Push-Pull Technology in Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Strategy for Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract

The SSA region is bearing the brunt effect of climate change as a result of over-reliance on agriculture, poor farming practices such as deforestation, and intensive use of agrochemicals in production. As the outcome, the land is degraded, and natural resources are depleted instigating a decline in soil fertility, low rainfall, high temperature, and low crop production. As mitigation, several strategies have been mooted including organic farming, conservation agriculture, and regenerative agriculture. These are the sustainable agricultural practices or climate-smart agricultural strategies as they are eco-system friendly. UPSCALE project to promote sustainable farming is upscaling PPT technology as an IPM, and organic system. It integrates the cereal or vegetable crop with a forage crop such as desmodium which repels pests such as stem borer and fall armyworm and it also suppresses Striga weed germination while brachiaria attracts stem borer moth from the crop. The technology has a great impact on crop productivity, allows fodder production for livestock, conserves the soil, and improves soil moisture content among others. The technology reduces external commercial inputs use, therefore, it is affordable for smallholder farmers. Despite the technology being a climate-smart strategy, it faces challenges such as scarcity of the desmodium seed in upscaling, weak government policies to support PPT and poor information dissemination. Therefore, it is recommended that different stakeholders need to be engaged in transdisciplinary research to support the adoption of PPT as a climate-smart agricultural strategy in the region.