Farming and livestock rearing are the main livelihood for over 80 percent of households in Ebonyi State and Nigeria at large (Egwu, 2015) and about 90% being smallholder farmers with an average farmland size of 1.5 to 3.0 hectares (Ebonyi State Agriculture Policy – 2010). According to the National Bureau of Statistics report of Quarter 3 2018, agriculture contributed 29.25% to the GDP of Nigeria. No doubt, in Ebonyi State, agriculture remains a substantial user of environmental services including water, forest, pastures and soil nutrients. Hence, intensive land use requires appropriate soil management policies and practices in order to avoid environmental degradation.
Climate Resilience Sustainable Agriculture (CRSA) is based on the concept of sustainable agriculture to ensure food security. It is the science and practice of agroecology and the recognition of people’s right to food. It represents an effort to incorporate in agriculture the new challenges posed by climate change (like flooding, erosion, global warming) and its impacts on poor people’s lives (like land wastage, poor agricultural yield), and the design and implementation of site-specific adaptation strategies aimed at reducing vulnerabilities and increasing the resilience of smallholder farmers’ production systems. A striking importance of CRSA is seen in a report by ActionAid where they opined that “a study undertaken after the passage of Hurricane Mitch in Central America in 1998 – based on observations and field interviews among 360 rural communities in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua – show that farmers who practiced agricultural diversification such as agro-forestry, as well as soil coverage (mulch) and multi-cropping suffered less crop damage and economic losses and recovered more easily than their neighbours who depended on mono-cropping systems.” They all are encompassing importance of CRSA, and cannot be over emphasised, as no country or region in the world is exempted from the challenges and impacts of climate change.
Therefore, keying into Governor David Nweze Umahi’s vision of making Ebonyi the number one non-oil State economy in the world, Participatory Development Alternatives (PDA) has been carrying out series of advocacies and trainings of agricultural stakeholders in Ebonyi State on the importance for the adoption of CRSA in the State. PDA also initiated the need for the State to develop her own Climate Change Policy and Action Plan in order to effectively mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change especially on agriculture. Sequel to this, PDA wrote and won a proposal to ActionAid Nigeria on the need for them to support the development of Ebonyi State Climate Change Policy and Action Plan. Currently, the State Climate Change Policy and Action Plan are on the verge of completion.