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ccording to an Asian Development Bank report issued from Manila last week, Asia and the Pacific face a food '€œstorm'€ in the coming decades unless they take decisive steps to respond to a host of pressures on food supplies '€” including from climate change.

Climate change is a major food security challenge in Asia with more than 60 percent of the population, or 2.2 billion people, relying on agriculture and food production for income.

It is estimated that developing Asia'€™s farms are expected to be hit hard by climate change; the production losses will be 2-18 percent for irrigated rice and 2-45 percent for irrigated wheat by 2050. Furthermore, available water supplies are shrinking in the face of increasing demand from consumers and competition from the agriculture and energy sectors.

Around 70 percent of Asia'€™s surface water is used for agriculture, but much of it is used inefficiently.

Many water-stressed countries lose large volumes of treated water through leakages in water supply systems. Asia is running out of water for the future. Also, rising temperatures, increasing droughts and floods and other weather extremes are more worrying threats to food security.

It merits a mention that in Paris later this year, global leaders will meet at a Conference of Parties to thrash out a deal to reduce dangerous greenhouse gas emissions and to find a solution to the pressing financial needs of billions of people, smallholder women farmers among them, on the frontline in the fight to adapt to climate change.

In view of the above and based on techniques, knowledge and innovations developed by the farmers themselves, agro-ecology is a major alternative to the industrial agricultural model.

If sufficiently supported by political and economic decision makers, it could become a very powerful weapon to fight against both food insecurity and climate change.

Khan Faraz
Dawn/ANN/Peshawar