0611-C4
OLADEJO OLANIYI OLAFARE 1
This presentation "Agricultural Education: An instrument for improving Agricultural operations and Environmental Sustainability" is a highly relevant paper in the field of Agriculture especially now that much attention has been paid to Agricultural education, it is the only means by which rural and urban farming operations can be practised without endangering the ecosystem.
The aim of the presentation is to identify and discuss the relevance of Agricultural education to the present day Agricultural practices / operations in relation to continuos sustenance of our livelihood without much hindrance to the supportive environment.
This paper examines some of the Agricultural techniques employed by the farmers which are not environmentally friendly but capable of boosting farm productions such techniques include the use of Agrochemical (Herbicides, insecticides fungicides), Mixed farming (raising both crops and animals on the same place of land), deforestation (Clearing and destruction of trees on a pieces of land for the purpose of Agriculture), flood irrigation.
The paper also looks into various ways by which development agents and policy makers are making combative efforts towards eradicating environmental degradation being caused through agricultural operations, such efforts include agricultural loans, provisions of the state of the art agricultural equipment, agricultural inputs, agricultural funds to the underdeveloped and the developing countries where these environmental problems tend to be there subject matters.
This paper critically analyses the local and alternative farming techniques that can be employed in farming operation which courses less or no degradation to the environment and its inhabitants such local techniques include the use of shifting cultivation, reforestation, planting of alley crops, mulching, uses of animal droppings and use of green manure, thus all these work to give the same result
This paper also discusses the way and manner in which politically powerful farmers and politically weak farmers in some part of the world engage in environmental conflicts, and this has given room for the politically stronger farmers to use their organized influence to escape accountability for the adverse effects being impacted on the environment at the expense of the non farmers.
The need for agricultural education and none vocational; agricultural for farming and for non-farm occupations requiring knowledge and skill in agriculture is increasing and becoming more apparent. When farming was the occupation of the majority population, much basic agricultural knowledge was common place or easy obtained. The agricultural knowledge and abilities necessary for the practical affairs of living, for effective citizenship, and for a vocational interest are no longer commonplace or easily obtained.
Agricultural courses usually are and should be the most meaningful and interesting courses in the public schools for many, and perhaps most, rural schools.
While agriculture is critical to the long-term solution of sustainable livelihood and food security in the humid tropics, it is only part of the story. To take pressure. Off land, nonagricultural sectors of rural economics must be strengthened in a anticipation to improving agricultural productivity. In short, what is called for is a portfolio of agricultural extractive, and nonagricultural activities that involve technological innovation designed for higher profitability for the farmer at lower cost to the environment and must be compatible with the contained resource position of the small farmer.
Research and technology alone will not drive agricultural growth. The integration between technology and policy is critical. The full and beneficial effects of agricultural research and technology change will materialize only if government polices are appropriate. Distortions in input and output markets, asset ownership, and other institution and a market distortion adverse to the poor must be minimized or removed. Access by the poor to productive resources such as land and capital needs to be enhanced. Human resources must be improved through expanded investment in education, health care, nutrition, and sanity environments. Rural infrastructure and institutions must strengthened. The policy environment must be conducive and supportive to poverty alleviation and sustainable management of natural resources.
In some advanced countries currently undergoing rapid agricultural resources, an earlier switch to high-yield farming in these countries helped ease a first generation of rural environmental problems-soil erosion, tree cutting, and habitat destruction-but it has now become associated with a dangerous "Second generation" of problems, including excess water and fertilizer use, inadequate nutrient and animal waste containment, loss of biodiversity, and excessive reliance on pesticides.
Agriculturists argue that most of those are technical problem that need not permanently accompany a switch to high-yield farming. If given proper policy signals (tighter pollution regulations, more liberal trade policies, and input or credit subsidy reductions:, input supply industries will innovate cleaner and safer products, and farmer will learn to profit by using inputs in smaller quantities and with greater precision. Just as these farmers originally learned to substitute quantities of purchased inputs for land, soon they will learn to a (lace input quantity with better quality and with improved management (for example by switching from exclusive reliance on pesticides to integrated pest management).
Farming is a threat to the natural environment in rich as well as poor countries, but the human stakes are now much higher in the developing world, where food needs are acute and growing rapidly. Roughly, 700 million people in developing countries do not have access to sufficient food supplies to meet their needs for a healthy and productive life. Already because of population growth, the developing world is being asked to feed 88million additional people every year, the equivalent of feedings a new Mexico every year. How can this production task be met if environmentally destructive farming practices continue?
