Making a difference

Globally agriculture uses around 70% of water taken from rivers, rising to 95% in arid countries such as Pakistan. The majority of this is used on 4 -5 water intensive crops – cotton, sugarcane, rice, wheat and pasture for cattle. Some 2.3 million tonnes of pesticides are used annually and this figure is increasing. In Pakistan pesticide use for cotton farming accounts for 50% of all pesticides used with major health impacts on cotton farming families and water carried downstream for social and environmental use.more

The chemicals we use are poison”
a story on the Farmer Field School’s approach, its success and implications

Since 2004, WWF-Pakistan has been working on agriculture in the district of Bahawalpur along with its local partner, the Kissan Welfare Association (KWA). Farmer facilitators who are members of KWA have been establishing Farmer Field Schools (FFS), which have been very successful in spreading awareness amongst small farmers in the cotton growing belt of Southern Punjab. Once a week, farmers meet for around 3 hours to study a selected field. Around 25 farmers participate, with usually two facilitators. The farmers are split into groups of 5 and they are asked to prepare a presentation on their findings with charts and drawings of what they’ve learnt (many farmers are illiterate, hence the need for images).more