Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has a significant role to play in reducing the gender gap in labor burden for women in agriculture. A targeted approach to address this gap can be useful in developing a women-responsive climatic risk management plan focused on reducing their labor burden in agriculture, especially in areas with high climate risks. The paper therefore presents a top-down approach to identify potential labor-saving CSA technologies for women farmers in areas facing high climate risks. It involves mapping women in agriculture, climate risks, and poverty hotspots and entails understanding the role of women in agricultural activities to identify the suitable CSA options for reducing the levels of labor drudgery. The study is illustrated for Nepal where feminization of agriculture is rapidly increasing, a high level of climatic risks persists, and adaptive capacity to climate change is very low, especially among women in agriculture. Results are presented for two hotspot districts, Rupandehi and Chitwan. Household socioeconomic characteristics were found to play a major role in women's labor contribution in different crop production activities. Discussions with farmers provided a list of more than 15 CSA interventions with labor reduction as well as yield-improving potential. Accordingly, considering the local crop, agro-climate, and social conditions, and women's participation in different agricultural activities, CSA technologies and practices such as direct seeded rice (zero tillage and low tillage using machine), green manuring (GM), laser land leveling (LLL), and system of rice intensification (SRI) were found to potentially reduce women's drudgery in agriculture along with improvement in productivity and farm income.
Gender integration across national policy processes is critical to ensure effective implementation of climate change adaptation interventions in agriculture. This is especially so for countries like Nepal, where climate vulnerability and women participation in agriculture is high, accompanied by gender gaps in access to information, technologies, markets, and labor burden. To do this, it becomes necessary to address the interrelated issues of gender, agriculture, and climate change instead of looking at them in isolation. This study, therefore, highlights policy gaps to suggest a set of recommendations for improving gender responsiveness at policy level in Nepal. It presents the gender gaps that women face in agriculture, based on data collected from five districts of the country. Subsequently, using the concept of gender-agricultureclimate change nexus, it analyses 20 government policies and related documents of Nepal based on a set of five indicators. The policy analysis elucidates the level of gender integration in agriculture and climate change policies in the country. Eleven of the 15 agriculture related documents acknowledge the need to focus on women farmers, with nine of them also defining provisions for women-related issues in agriculture. Two of the five climate change policies merely acknowledge gender issues related to climate change. However, only two of the 20 policy documents recognize the need to address gender, climate change, and agricultural issues in coherence. Accordingly, the paper proposes a framework highlighting key points to make policy process and implementation plans in the agriculture sector more gender responsive in Nepal, focusing on the development and promotion of gender responsive Climate-Smart Agriculture technologies and practices. It suggests measures to increase access of assets and services to women farmers, improve their capacity to participate in decision making across levels, and promote transformative changes at both local and policy level.
COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in widespread global disruptions. While much is being discussed about the health and economic impacts, there has been a limited focus on the immediate food sector shocks and their related social implications in developing countries, especially when the farmer surveys cannot be conducted due to mobility restrictions in many countries. To overcome these challenges, this study uses news mining and content analysis of media articles published from February to April 2020, to assess the early impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food supply chain and farm distress in India. It also presents the media perception of the impact of the pandemic and resulting policy measures using sentiment analysis, in addition to the cross-tabulation of results that show differential impacts across food supply chain components among different commodity groups and regions. The results show wide-scale impacts across different components of the food supply chain ranging from crop harvesting and processing, distribution and logistics to disruptions across food markets, as represented by 22, 11 and 30% of total articles, respectively. The impacts are also differentiated by commodity groups, with animal products having more trade and demand-side issues, logistic bottlenecks in fruits and vegetables and crops showing problems in labor availability and harvesting. Sentiment analysis of news items shows a spike in the negative sentiment immediately post the national lockdown, with relatively less negativity in subsequent weeks due to large-scale policy and community action. Sentiment classification along different indicators shows the highest negative sentiment for animal products (85%) in commodity groups, western states of India (78%) among different regions, and food supply (85%) and markets (83%) among supply chain components. Further, extreme weather analysis (using excess rainfall events) shows that farmers faced compound risks from the COVID-19 pandemic and extreme weather events in many parts of the country. The results highlight the importance of building resilient food systems, especially when the biotic and abiotic shocks are projected to increase globally due to many drivers including biodiversity loss and climate change.
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