In much of Africa, where crop yields will have to increase, the "mining " of soil nutrients is now helping to push average crop yields into decline. In much of South Asia, old irrigated lands are becoming saline and water logged and is going out of use almost as a first as new irrigated lands are coming into production. From Honduras to Java, soils are washing away on newly cleared lands. In East Asia, South Asia, and Central America, the natural biological controls for crop pests are being poisoned with farm chemicals, even while the pests themselves are becoming more poison resistant.
Worsening this crisis today is a paralyzing technical debate between agriculturists and environmentalists over what environmentally sustainability farming would actually look like, production-oriented agriculturists argue that environmental protection especially protection of forests and topsoil can be advanced through modern, input-intensive farming. Environmental advocates, by contrast, associate high-input with chemical pollution, a faster exhaustion of water supplies, and a dangerous loss of biodiversity. They feel it is better to hold onto traditional farming techniques suited to local economies and to the circumstances of ordinary resource-poor farmers.
These divergent technical preferences between agriculturists and environmentalists have helped paralyze the international policy community. Bilateral multilateral assistance organizations, not wishing to antagonize powerful environmental lobby groups, have become increasingly wary of sponsoring input-intensive, science based farm modernization projects. This is one reason international assistance to farming and to farm research has recently faltered. Yet the number of people needing food in the developing world grows every year, while the quantity of their farm resource base continues to degrade.
How can this paralyzing policy deadlock be broken? Paying more attention to geography and to politics is one way to start. In some regions of the developing world the agriculturist argue for more use of purchased inputs, while in other regions less input use is needed, so the environmentalist are right. In some regions, neither group will be entirely correct, since appropriate technical changes will not take place without more fundamental political and social change.
In Africa, agriculturists tend to be right: use of purchased inputs will have to increase food production is ever to increase at an acceptable cost to the rural environment. Fertilizer use in Africa today, at12kilograms per hectare, is only ¼ the level of India and only 1/36 the level of Japan. Irrigation covers only 4 percent of cultivate area in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 26 percent in India and 44 percent China. Africa's rural environment is at risk because too many farmers are trying produce more simply by extending traditional low-input practices such as shifting cultivation into forest land, or onto drier and more fragile lands, or by showing fallow times.
Africa, and also in much of non irrigated dry or upland Asia, the only way to boost production in pace with local food needs, without having to cut more trees or plow up more land, will be to move toward higher purchased input use and higher yield farming. The experience of India is telling. By switching to highly responsive seeds more fertilizer use, and expanded irrigation, India was able to double its total with production between 1964/65 and 1970/71.This not only helped India avoid a famine, it also helped protect the rural environment. If India had attempt to use traditional low-yield farming techniques to secure the same wheat production gain, it would have had to plow up an additional 36million hectares of cropland, resulting in further deforestation, substantial habit destruction, and soil erosion. Environmentalists who criticize India's Green Revolution should acknowledge the need to boost total production weight the environmental damage that would have taken place if this had been attempted without a switch to intensive farming. On the other hand, the environmentalist preference for reduced input use is fully justified in some of the more advanced Asian countries now undergoing rapid industrial development, such as Taiwan and Korea, An earlier switch to high-yield farming in those countries helped ease a first generation of rural environmental problems -soil erosion, tree cutting, and habitat destruction -but it has now become associated with a dangerous "second generation" of problems, including excess water and fertilizer, use, inadequate and animal waste containment, loss of biodiversity, excessive reliance on pesticide.
This optimistic vision has merit, but too often, it discounts political realities.
Environmentally damaging input mismanagement has persisted in the rapidly industrialised countries of East Asia because farmers (similar to well organise farm lobbies in all mature industrial countries) tend to gain disproportionate political interest and then to use that influence to demand subsided and trade protection. The predictable result is a policy set (artificially high commodity prices, combined with artificially cheap inputs (that induces damaging input use habits. Similar to politically powerful farmers in Europe or not America, farmer in these rapidly industrializing countries also use their organised influence to escape accountability for the adverse effects (mostly off-farm) that result from their careless excessive water and chemical use.
