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Drivers and major changes in agricultural production systems in drylands of South Asia: assessing implications for key environmental indicators and research needs

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Title Drivers and major changes in agricultural production systems in drylands of South Asia: assessing implications for key environmental indicators and research needs
 
Creator Haileslassie, Amare
 
Contributor Craufurd, Peter
Blummel, Michael
Gumma, Murali Krishna
Palanisami, Kuppannan
NageswaraRao, V.
 
Subject intensification trajectories
environmental and material outcomes
sustainable ecosystems
resilient system
 
Description The South Asian dryland (arid and semiarid)
ecosystems have been exhibiting considerable agricultural production system changes. In
fact, today, there are scientific consensus that this nature of agricultural production system enables it to capture market, technologies
and environmental opportunities. Pressing concerns are, however, adverse environmental tradeoffs
that these changes are
experiencing and therefore the challenges toward a resilient agricultural production system. This is particularly important in arid and
semiarid
ecosystems which are resources constrained and thus more vulnerable: for example to climate change. To stimulate and
revive a debate in agricultural research circles, this paper demonstrates the magnitude of major changes, their drivers and
environmental implications in context to agricultural production systems in drylands of South Asia. As an example we selected districts
representing different dryland agricultural production systems in western Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka states of India.
Taking crop, livestock and trees as major enterprises, we characterized agricultural production systems of the sample districts. Key
operational resources, demographic and external agents were illustrated as examples of drivers of changes. Then major emphasis was
given to material and environment related livelihood outcomes and their dynamic as agricultural production systems evolve over time.
Despite a remarkable improvement in material outcomes of agricultural production (> 100% increase in cereal grain yields taking 1966
as a base year), the long term environmental dimension tends to be compromised by short term needs: as demonstrated by perpetual
soil nutrient stock mining, ground water depletion and instability of cereal grain yields (28110%
CV). Based on these empirical
evidence, we debate as to where a system research should focus and what policy circles need to do to address emerging problems and
contribute to advances toward a sustainable agricultural production systems in dryland.
 
Date 2013-09-30
2017-01-05T19:41:55Z
2017-01-05T19:41:55Z
 
Type Conference Paper
 
Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/id/eprint/7145
https://mel.cgiar.org/reporting/download/hash/wVN3UuSR
Amare Haileslassie, Peter Craufurd, Michael Blummel, Murali Krishna Gumma, Kuppannan Palanisami, V. NageswaraRao. (30/9/2013). Drivers and major changes in agricultural production systems in drylands of South Asia: assessing implications for key environmental indicators and research needs. Beijing, China.
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11766/5258
Open access
 
Language en
 
Rights CC-BY-NC-4.0
 
Format PDF
 
Publisher International Dryland Development Commission (IDDC)