Let’s Adopt Climate Smart Agriculture To Sustain Economy – Prof. Owusu3 min read

Farmers across the country have been urged to adopt climate smart agricultural practices in order to increase the country’s food stock and help sustain the country’s economy.

Prof. Kwadwo Owusu, a senior lecturer at the Department of Geography and Resource Development, University of Ghana, who made the call, said Climate Change posed a serious threat to agriculture in Ghana largely due to traditional methods of farming especially by small holder farmers, indicating this could be mitigated through effective climate smart farming practices.

He said “Climate change is a serious threat to Agriculture in Ghana, this shouldn’t have been the case but it is because of the way we do agriculture, small holdings, low technology, low applications of input, even the forecast to guide farmers is not at the level where they should be.

“Our agriculture has to move into a zone where technology is applied else we cannot feed ourselves given what climate change is doing to agriculture and our desire to become self sufficient”.

According to him, only few farmers have resorted to using proper irrigation methods regardless of the climatic conditions in recent years.

He said applying old agriculture methods would not only affect farmers’ productivity but more especially the larger economy though “we have the capacity to be food sufficient as a country.”

“We cannot farm any longer the same way our fore fathers farm, we will have to innovate and bring strategies that can improve productivity, if its the rainfall and farmers can’t predict the rain, then they would have to augment the farming processes with rain” he added.

He stated that though a lot of things have been attributed to climate change, that could vary from time to time.

Prof. Owusu who is also the Director for Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Studies University of Ghana, further explained that climate change has been caused by a host of factors which are manifested as a result of the interaction of a lot of things such as surface characteristics, micro environmental factors and sea surface temperature, land characteristics, ocean temperature, planetary wind system and green house gases, among others.

These factors, he said, were not severe in the past and so made it easier for farmers to make predictions unlike today where farmers find it more difficult to make predictions especially, in situations where they use indigenous knowledge.

“It’s about time we move the discussion from the traditional method of farming just to take care of ourselves and family. Now, you farm to sell the produce to get money to fulfill some other purposes. It cannot be business as usual in the climate change discourse,” he noted.

He, therefore, advised farmers to be innovative and adopt strategies that would improve productivity, for instance by augmenting farming practices with other methods such as irrigation, among others.

Prof. Owusu, however, mentioned that though it is expected that farmers could innovate by using modern methods to increase productivity as climate change presented different scenarios and opportunities, small holder farmers could also do composting, as well as the biological control of weeds and pest.

Little things like mulching can be done to conserve the water in the soil so that it does not leave the soil quickly for more water to be added.

“They need to protect the soil to avoid evapo-transpiration, small dug outs to irrigate the fields could also be some of the tiny steps that can also be taken by the farmers”, he added.

This report is produced in fulfillment of the UNESCO and CIJ London Climate Change in News Media Project facilitated by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID).