To see is to believe: Truth or myth about youth, agriculture and climate change

This year’s Climate and Society class is out in the field (or lab or office) completing a summer internship or thesis. They’ll be documenting their experiences one blog post at a time. Read on to see what they’re up to.

An-Chi Ho, C+S ’18

Youth, agriculture, and climate change might not seem like a logical pairing, but they fit better than you might expect. The connection is also really important. Climate change has significant and direct impacts on agriculture, and young people—the future of agriculture—are expected to participate more in this sector and make agriculture more adaptive and resilient to climate risks. Several international agencies like the Food and Agricultural Organization and the African Union have declared the importance of youth engagement in agriculture and committed to supporting this issue.

My summer internship is at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) working on the research at the intersection of these three topics. IFPRI has been investigating gender in the same context for years, and now, they want to expand their research to include young people as well. If you simply Google the three words together, you’ll find this is a topic emerging within the past two years. Your Google search might make it seem that this research is straightforward, showing that youth are vulnerable to climate change or that technology could entice youth to adapt to climate change’s impacts on agriculture. Sounds reasonable, right? However, after a more in-depth search, you’ll find it’s hard to find concrete evidence to support these arguments. That is, the statements on the internet might only be anecdotes or even myths.

Youth at CCAFS climate-smart farms in Western Kenya. (Source: flickr/C.Schubert)

The same problem also existed for gender issue several years ago. At that time, no one really knew how different climate change impacts would play out for male vs. female farmers, but people tended to intuitively think that women would suffer disproportionately from climate change. Researchers conducted numerous surveys and interviews and analyzed these data both qualitatively and quantitatively. In the end, we can finally discern how accurate those initial thoughts were.

Studies show that women farmers face both challenges and opportunities from climate change. For example, women usually have fewer or lower-value assets and less access to resources, making them less adaptive to the changing environment than men. On the other hand, male migration from the rural area as an adaptive response to climate change could increase females’ decision making power in the household, raising their social status. This research shows that our original supposition might be wrong sometimes even though it sounds persuasive, which is why research into the impact of climate change on young farmers is so important.

It is a prevailing thought that youth are not interested in agriculture nowadays due to the high risk and low social status that come with it, and climate change even further decreases food security, making agriculture among the least appealing career choices to the young generation. To seek other opportunities, a majority of them migrate to urban areas, but those ventures can end in failure due to limited white collar jobs or lack of skills. As a result, these young people are stuck in the middle: they’re not willing to go back to agriculture nor can they survive in the cities, leading to the high unemployment rate.

To address this problem, governments, scholars and stakeholders have been discussing how to make agriculture more attractive to youth. Some believe that adopting new technology and innovation to enhance the climatic resilience of agriculture can be a way to bring the young generation back to farming. Some think that youth can stimulate agricultural evolution because they are more willing to change and take risks. Others claim that land ownership is the major problem blocking youth from agriculture involvement, so land constraints should be solved first. And these factors are just the tip of the iceberg.

Even though these beliefs all sound logical, we can’t assert their credibility until concrete evidence is found. Are young people really abandoning agriculture nowadays? Some studies have found examples to the contrary. Even if youth are tech savvy, is technology alone appealing enough to make them willing to embrace agriculture? Is the lack of land access really the major push factor or something else affects more? These are all research gaps waiting to be filled, and we’re still at the very beginning.