Conservation Agriculture adoption in Paraguay Essay

Conservation Agriculture adoption in Paraguay - Essay Example The sustainable natural resource management project (PMRN) was introduced to the farmers to enhance the conservation of agriculture in Paraguay. The case study involves 17,000 farmers whose main reason was helping them improve on agriculture productivity using a number of strategies. Agriculture production in Paraguay was poor and had declined due to the policies that discouraged good agricultural production in the colonial periods. The management took an exercise whereby they analyzed characteristics of farmers in order to understand some of the factors that led to poor results of agricultural produce in Paraguay. One of the identified factors was that, a small rise in business caused by liberation together with market-oriented trade, resulted to degradation and loss of fertility in the lands. Competitive markets lead the farmers to increase their productivity as they previously used crude methods such as burning of land and deforestation to increase the land for production. As a re sult, soil erosion, decreased forest reserves and loss of organic matter to the soil result to water and soil erosion, low productivity of the land, high levels of carbon dioxide and water pollution from chemical and pesticide use led to a decline in productivity. The government of Paraguay had to adopt the non-tillage farming system, proven as a success in other countries such as Argentina and Brazil. The most relevant group depending on agriculture is the small holders in Paraguay representing 43 percent of the total amount of farmers (Knowler & Bradshaw 2007).