Civil society organisations have cautioned East African farmers against dropping traditional and ecologically-suitable farming practices en masse for a production system now advocated by proponents of climate-smart agriculture.

Civil society activists say the region stands a better chance of realising good yields in the long term by adopting environment-friendly and less costly production practices.

They have cited Ethiopia, where an experiment conducted to investigate the impact of biomass use in the south of the country found out that the wheat produced with biomass was equal to that produced with recommended doses of nitrogen fertiliser yet biomass was far cheaper and readily available locally unlike the synthetic fertiliser. This implies that low-income farmers can produce a reasonably high yield of crops by using biomass as organic fertiliser.

The activists also decry the use of herbicides and pesticides they believe have been decimating and important organisms in the soil and on the land — earthworms, bacteria, fungi, other micro-organisms and insects that are so key to pollination and hence fertilisation and eventual food production.

Their argument is backed by soil scientists who say that when massive doses of toxic chemicals are applied to the soil and to plants, the ability of such micro-organisms to cycle nutrients and enable plants to improve on nutrient uptake is greatly impaired affecting overall biodiversity and crop production. They say that massive use of chemicals has been destroying this intricate relationship between the health of the soil and sustainable food production.

READ: Farmers urged to embrace organic compost

Dr Daniel Maingi from the Kenya Food Rights Alliance, joined counterparts in other civil society lobby groups in asking the FAO to drop its push for climate-smart agriculture and instead promote crop-production techniques that are appropriate to the ecology and socio-cultural situation of such food insecure regions as East Africa.

It is acknowledged that climate change continues to affect food production in many parts of Africa. This has seen the emergence of different approaches including climate-smart agriculture, which is now being promoted as a means of enabling farmers to cope with the effects of global warming as well as producing more for an increasingly hungry world.

Besides FAO, governments and big-time agri-business companies have joined the fray and are now part of what has become the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture. Their argument is that just as burning fossil fuels leads to massive release of heat-trapping gas, tilling the land and raising cattle contributes 10 per cent to 12 per cent of the carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide released into the atmosphere which are responsible for global warming.

READ: FAO pushes for climate smart farming to curb food insecurity

To this group, the world stands a better chance of controlling the worst effects of climate change by doing away with the ongoing release of greenhouse gasses if tilling of the land is done away with and a plethora of measures adopted to ensure that farmers are able to continue producing the food needed globally.

The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture was launched on November 23 during the UN climate change summit, to improve food security and nutrition uptake in the face of climate change. By December, 71 members had joined the Alliance.

Civil society groups are wary of a phenomenon called “green washing” in which “the worst polluters and hence worst contributors to greenhouse gas emissions” have come together with governments for the purpose of continuing in their “bad practices” under a newer, better-sounding and hence more acceptable omnibus body.

To these groups, “climate-smart” agriculture provides what they termed “a dangerous platform for corporations to implement the very activities we oppose. By endorsing the activities of the planet’s worst climate offenders in agribusiness and industrial agriculture, the Alliance will undermine the very objectives that it claims to aim for.”

The loudest opponents of climate-smart-agriculture raised their voices during the UN Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru in early December. They include ActionAid International, Friends of the Earth International, the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements, he South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication, the Third World Network, the Bolivian Platform on Climate Change, Biofuel Watch and the National Network on Right to Food.

They have specifically isolated for condemnation companies involved in land grabbing and those that produce and own different brands of synthetic fertilisers and genetically modified seeds, including Yara, the Norway-based multinational that leads in fertiliser production globally. Others are Sygenta and Monsanto ,which lead in GMO production and ownership.

But other people are not reading from the same script with the civil society. To some, it is either climate smart agriculture or a doomsday scenario.