Climate Change and Food Supply Chains in Uttarakhand: How ICTs can help? Sapna A.Narula * Asstt.

Professor, Faculty of Policy and Planning, TERI University, New Delhi, India

Climate change presents yet another challenge to the food security concerns of the country besides the already existing chronic problems. While overall food production may not be threatened, those least able to cope will likely bear additional adverse impacts such as horticulture. Besides bio-physical impacts on the food chains such as quantitative as well as qualitative losses, weed-pest challenges, land soil-water resources, climate change may cause economic impacts such as decline in yields and production, reduced marginal GDP from agricultural fluctuation in world market prices, changes in geographical distribution of trade regions .Climate change is likely to pose challenge to the food system resulting into resource scarcity, changes in crop acreage, production and productivity, land use pattern and livelihood diversification. This can further put

pressure on marketing system resulting into price distortions and hence threatening food and nutritional security. This effect of climate change is more pronounced particularly in Himalayan states such as Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, where the change in land use practices (water diversions, deforestation, local agriculture practices, industrialization etc.) has caused large scale impacts on the watersheds of the region. Hence, there is a need to estimate the impact of climate change on agriculture and food systems. There is a need to develop and implement local adaptation strategies in order to cope with the changing climate around us. These include alternate livelihood options, research and use of new and better cropping patterns, use of technology through development of early warning systems etc. Various stakeholders ranging from local communities, to academic institutions, civil society organizations and Government bodies and policy makers need to work in an integrated manner to make their regions "climate ready.

This paper was submitted for eWORLDFORUM 2011 conference

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The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of climate change on agriculture supply chain in Uttarakhand. The study aims to find answers to the following questions. How much are the quantitative as well as qualitative losses at various stages of agriculture supply chain in Uttarakhand? What are the productionrelated and market related constraints in the food system? What is the present and likely impact of climate change on the crop acreage, crop productivity, resource use, socio-economy and livelihoods of the communities? What are the possible implications of these factors on the agricultural marketing and supplies and the income of the farmers? What climate adaptation and mitigation strategies should be developed to have climate ready food supply systems in the state in light of NAPCC ( National Action Plan on Climate change) ?

This paper was submitted for eWORLDFORUM 2011 conference

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