from last year’s 8.4 million metric tons.
It is well known that climate variability caused by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) risk to farmers of southeastern South America. However its mechanisms and effects were not well understood and not communicated with enough lead time to allow policy makers and farmers to implement adaptation strategies to reduce production risks.
Now this is changing thanks to a project funded by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) IAI that is developing a climate information and decision support system aimed at reducing the climate risks farmers face with each season’s planting.
Scientists in this project surveyed several Paraguayan farmer cooperatives on members’ knowledge of, and attitudes to seasonal climate variability, [...]
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