Putting Smallholders on the Road to Food and Livelihood Security

Despite the benefits of the Green Revolution, more than 1 billion people worldwide suffer from food insecurity. Declines in household food production are commonplace for about 60 percent of the rural population in tropical and sub-tropical countries. Land degradation has resulted in low productivity - partially due to poor land and water management practices and inadequate policies. These improper practices in turn directly impact on smallholders and cause off-site damage to downstream producers and the environment. The UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are an urgent call for action to create a better world. IWMI's research on Smallholder Land and Water Management has focused on addressing three of these goals in particular: 1) eradicating extreme hunger and poverty, 3) ensuring gender equality and the empowerment of women, and 7) ensuring environmental sustainability.

The merger with the International Board for Soil Research and Management (IBSRAM) in 2001 brought issues of soil and land management firmly into IWMI's research agenda. It also served to expand IWMI's perspective from a former focus on large irrigation schemes to a broader view of the spectrum of options—large-scale, small-scale, irrigated, rainfed—available to farmers to enhance food production and livelihoods. Thus, in complement to IWMI's Agricultural Water Management Project, a key focal point of the Smallholder Land and Water Management Theme was to research mechanisms to improve water and land productivity of rainfed and small-scale systems at the catchments scale.

Rainfed lands in developing countries tend to be associated with poor farmers. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, rainfed agriculture accounts for 95% of the agricultural land and supports 70% of the rural population. Yields from these systems are low, and fertility management and supplemental irrigation can significantly reduce the chronic low productivity and crop failures that characterize the region. (Rockstrom et al., 2003) Further, recent stagnation in the Growth of agricultural production in the green revolution areas in Asia has prompted policy makers to look in the same direction, toward rainfed agriculture, to continue the momentum of productivity growth that will be necessary to feed the growing world population. The negative impacts that unsustainable upland farming practices have on downstream populations and resources, and on biodiversity preservation, is an additional driver for this area of research that has lent increasing urgency to the task.

IWMI's research on Smallholder Land and Water Management has concentrated on the essential link between soil and water productivity in three focus areas: rainfed and small scale irrigation systems, catchments management and rehabilitation of degraded lands. The research was divided into the sub-themes, "Smallholder Productivity", which emphasized adoption, adaptation, and equity issues to increase access and productivity of water for smallholders; "Catchments Management", for integrated natural resource management (INRM) research at the watershed scale that encompassed on and off site impacts of resource management; and "Rehabilitation of Degraded Lands", because degradation of natural resources is so important, and because land and water degradation processes are interlinked.

The research focus has been on technologies that can be implemented on an individual basis, by single farmers to upgrade their own farming systems, as this type of option has been very attractive to farmers in Asia, with substantial productivity benefits. The treadle pump and low cost drip irrigation have proven very effective in improving both water supply and water productivity in a range of situations. The primary focus for IWMI research was the Integration of these technologies into social, biophysical and economic contexts of the smallholder farmer (Badiger, 2003).

Catchment Management

For farmers living in marginal lands in upper catchments, IWMI made significant headway in understanding the complex inter-linkages between the biophysical and socioeconomic process that influences local land use practices and their downstream implications (e.g., Maglinao and Valentin 2003). Basic scientific research on erosion has yielded a new understanding of plot level and catchment level processes that are directly relevant to farming systems for sloping lands. These scientific contributions, particularly in the areas of long term effects of erosion, tillage erosion, weed ecology, and relationships between land use and catchment level sediment yields are embedded in an action research agenda that applies these results directly to farming systems (Maglinao and Valentin, 2003). Best practices and guidelines for sloping land agriculture that were developed have been adopted in national manuals and even in legislation in Southeast Asia, and some outcomes have been adopted in practice, such as Conservation Villages. Significant capacity building has taken place as represented by the numerous scientific publications produced by national scientists and students. All researchers in both IWMI's Asia land and MSEC networks have benefited from cross-country exchange, and their perspectives have gained a higher profile within the international scientific community.

Rehabilitation of Degraded Lands – "Learning from Bright Spots"

Finally, IBSRAM and later IWMI research on land degradation and related policy analyses (e.g., Penning de mVries et al., 2002a) has led to a relatively new area of research on ‘bright spots,' where scientists are examining existing smallholder and/or community experiences in rehabilitating degraded agro ecosystems and the opportunities for replication at different scales and in different locations (multiple manuscripts in preparation). The degradation of land and water resources which includes salinization, erosion, nutrient mining and pollution reduces the global capacity to produce food. It also reduces water productivity and environmental services. IWMI and colleagues looked at this issue from the angle of integrated soil and water management. IWMI's work focused on 1) assessment work focused on learning from ‘Bright' spots 2) farm scale rehabilitation of light textured tropical soils and 3) understanding regional and global processes that contribute to land degradation. Looking systematically into the factors that contribute to the development of "Bright Spots", their impact on land and water and how such successes can be repeated elsewhere has become an important thrust of IWMI's research with significant support from other programs, such as the Comprehensive Assessment.