Annex 14: FAO Guideline “A Framework for Reclamation Action Plan for Affected Soils”

Agricultural affected lands need to be quickly rehabilitated to restore the production capacity of farmers and ensure food security in rural areas. A framework of intervention is proposed to ensure that the next cropping season can start in fairly good conditions for medium to low damaged areas and that for badly affected areas rehabilitation works or plans for reorientation of production are carried out soon.

Reclaiming field/soils affected by the tsunami will depend on the severity of the damage and the resilience of the system. FAO proposes to confront this crisis with an approach developed in three steps:

1. Classifying and zoning the damages and the resilience of the system.

2. Identifying the capacity of farmers and local communities in restoring progressively their production capability.

3. Designing and scheduling a consistent set of targeted interventions for the short and long term, for each zone, considering the above as well as the agro-climatic constraints (rainfall, agricultural calendar and usual practices)

Given the extreme dispersion of sites to be investigated and rehabilitated, it is critical that local expertise is engaged and strengthened to deal with the diagnosis and remediation.

Therefore FAO aims to help governments and regional authorities in increasing the local capacity through:

• a massive consistent training program of local staff;
• by making available cheap salinometers (at least 100 per country for a start); and

• assist farmers in reaching their pre-disaster agricultural production capacity or reorient them towards diversified production activities.

1. Assessing the needs

Damages differ by nature:

• Direct crop destruction by uprooting, salt poisoning, flood, etc...

• Erosion and scouring that modifies the topography, land levelling and the elimination of bunds (for paddy fields)

• Soil fertility losses when upper layer is washed away

• Deposition of salted sediment

• Salt infiltration

• Trash and debris accumulation.

or by intensity which depends on three main characteristics of the particular location:

• the energy of the flood,
• the type of soil coverage and vegetation, and

• the soil hydraulic properties including drainage capacity^[9].

FAO proposes a simple classification for assessing the damages based on 3 main subsets:

• Field level
• Infrastructure

• Farming capacity

Methodology

Rationale: The level of support and the specific set of interventions required to return to normal situation in affected areas depend on damages intensity, capacity of main infrastructure to allow remediation, the farming capacity both human and material to reengage in agricultural activities and reclamation works when required.

It is proposed to quantify the damages through ranked indicators for each subset using the following tables.

Physical damages preventing from recovering the field production capacity are related to irrigation and drainage infrastructures, but also to transportation infrastructure. Drainage networks can be destroyed, silted or plugged, while irrigation structures may have been damaged or destroyed. Irrigation networks may be silted up; no longer able to feed by gravity; or fields may be unserviceable due to a significant increase of their elevation as a result of sedimentation.

Table 1.

(*) Infiltration rate of upper soil layer influences the quantity of salt that contaminates the soil profile. Of course this aspect also influences the ability for remediation, highly infiltrating soil such as the sandy soils in Maldives are likely to be quickly leached and cleaned with fresh water.

(**) The ranking given here is considering the damages resulting from a small duration flood which makes sandy soils more damaged than clay soils and more impacting the shallow fresh water aquifers. For long duration floods, the damage intensity on soil is the reverse and so should be the ranking: clay soil will store much more salted water and fix much more salt than sandy soils which can be easily leached out by fresh water. [Reverse ranking for long duration floods: 1 sandy (high drainage); 2 medium (medium drainage); 3 clay-silt (low drainage)].

Table 2.

Farmers, extension workers, staff of agricultural services may have suffered a lot from the tsunami. Some are among the many that lost their lives, while many of survivors are in a state of chock and trauma. In the worse stricken areas it might take some time for farmers to go back to normal life and affected fields.

Furthermore draught animals, equipments and tools may be lost or damaged by the tsunami as well and need to be quickly replaced.

The program of reclamation should give full consideration to this aspect and favour as much as possible guidance to farmers with a set of practical actions on the fields, aiming at restoring the full capacity wherever it is possible. The time horizon for attaining full capacity will differ from one category to the other.

Table 3.

