Mitigation and Adaptation Options for Rainfed Agriculture in West Asia and North Africa

Abstract

Climatic change and land degradation are the most serious threats affecting the sustainability of land resources in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region. Mitigation or adaptation interventions should be implemented using database on climate and climatic variation, characterization of local climatic changes, rainfall variability, drought occurrence and probability of extreme weather events, impacts on food production and security, and health of rural communities. Technologies for improving rainfed farming need to focus on optimizing the use of water runoff, innovative soil moisture conservation practices, developing new cropping system, management practices adapted to new temperature and moisture regime, innovative packages for production of high cash crops suitable for small holdings and tolerant to moisture and temperature stresses, conservation of agro-biodiversity, and low cost and energy efficient-farming system. Governments are called to establish national system to implement drought mitigation strategy that covers disaster risk management and treat it as top national priority. Plans to help farmers to endure extreme events should be among sustained institutional national policy. Emergency plan to provide aid to rural farmers during such events should help them to stay on their farms and avoid forced migration and accelerating land degradation. Improving farmer’s livelihood under stress conditions may be achieved by adopting broad base food security strategy integrating rainfed sector with others such as livestock in order to increase products’ added values and obtain better return.