Mounting evidence points to the fact that climate change is already affecting agriculture and food security, which will therefore make the challenge of ending hunger, achieving food security, improving nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture even more difficult (FAO 2016). Through Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13, the 2030 Agenda calls for strengthened resilience and adaptive capacity in response to natural hazards and climate-related disasters globally. It calls on all countries to establish and operationalize an integrated strategy – one that includes food security and nutrition – to improve their ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change, and to foster climate resilience and lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without jeopardizing food production (FAO et al. 2018). Climate Smart Agriculture may help achieve higher production with reduced emissions. This would have been the simple answer to climate change impacts on agriculture, if the issues were simple. But they rarely are. Extension and Advisory Services (EAS)i need to support farmers in addressing some of these concerns, but their capacities need to be significantly enhanced to play these roles. This brief discusses some of these issues and draws significantly on the South Asia Policy Dialogue organized jointly by Agricultural Extension in South Asia (AESA), IRRI South Asia Regional Centre (ISARC), the Centre for Research on Innovation and Science Policy (CRISP) and the Sri Lanka Network of Agricultural Extension and Advisory Services (NAEASSL) at Colombo, Sri Lanka, on 5 October 2018. Several policy makers, donors, and key extension professionals engaged in promotion of climate smart agriculture in South Asian countries participated in this dialogue.
During the last six years (2013-2019), the Agricultural Extension in South Asia (AESA) Network has served as a platform for collating the voices, insights, concerns, and experiences of people in the extension sphere of South Asia. Diverse professionals shared their concerns on the present and future of Extension and Advisory Services (EAS) in the form of blog conversations for AESA. Together, all of these individuals who are involved, interested and passionate about EAS, discussed ways to move beyond some of the seemingly intransigent problems that are hindering the professionalization of EAS. Nevertheless, these blogs also take the time to celebrate and salute the signs of promising new beginnings. This publication is an effort on our part to compile 100 such conversations on EAS, which were originally published as AESA blogs, starting in February 2013, into this book. Several of our readers have been asking us to assemble all these reflections into a single document so that these are available as a good reference document for a wide spectrum of actors involved in EAS – scholars, practitioners, trainers, faculty, innovation intermediaries, mentors, leaders and managers – all of whom are involved in driving agricultural and rural transformation.
This paper reviews the extension curricula currently followed in universities in India at different levels in light of the new challenges faced by farmers, the new capacities needed among extension personnel to address these challenges, new trends in the job market and advances made in the field of extension. Apart from analyzing the existing mechanisms available for curriculum reform in India, the paper also reviews the literature on extension curriculum reforms elsewhere including recent efforts by the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS) to develop and promote the New Extensionist Learning Kit (NELK), a collection of learning resources in specific areas where capacities of extension professionals need to be enhanced.
