The Eastern Gangetic Plains of Western Bangladesh, Eastern India
and South-Eastern Nepal is a region of extreme poverty, food insecurity and
severe climate risk in South Asia. The Sustainable and Resilient Farming
Systems Intensification (SRFSI) project is focused on reducing poverty and food
insecurity and improving agricultural productivity in resilient ways through
conservation agriculture based system intensification (CASI) in India (Bihar
& West Bengal), Bangladesh and Nepal. The project is funded by the
Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) under
the Sustainable Development Investment Portfolio (SDIP), with a co-investment by
ACIAR. It is led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre
(CIMMYT) and implemented by 20 national, international and Australian partners.
The implementing partners belong to agricultural research institutions, government
agriculture departments NGOs, and Australian universities.
The partners and some key stakeholders meet twice-annually to
review, share progress and plan future activities. The review and planning
meeting for 2016 was held from 18-21 September in Darjeeling, India. The partners
presented the status of their project components including trial results,
socio-economic activities, innovation platforms, APSIM modelling, gender
mainstreaming, private sector engagement, studies on groundwater irrigation and
mechanization.
ACIAR is actively engaged with the private sector to bring
additional investments to conservation agriculture. The meeting focused
on the means to scale out to benefit the
targeted 1.5 million households by the year 2020-21. The participants also
considered how to shift the focus in Phase 2 from farm level
innovations/technologies to removing policy constraints for adoption of these
technologies and strengthening local markets and value chains. With this in
mind, discussions during the meeting were consciously aimed at encouraging the
team to think and plan for the second phase of the project and find more
effective and significant ways of regional cooperation.
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Participants of the SRFSI regional meeting held fro 18-21 September, 2016 at Darjeeling, India. Photo: ACIAR |
The SRFSI project
benefited greatly from 18 months of preparatory capacity building, pilot
research and studies. The project is in its third year of implementation and is
progressing well. More than 26,000
farmers are already involved in the project, with inclusion of 30% women in key
project activities. There has been the successful
introduction of CASI technologies like new crop varieties; systems
intensification and diversification; introduction of new crops like maize,
wheat, legumes, etc.; intercropping vegetables and legumes with maize; and the
introduction of mechanisation based agriculture. CASI technologies,
particularly Zero till (ZT) wheat and maize in India and Nepal, and Strip till
(ST) maize and wheat in Bangladesh, are consistently showing higher profits, with
huge savings in labour, water and energy for the farmers. The higher
profitability has created a huge interest among participating farmers and their
fellow neighbours. CASI technologies are thus expected to be more widely
adopted in the future, not only in the project nodes but with scaling out to
neighbouring villages and districts.
The SRFSI team in West Bengal has capitalised on the farmers
clubs/local NGOs established by National Bank for Agriculture and Rural
Development (NABARD). These farmer clubs have been oriented as micro
entrepreneurs for single window services like access to mechanisation, quality
inputs, knowledge and capacity building. The Department of Agriculture in West
Bengal has endorsed CASI technologies for widespread adoption. In Bangladesh, the
SRFSI partnership has enabled efficient input supply to farmers practicing
CASI, including machinery service providers and has provided technical support
to development agencies and farmers on the ground. Nepal has successfully
experimented with the concept of Community Business Facilitators (CBF), who are
seen as agents of change to facilitate adoption of CASI technologies by farmers.
It has also successfully demonstrated laser land levelling in both districts of
Sunsari and Dhanusha. In Bihar, SRFSI has been able to attain major
participation of women in the project through their partnership with Jeevika, a
rural livelihoods project of the government of Bihar.
Author: John Dixon, Research Program Manager Cropping Systems and Economics
Author: John Dixon, Research Program Manager Cropping Systems and Economics
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