Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

5-2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Sophia Perdikaris

Subject Categories

Agriculture | Sustainability

Keywords

Climate-Smart Agriculture; Food Security; practices; small farmer; Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) is one of the solutions that simultaneously address the issues of food security, climate change and agricultural productivity. It has been gaining momentum in the last five years among policy circles and development organizations have prioritized CSA interventions in developing countries around the world. In this paper, CSA interventions are examined from the small farmer's perspective and the purpose of this paper is to find out whether Climate-Smart Agriculture truly empowers the farmer in the face of climate change. Such a study emerged from the fact that in the past, agricultural interventions like the Green Revolution promised farmers food security but initiated practices that exacerbated their vulnerabilities and degraded the integrity of the ecosystem. The method involved assessing ongoing and completed projects of development agencies. These projects were examined based on the ease with which a small farmer could adopt such a practice and the ecological sustainability of the project. The results of this examination indicate that there are few interventions that have the potential to truly empower small farmers. Nevertheless, there are those interventions that are designed to be neither ecologically sustainable nor financially viable to the farmer. This implies an inherent flaw in the concept of CSA and sheds light on the vested agribusiness' interest in this area.

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