WEBINAR: Diana Seecharran on resilient agriculture

On Monday, 23rd of September 2024, the PECS working group on collaborative governance and management hosted another webinar: Michael Schoon invited Diana Seecharran to talk about ‘Resilience of Guyana’s Coastal Rice-based System‘:

The world’s coastal agroecosystem faces the dual challenges of producing more food to meet global demand and confronting escalating threats from various shocks and stresses. Guyana’s rice sector provides food security, supports livelihoods, and contributes to the national economy. Approximately 200,000 hectares of rice is grown in the coastal region. Resilience of Guyana’s coastal rice-based socio-ecological system can be understood through its robustness, adaptiveness, and transformability. We used qualitative approaches, in the form of semi-structured interviews (n=100), to analyze the resilience of this system. Our findings show that despite shocks and stresses from high input costs, inclement weather and poor paddy price, the rice-based SES of Guyana is consistently recovering and boosting production. The nature of these shocks shape how farmers adapt. Faced with rising input costs, farmers either pay more for inputs or reduce the amount of inputs used. Most farmers used their own resources to recover from crop loss due to flooding, while some farmers were still recovering. Farmers adapt to changes mainly by investing in technology such as acquiring new farm machinery or planting new high yielding rice varieties that are less susceptible to lodging. Farmers depend heavily on farm equipment suppliers and the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) to supply the technology. Although most farmers plan to continue rice cultivation, they may be forced to stop if disturbances become too frequent or too large, which can potentially result in transformation of the rice system to pastures or for infra-structure development. To be resilient, there needs to be significant investment in flood management and regulation of the price of inputs.

Diana Seecharran is a lecturer in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Guyana. She has an MSc in Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Development and PhD in Innovation in Global Development. She teaches Ecology, Natural Resources Management, and Coastal Zone management. Her main research fields include work on how cultural practices and beliefs influence environmental perceptions and attitudes and affect resource use, sustainable tourism development, farmers adaptations to climate change, resilience of coastal rice systems.

You can listen to the recording of the webinar here.

All other past webinars hosted on behalf of the PECS Collaborative Working Group are available here.

 

Text by Michael Schoon/ Upload by Johanna Hofmann