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Gender and Climate Adaptation Policy

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Women Farmers Garner Knowledge, Pool Agriculture Tools to Adapt to Climate Change

Practice

Locally available information and access to everyday agricultural tools are critical in helping small and marginal men and women farmers adapt to increasing vagaries of climate change in the agriculture fields.

In the flood plains of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG), a local NGO, has taken just such a step by setting up Village Resource Centres (VRCs) with a special focus on women farmers who undertake 60-80% of the agricultural work (GEAG Survey, 2006). This is an innovative and cost effective way to disseminate information on weather parameters and to provide easy and cheap access to climate-resilient varieties of seeds, bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides. The Centres also pool agricultural equipments like irrigation pipe, winnowing fan and spray machine for members to use.

The Centres run on a problem-solving mode and can easily be supported by government programmes like Krishi Vigyan Kendras, ATMA or National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM). Agriculture Universities can collaborate with these Centres and also use them for farm-to-lab research work. The Centres can be best implemented through Gram Panchayat Agriculture Committees within the PRIs’ Village Development Plans, ideally in collaboration with local NGOs; the latter to help mobilize men and women farmers, build their capacities and enable village youth/women’s groups to manage the Centres as a rural enterprise. GEAG’s VRCs act as an alternate agricultural extension system for the farmers, especially women farmers who are hardly served by the extension system. Government departments like agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries, health, education, etc can use such a VRC to disseminate their schemes and crop demonstrations. VRCs are a good convergence strategy for agriculture development and adaptation.

VRCs have proven to be very effective in climate change adaptation and in coping with disasters like the recurring floods and agricultural droughts. Farmers have been able to adopt alternative agricultural practices and cropping systems to ensure their food security. These VRCs are completely owned by the community and communities feel very confident in sustaining its activities even after GEAG withdraws its support. Thus, where a government enterprise actively shares managerial and decision-making power with community members/groups, such VRCs will survive and serve their purpose.  

Farmer Field Schools (FFS), housed at VRCs, are another way of transferring knowledge and skills to farmers. These ‘schools’ are run once a month at every VRC and bring together information and resource persons from many different agriculture departments and also promote horizontal, or ‘farmer-to-farmer’ training from ‘master trainers.’ Some of the VRCs have women master trainers and local male farmers are now accepting women master trainers as their resource persons to learn climate-resilient sustainable and low input agriculture. Presence of master trainers within a village ensures their all-time availability and continuous interaction with the farming community. This leads to better adoption of sustainable agriculture practices. People from nearby villages too draw on these benefits.

Local presence of VRCs is particularly valuable for women farmers given their extensive work and care responsibilities and restricted mobility, VRCs, also initiated by other NGOs in India, have helped recognize the critical role that women farmers play in adapting agriculture to climate vagaries and helped them save labour and time in several agricultural tasks. VRCs have brought them economic benefit, take up decision-making roles and assume leadership. A government scheme on VRCs with a vision to empower women farmers will be a right step towards climate change adaptation.