Nokta
RESPONSES to the climate change battle will require a repositioning of the global agriculture sector, significant investments in the sector and a change in the way in which agriculture is done, Mr. Shyam Nokta, Adviser to the President and Chairman of the National Climate Committee, said yesterday.

In an address at the opening of the annual research conference of the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI), he noted that while agriculture is vulnerable to climate change, the sector also significantly contributes to climate change and the challenges it poses.

It is clear that measures are needed to adapt to climate change, increase resilience and ability to ensure that the sector is sustained; but it must also employ new technology and approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he noted as the two-day conference got underway at the Guyana School of Agriculture at Mon Repos on the East Coast Demerara.

The current and future scenarios present an important opportunity for expansion and diversification so that as an economic sector, agriculture can be positioned to meet the demands of climate change, Nokta said.

Pointing out that adaptation is a clear challenge for NARI and other agencies in agriculture, he said they are starting to prepare the sector for these changes, with some practical innovations being put into place.

Mitigation is also a focus and one of the more strategic initiatives is the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) which is geared to achieving these objectives without undermining food security, rural development and livelihoods, Nokta said.

He stated that the LCDS sets out an approach to a low deforestation, low carbon, climate-resilient economy by which, with the right low deforestation economic incentives, Guyana could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions of about 1.5 gigatons by 2020 that would have been otherwise produced by pursuing an economically rational development path.

He said that while much of the focus has been on forests and the payments Guyana could receive from avoided deforestation, the agriculture sector is prominent in the LCDS and resources from forest payments can be used to further enhance the current efforts to diversify agriculture as well as for value added.

A priority in the LCDS is to look at investments in infrastructure and access to drainage and irrigation which would open up substantial unused arable land for agriculture development, including the intermediate savannahs, the Rupununi Savannahs and the Canje Basin, he said.

Nokta said this would reduce the pressure for forest clearing and improve food production, allow Guyana to attract large-scale investments and, importantly, bring on board the kind of cutting edge technology needed for expansion in agriculture.

He noted that in the LCDS, four of six priority low carbon investments fall within agriculture – fruits and vegetables, aquaculture, sustainable forestry and wood processing and bio-ethanol.

Adaptation to climate change is also a critical area in the strategy and this will, among other factors, seek to reduce the risks of the sector through investments in sea and river defence, drainage and irrigation systems, strengthening the building code, developing early warning systems for emergency response, making risk insurance available and developing and implementing flood-resistant crops, he added.

According to Nokta, the LCDS provides not only a strategic approach on how the agriculture sector evolves, but importantly, to examine how Guyana can use the resources from forest payments to diversify and catalyse some of the priority sub-sectors where it has a competitive advantage.

He argued that the long-term future of the sector will rely on designing new ways to adapt and changing and adjusting agricultural practices that contribute to climate change within the context of not undermining food security, rural development and livelihoods.

Noting that this is a challenge that the world will also face, he said he believes that with the LCDS, the Jagdeo Initiative on Climate Change and through the leadership, direction and initiatives by the Agriculture Ministry, Guyana could provide a working model as a demonstration for the world to see.