What About Climate-Smart Agriculture?

Abstract

Climate-smart agriculture seeks to simultaneously address the three major challenges of food security, adaptation to climate change and climate change mitigation. The authors question the usefulness of this new concept, which FAO and other institutions have been championing since 2009. Its main value does not lie so much in its originality or theoretical relevance as in the fact that, since it has enjoyed a certain vogue on the international stage, it offers a locus for discussion of global public policies, taking in not just the food security and climate challenges, but also those of employment and biodiversity. There are a number of points—importance of family agriculture, role of professional agricultural organizations, relevance of agroecology, integration of biodiversity, funding arrangements, etc.—that still need to be discussed in order to enrich the climate-smart agriculture concept. The recently established international alliance for climate-smart agriculture may also present an opportunity to facilitate consideration of issues relating to agriculture in the broader sense in international climate negotiations. A concrete proposal for development of a mechanism to achieve ‘resilience and reduced emissions in rural areas’ is put forward at the end of the article. It could help support the ecological transition of family farming to climate-smart agriculture in pilot rural areas.