2. Zoning the field damages

2.1 The zoning is made firstly with consideration on the Field Damages indicators.

Important: there is no a priori methodology to give the right weighting factors of the criteria used in previous tables. The ranking of indicators and the weighting should be revised after preliminary tests on the ground.

This note provides a preliminary guesstimate about the ranking and the weights each aspect should be given. Officers in the field should revise them and report to AGLW for furtherrefinement and possibly homogenisation, if needed.

Class A “Low damaged area = below 8 ”. In this category there is no major obstacle to a rapid reclamation and salt leaching either through rainfall or through some special allocation of surface water. The restoration of capacity in this category should be monitored carefully but obtained without major intervention before the beginning of the next cropping season in April and May 2005.

Class B “Medium damaged area = between 8 and 16”. This category requires specific and significant interventions to reclaim soil, to restore land surface properties (land levelling, trash, sediment). Salt leaching would require high quantities of water either through rainfall or through some special allocation of surface water. Farmers can do most if not all the rehabilitation works themselves possibly on a “work for food program” provided that the farming capacity has not been too much reduced.

Class C “Highly damaged area = above 16”. For this category there are major obstacles to a rapid reclamation and probably the next cropping season is out of reach. In some cases, the return to cultivation might even be discussed and alternative production activities from natural resources use and management (eco-systems) may be sought for these coastal lands, while compensating current landowners and helping them reorienting/diversifying their activities on other land or other productive activities.

3. Remediation work plans

3.1. Water leaching

Leaching of salt in the upper soil profile is obtained from excess water on surface that provoke percolation below the top soil layers, flushing out of the profile salt water. This excess water results from a positive balance of [Rainfall+ irrigation- Evaporation].

In monsoon areas the rainfall is regularly greater than evaporation and the excess is thus positive. But this is not true everywhere and all the time.

The net water balance [Rainfall+ irrigation- Evaporation] should be roughly assessed for affected areas in order to estimate the leaching occurred.

A significant positive net water balance decreases the FIELD damages and for instance can pull field from Class B to Class A (but not from C to B).

3.2. Determining a set of actions

3.2.1. Class A fields

It is expected that for this situation recovery is likely to be obtained without major intervention. More likely net water balance between January and April, will be enough to flush out the salt and cultivation with normal crops can resume for the next cropping season in March and April. The existing farming system and production are able to recover quickly and no specific precaution for crops are required.

It will still be required to monitor upper soil salinity, to ensure that good conditions are met for the next cropping season and convince farmers to return to normal cultivation.

3.2. Class B fields.

For this type of situation recovery will take some more time and more specific interventions, at least one full cropping season and/or a full monsoon season will be required to recover. We cannot expect to restore full capacity before the start of the next cropping season, but farmers should be able, and encouraged, to crop at least partly their lands.

In this situation we may have to consider:

• Salt tolerant varieties of usual crops to allow cropping in not fully cleaned soils
• Delayed start of the season with varieties having shorter period of growth

• Temporary changes in the production system to compensate for the expected losses of food production and incomes in the coming seasons.

For the coming campaign and possibly the following one, farmers should receive support for seeds, inputs and advice. Their food security should also be assured by compensating them for expected reduced yields, and by providing them easier access to credit.

3.3. Class C fields

To reclaim these fields major works of rehabilitation/reclamation are required either within the field or in the near-by infrastructures.

For some of these fields, mostly very close to the sea shore, alternatives land use and production services might be sought within the context of a comprehensive agro-eco-systems rehabilitation. Abandoning land cultivation can then be a viable option if affected farmers and landowners are well compensated with alternatives productions means.

For the major part of these fields return to cultivation cannot be reached immediately and solutions must be found to allow farmers to temporary cultivate in other un/less affected lands; and to diversify land and natural resources management in order to provide them with alternative means of production and food security.

In the coming weeks specific prototypes for cropping pattern plans and production diversification will be suggested for the last two categories by FAO-AG department.

It is likely that this C class will be further subdivided into two classes:

• C1 Agriculture vocation is maintained

• C2 Ecosystem services are preferable.

Table 4. Summary of rehabilitation plans