By Laurie Goering
KATOWICE, Poland, Dec 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Farming in the Jacuipe Basin of Brazil’s parched northeast has never been easy. But rising temperatures and a halving of rainfall over the decades mean it now rarely pays.
“Everybody is saying the climate is changing (and) it’s getting more difficult to produce,” said Daniele Cesano, a renewable energy developer whose business interests have taken a twist: trying to make cows and cacti pay in a warming world.
Cesano works with more than 100 struggling farmers in the northeast to find new feed for their dairy cattle and new sources of income, while smoothing fluctuations in milk supply.
His business aims to make farmers – and the region’s milk supply system – better able to cope with harsher weather linked to climate change.
So far the MAIS (Smart and Sustainable Agro-climate Model) experiment has proven promising enough that it is set to be expanded next year to similarly drought-hit Sicily and Spain.
“I’ve come to this with the perspective of a project developer. It’s something that doesn’t exist in agriculture,” Cesano said at the U.N. climate talks in Poland last week.
“Conventional agricultural is dominated by a conventional package. If you produce soy, all these multinational companies sell you what you need” – and that stops farmers developing because costs are high and incomes low, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We tried to come up with a different, sustainable package,” said Cesano, who runs Adapta Group, a social enterprise working on climate change adaptation.
