Climate Proofing of Malawi’s National Agriculture Policy, with Special Reference to Rice Production

Abstract

Climate change affects and is predicted to affect rice production in the future. This has implications on food and livelihood security, particularly for rural smallholder farmers in developing countries like Malawi. One of the responses to these implications is climate risk reduction, which is the integration of climatic risks into development projects, programmes and policies in a bid to reduce potential and actual impacts. Climate risk reduction can be streamlined into policies that guide development through climate-proofing which is the deliberate integration of climate threats and opportunities into a project, programme or policy. The overall objective of the study was to develop a crop-specific climate-proofing model for streamlining adaptation in the agriculture sector using rice as a case study. An analysis of climatic impacts on rice production and an assessment of whether Malawi’s guiding policy for the agriculture sector, the National Agriculture Policy 2016 effectively integrated climate change to a level satisfactory to reducing risks because of climate change across various temporal scales where done. Rice production was used as a case study. The study revealed that average rainfall in the area has a std dev 222.67 which varies beyond the expected 68% of deviation. Minimum temperatures also vary with the temperatures becoming cooler beyond -2 sigma. Maximum temperatures are increasing, with variations observed beyond 1 sigma. No significant impacts on rice production were established, (R2 = 0.110). The policy review showed that there was insignificant reference to climate change. Over 90% of factors had moderate linkage to 1 of the 5 themes developed to depict inclusion of climate proofing concepts. Other significant linkages with other themes were 38% and 52%. Less than 10% were strongly linked to any of the themes. KII to establish whether incorporation of climate change issues was deliberate found that inclusion of climate was more of a secondary goal. There were no specific strategies that were being implemented as a result of the policy in the study area despite there being evidence of various strategies towards dealing with the impacts. The policy does not deliberately include climate change issues that impacts on rice production which potentially increases the climatic risks on production. As a recommendation, the study suggested a proposed conceptual framework approach that can contribute to increasing incorporation of climate change in agricultural production as guided by national policies and thereby contributing to the reduction of the level of climate risk reduction in crop production, more specifically in rice production in the target district.