Climate smart agriculture, farm household typologies and food security: An ex-ante assessment from Eastern India

Abstract

One of the great challenges in agricultural development and sustainable intensification is the assurance of social equity in food security oriented interventions. Development practitioners, researchers, and policy makers alike could benefit from prior insight into what interventions or environmental shocks might differentially affect farmers' food security status, in order to move towards more informed and equitable development. We examined the food security status and livelihood activities of 269 smallholder farm households (HHs) in Bihar, India. Proceeding with a four-step analysis, we first applied a multivariate statistical methodology to differentiate five primary farming system types. We next applied an indicator of food security in the form of HH potential food availability (PFA), and examined the contribution of crop, livestock, and on- and off-farm income generation to PFA within each farm HH type. Lastly, we applied scenario analysis to examine the potential impact of the adoption of 'climate smart' agricultural (CSA) practices in the form of conservation agriculture (CA) and improved livestock husbandry, and environmental shocks on HH PFA. Our results indicate that compared to livestock interventions, CA may hold considerable potential to boost HH PFA, though primarily for wealthier and medium-scale cereal farmers. These farm HH types were however considerably more vulnerable to food insecurity risks resulting from simulated drought, while part-time farmers and resource-poor agricultural laborers generating income from off-farm pursuits were comparatively less vulnerable, due in part to their more diversified income sources and potential to migrate in search of work. Our results underscore the importance of prior planning for development initiatives aimed at increasing smallholder food security while maintaining social equity, while providing a robust methodology to vet the implications of agricultural interventions on an ex ante basis.

Keywords: Bihar; Conservation agriculture; Drought; Livestock; Scenario evaluation, Climate change; Socio-ecological system.

Fig. 1

Map (a) South Asia with (b) detail of Bihar and the surveyed 18 villages. Point data indicate each village in different districts. Nawada (light grey) is South of the Ganges, Begusarai (dark grey) is the Ganges North ridge, and Samastipur (intermediate grey) is in the North fertile plain. Some villages may overlap due to map scale.

Fig. 2

A simple model of the potential food availability ratio expressed in energy equivalents, showing direct and indirect forms of food availability generation and consideration of household required caloric availability (adapted from Frelat et al., 2016), using a minimum daily threshold of 2500 kcal person^− 1 (in adult male equivalents) for all days of the year. If the ratio is > 1, the household is considered “food secure”. If < 1, the household is “food insecure”.

Fig. 3

Results of the Bihar principle components and cluster analysis. (a) Variability explained by successive principle components expressed as inertia gain. The first three principle components explain 13%, 22% and 30% of the total cumulative variability. (b) Projection of variables on first two principle components, (c) Clusters projected on first two principle components. (d) Hierarchical cluster analysis dendogram depicting five clusters projected from inclusion of three principle components. (e) Variables projected on the first and third principle component. (f) Clusters projected on all three principle components.

Fig. 4

Hierarchical tree-structured maps depicting the proportions of the different farm household types in (a) Begusarai, (b) Samastipur, and (c) Nawada districts in Bihar and across all districts (d). SSCLFs indicates small-scale crop and livestock producers. WFs signifies wealthy farmers. n = 95, 88, and 86 farmers total in Begusarai, Samastipur, and Nawada, respectively.

Fig. 5

Distribution of potential food availability for households observed in Bihar. Farm households are ordered in ascendant order of their potential food availability ratio by moving average with window of five households. The dashed red line indicates a PFA of 1. Bin colors indicate livelihood strategies and potential sources of energy. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 6

Distribution of potential food availability cluster grouping in Bihar. For details, refer to the legend of Fig. 5. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article).

Fig. 7

Box and whisker plot showing results of scenario analysis. (a) Net potential food availability (PFA) ratio increase and (b) percent change in PFA ratio from simulating the yield and productivity enhancing effects of conservation agriculture practices on rice-wheat cereal rotations (based on Jat et al., 2014). (c) Net PFA ratio increase and (d) corresponding percent PFA change for the 50% increase in daily milk yield scenario. (e) Net PFA ratio decrease and (f) percent PFA decline for the catastrophic drought scenario in which yields of all cereals were reduced by 90%. PTF = Part-time farmers, WF = Wealthy farmers, SSCL = Small-scale cereal and livestock farmers, MSCCF = medium-scale cereal crop farmers, and RPAL = Resource-poor farm laborers. Bold horizontal centerlines depict the median value. Upper and lower box ranges correspond to the upper 75th and lower 25th quartiles, respectively. Minimum and maximum values are depicted by the whiskers.