Agricultural greenhouse gas emissions of an Indian village - Who's to blame: crops or livestock?

A carbon footprint assessment, combining various scales of analysis and including a territorial assessment, is proposed to estimate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from crops and livestock in an Indian village impacted by both Green (for crops) and White (for milk) revolutions. It is based on the GHG assessment of 10 cropping systems, 8 livestock farming systems and 9 production systems using the comparative agriculture and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approaches. Results show that mineral fertilisation, irrigation and methane from paddy fields are the main drivers of emissions at plot level. Livestock farming systems emit from 4.7 tCO2eq/female to 8.6 tCO2eq/female, enteric fermentation being the first source of emission. Disparities at farm level are huge, ranging from 9 to 733 tCO2eq. At village level, emissions yield 37 tCO2eq/ha and livestock contributes to 60 % of GHG emissions. The high GHG emissions are a legacy of the Green and White Revolutions: the livestock population is high, fed on highly emissive fodder and concentrates and produces little milk. The results enhance our understanding of the share of carbon emissions from crops and livestock at farm and territorial level. They pinpoint the environmental and socio-economic downsides of livestock farming intensification.

Groundwater irrigation reduces overall poverty but increases socioeconomic vulnerability in a semiarid region of southern India.

The development of irrigation is generally considered an efficient way to reduce poverty in rural areas, although its impact on the inequality between farmers is more debated. In fact, assessing the impact of water management on different categories of farmers requires resituating it within the different dimensions of the local socio-technical context. We tested this hypothesis in a semi-arid area in Karnataka, South India, where groundwater irrigation was introduced five decades ago. Using the conceptual framework of comparative agriculture, based on farmers' interviews, we built a farm typology, traced the trajectories of farm types over the last decades and assessed their current technical and economic performances. Our results show that the differentiation of farm trajectories since the 1950s has been linked with the development of groundwater irrigation, interplaying with their initial assets, and the evolution of the national and local contexts. We highlight the mechanisms by which irrigation indeed reduces poverty but engenders fragilities, particularly for poor households, whose situation was aggravated by the depletion of water resources over the last two decades. Finally, this extensive understanding of the agrarian context allowed us to formulate and assess the potential of different ways forward, including irrigation technology, change in cropping or livestock systems, land tenure, and value added distribution. As such, this analysis would be of major interest to policy makers involved in reforming the agricultural context for better agricultural water management.

Drawing together the knowledge of forestry and pastoralism experts in the construction of a technical support tool for silvopastoralism.

A growing body of literature documents emphasizes the value of the hybridisation of different types of knowledge for environmental management. This is particularly true for silvopastoralism: although silvopastoralism appears to be a relevant way to manage large forests areas in the northern Mediterranean region, knowledge pertaining to silvopastoralism is distributed between foresters and pastoralists, with a lack of shared knowledge making joint action difficult. The consensus about the need of knowledge hybridisation, however, is not enough to make it happen and a whole field of research investigates the methods which can be used to create shared knowledge. This paper studies one of these methods - the participation of experts in modelling - used in a French research development program to design a technical support tool for silvopastoralism. After having described the modelling process conducted by forestry and pastoralists experts, it presents the conceptual silvopastoralism model they produced and analyses the shared knowledge - especially intermediary concepts and expert typologies - it contains. The paper finally outlines the conditions needed for the participation of experts in modelling to create shared knowledge, its limitations in generating quantitative expertise and discusses how the knowledge created can be shared with a wider audience.