At a deeper level, resource abuse in farming often reflects power abuse. In East Asia, where farmers tend to be politically stronger within their sector than non farmers, much of the environmental damage they do reflects the subsides they are able to command, and most of the suffering from that damage is felt by politically weaker non farmers (as when animal wastes pollute congested urban area or when excessive irrigation and chemical use depletes or pollutes off-farm surface and ground water supplies). In Africa, by contrast, where farmers tend to be politically weaker than Urban dwellers and vulnerable to the whims of centralized government ministries, the environmental damage they do grows out of this weakness. The few inputs rather than too many because their production tends to be overtaxed rather than subsidized. Lacking secure local control over the resource base, they tend to exploit and overuse good resources when given the chance, while skimping on investment in long-term protection. The environmental damage they do mostly takes places on the farm (overgrazing, loss of trees, soil nutrient depletion), so it harms farmers more than non farmers in yet another manifestation of the underlying power relationship at work.
These links between political and environmental resource protection can be seen in a slightly more complex pattern in Latin America. This is a region where a politically weak rural majority, often without secure access to good land, farms alongside a politically privilege minority of commercial farmers. The result is a dualistic pattern of environmental resource abuse. Privileged commercial farmers on high-potential lands use government subsidies to overmechanize, overirrigate, and overspray, even while nearby peasant farmers, with insecure access even to low potential lands, are mining soils, invading forest margins, and plowing hillsides in an environmentally damaging "hit-and-run" fashion.
Where first-generation and second-generation forms of environmental damage are taking place side by side to due persistent rural social inequities and insecurities, technical solutions alone (either agriculturist or environmentalist) will miss the pint. The solutions include more fundamental rural social and political reform.
By the year 2020, land degradation may pose a serious threat to food production and rural livelihoods, particularly in poor and densely populated areas of the developing world. An appropriate policies are required to encourage land-improving investments and better land management if developing countries are to sustainable meet the food needs of their populations.
Land degradation takes a number of forms, including depletion of soil nutrients, salinization, agrochemical pollution, soil erosion, vegetable degradation as a result of overgrazing, and the cutting of forests for farmland. All of these types of degradation cause a decline in the productive capacity of the land, reducing potential yields. Farmers may need to use more inputs such as fertilizer or manure in order to maintain yields, or they may temporarily or permanently abandon some plots.
Degradation may also induce farmers to convert land to lower-value uses. For examlpe, farmers may plant cassava, which demands few nutrients, instead of maize or may convert cropland to grazing land.
Farmland degradation can also have important negative efforts off the farm, including deposition of eroded soil in streams or behind dams, contamination of drinking water by agrochemical, and loss of habitat.
Historical and economic evidence suggests that farmers often respond actively to degradation by modifying their system or practices and through land improving investments. Unfortunately, no global even national data are yet available estimating the scale and effects of land improvements (for example, area under terracing or other conservation practices), although data collection efforts are beginning.
Although some types of degradation are irreversible, most can be prevented or reversed, for example, adding nutrients to nutrient-depleted soil. Rebuilding topsoil through soil amendments, re-establishing vegetation, or buffering soil acidity.
The practicality of rehabilitating degraded landscapes depends on the cost relative to the value of the output or environmental benefits expected.
Despite the lack of quantitative data, it is clear that land-improving investments are creating a number of "bright spots" in the developing world. Agroforestry, community forestry, and afforestation are beginning to have large-scale positive impacts in numerous countries. Conservation farming is spreading widely in counties including Morocco, the Philippines, and Thailand and regionally in East Africa, parts of West Africa, and parts of South America. Water management is improving through water-saving irrigation, water harvesting, aquaculture, small-scale irrigation, and salinization control.
Diversification into higher-value perennial crops is protecting soils in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Dryland range rehabilitation schemes are showing positive results in Syria and Jordan. Southern Africa, Mexico, and Northern Argentina. Farmer incentives for land investments are improving through range cooperatives in Jordan more favourable property right in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Laos, and Vietnam and community based natural resource management in many areas.
An effective response to land degradation calls for improving the incentives for farmers to care for their land and improving their access to the knowledge and inputs required for proper care. Based on lessons learned from past successes and failures in managing environmental degradation, the following policy actions should be considered:
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5. Stanley S.F "Local Agricultural Techniques (1957)
6. Obafemi Awolowo University Journals "Practicing Agriculture" (1977)
1 MAIL ADDRESS:P M B 4420 OSUN STATE MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES,OSUN STATE NIGERIA.
TEL:234-35-242117.
EMAIL: [email protected]
A PAPER PRESENTED IN FULFILMENT OF PARTICIPATION IN THE X11WORLD FORESTRY CONGRESS, QUEBEC CITY, CANADA. (21st-28th SEPT. 2003)