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Managing weather risk for agricultural development and disaster risk reduction
Nearly 1.4 billion people live on less than US$1.25 a day. Seventy per cent live in rural areas where they depend on agriculture, but where they are also at risk from recurrent natural disasters such as drought and flooding. Natural disasters have a devastating impact on the food security and overall social and economic development of poor rural households.
According to data from Munich Re’s NatCatSERVICE, natural disasters account for losses, on average, of US$51 billion in developing countries every year. Unless well managed, weather risks in agriculture slow development and hinder poverty reduction, ultimately resulting in humanitarian crises. Poor farmers have few options for coping with significant losses, and in order to reduce their exposure to risk, they often forgo opportunities to increase their productivity.
Fighting water scarcity in the Arab coutries
The Arab countries account for more than 5 per cent of the world’s population, but less than 1 per cent of global water resources. And as a consequence of the phenomena associated with climate change, the region is facing an even greater water shortage.
For 30 years now, IFAD and its partners in the region have worked to develop effective, replicable solutions to help poor rural communities manage their scarce water resources. More than half of IFAD’s programmes and projects in the region include a focus on water.
IFAD and rural water investments
IFAD is currently engaged in over 230 loan operations in 85 countries. About two thirds of that portfolio is related to community-based natural resource management.
Poor rural people and their institutions are at the core of this approach. Water is critical to these men and women pastoralists, fishers, farmers, young and old, part- or full-time, urban or rural, indigenous, tribal or otherwise often marginalized people. It is the key entry point for improving their livelihoods.
Interventions for improving livelihoods
Climate change represents an additional challenge to rural people in SSA – and a further reason for investment in water control. Smallholder farmers, pastoralists and artisanal fishers are among the most vulnerable to this threat.
While projections of changes in annual rainfall vary across Africa, these groups will experience the negative effects of increased temperature and
extreme events. For them, enhanced control of water will become critical in building resilience to increased climate variability.
Reinforcing gender equity
From subsistence farming to profit: the benefits of agro-wells in Sri Lanka
Large, well-constructed ‘agro-wells’ are making farming profitable for farmers living in dry areas of Sri Lanka. Farmers in the dry areas of the district of Matale benefited from the Regional Economic Advancement Project (REAP) from 1999 to 2007.
REAP was mostly funded by a loan of US$11.7 million from IFAD to the Government of Sri Lanka. The project had a total budget of US$14.5 million,
and benefited some 30,000 households.
A major activity of REAP’s subcomponent on soil conservation and water management was assistance to the poorest farmers to enable them to
construct agro-wells for irrigation purposes. This activity was started in 2001.
Irriguer pour mieux cultiver : la réussite du Haut Bassin du Mandrare. L’expérience de 12 années d’intervention du PHBM (1996-2008)
Le potentiel irrigable du Haut Bassin du Mandrare est connu depuis très longtemps.
La zone du Haut Bassin du Mandrare divisée en six sous-bassins versants qui alimentent le Mandrare bénéficie d’une bonne pluviométrie (normalement comprise entre 800 et 1100 mm) par rapport aux autres zones de l’extrême Sud de Madagascar.
Les sols des vallées sont fertiles et se prêtent à la riziculture irriguée, activité agricole pratiquée par 60 % des habitants de la zone.
Linking land and water governance
Secure access by rural poor people to both land and water is central to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, in particular the target of reducing by half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.
Most of these people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.
However, international debate continues to address land and water issues separately, and to view the significant use of water in agriculture as problematic.