Climate change will force Australian farmers to adapt

Sarah Clarke in ABC News: Australia's farmers will need to adapt to cope with a potentially hotter and drier continent as the effects of climate change take hold, scientists say. As the UN's chief science body meets in Hobart today to update the latest climate modelling, the CSIRO says forecasts show Australia will have to cope with less rainfall, longer dry periods and crops struggling to grow in changing conditions.

CSIRO climate applications scientist Steve Crimp says the nation's agricultural sector will likely feel the heat of a hotter climate. "Certainly across most of southern Australia, the projections of the future are for warmer and drier conditions, so when we experience warm and dry conditions, growing those crops, canola, wheat, barley etc will be more challenging in the future," he said.

A CSIRO report warns climate change will threaten Australia's farming productivity and says grazing livestock, particularly cattle, will be stressed as a result and less likely to breed. Central Australia is predicted to experience the greatest warming.

Modelling shows irrigated cropping may also be challenged, especially in the south east where water is drawn from upstream in the Murray-Darling Basin. The CSIRO forecasts all cropping could be hit by less rainfall....

Drought in the Wheatlands, Western Australia, shot by Phillip Capper, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Farmers need to grow climate smart

Busani Bafana in IPS: Farmers cannot wait much longer for negotiators to reach an agreement on including a work programme on agriculture in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And until one is approved, “it will continue to be difficult for farmers to produce the food needed, and at the same time reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

This is according to Anette Friis from the Danish Food and Agriculture Council and spokesperson for Farming First, a global coalition calling on world leaders to increase agricultural output in a sustainable and socially responsible manner.

“Countries failed to get an agreement on agriculture at this year’s (Conference of the Parties) COP18 in Doha, which means that discussions will not move to the next level and a work programme on agriculture is not foreseen for the near future,” Friis told IPS. A work programme is a blueprint for action.

Friis said that agricultural organisations needed to pressure leaders to ensure that a future COP deal would include agriculture. She said that discussions on including an agricultural work programme would continue at the next COP in Bonn in June 2013. But this, Friis said, would be without further submissions from parties, which could have informed and moved the process forward.

Farming First is one of 18 leading agricultural organisations that have called for a work programme on agriculture under the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), an advisory body established under the UNFCCC....

No-till farming in Switzerland, outside Bern, shot by Volker Prasuhn, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Typhoon reduces Philippine farmers to beggars

Seed Daily via AFP: The secluded valley that sheltered Jerry Blanco's banana crop from communist and Muslim rebellions offered no refuge from Typhoon Bopha, which left him destitute in seconds.

Last week's terrifying storm has left more than 1,600 people dead or missing in the southern Philippines, and all but wiped out the banana plantations that are one of the desperately poor country's few export earners.

"First the strong wind came, then a sheet of rain. Our roof rattled, the house creaked and then the wall was blown away," Blanco, a 39-year-old plantation worker, told AFP in the southern Philippines.

"I looked out across the field, and all the (banana stalks) were felled. Our harvest was gone. The first thought in my mind was, we've just lost our future," the father of four said....