Positionpaper-CSA.docVIP

PAGE  PAGE 12 Sustaining Agriculture in the era of Climate Change in India Civil Society position paper This is a position paper drafted by civil society groups including farmers’ organizations in India, on the potential of Sustainable Agriculture (SA) in the context of Climate Change (CC) initiated by Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, Jatan Trust and Oxfam India. This paper is premised on the fact that the imperative to shift to sustainable farming is more urgent than ever in the era of anthropogenic climate change, though the imperatives for such a shift flow from other factors too (including increasing enormous public financing needs for inputs like chemical fertilizers, the lack of economic viability of the current model of farming for millions of farmers, the environmental health disaster that is unfolding in different parts of the country due to intensive agricultural technologies, the ecological degradation of productive resources in these intensive models etc). Climate change is already a reality for a majority of Indian farmers even as plans are being evolved at the government level mostly to create adaptive capabilities; meanwhile, Indian farmers are being forced to adapt to several CC-related changes by themselves because they have no other choice. For no fault of theirs, Indian farmers, like the most marginalized everywhere, are paying a high price for anthropogenic climate change. The worst-hit, as usual, are small and marginal holders in marginalized locations with social disadvantages to begin with. Such farmers have meager resources to buffer them from the new risks that climate change poses. The macro-plans being created by the government in India are mostly meant for the National Agricultural Research System (NARS) and a re-arranging of their research agenda in the context of climate change – the NARS’s linear systems of “lab to land” research have been already critiqued for their non-participatory, top-down, unaccountable nature. Such