COASTAL FARMERS’ KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE AND PRACTICE REGARDING CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE

Abstract

Climate smart agriculture (CSA) aims to improve food security, help communities adapt to climate change and contribute to climate change mitigation by adopting appropriate practices. The basic premises of the knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) surveys are that knowledge forms attitude, and that both knowledge and attitude are the building blocks for practice. The study therefore aims to assess the extent of knowledge, attitude and practice of farmers regarding climate smart agriculture and to explore the contributions of the selected characteristics of the coastal farmers to their knowledge, attitude and practice. Data were collected using an interview schedule from 354 coastal farmers under 3 districts namely, Khulna, Bagerhat and Satkhira through Multistage Random Sampling Method during December, 2021 to March, 2022. To explore the contribution of the predictor variables to the outcome variables, full model regression analysis was employed. It was found that about 14.13% of the farmers had poor knowledge, 75.14% had medium-level knowledge and 10.73% had high level knowledge on CSA. The highest proportion (61.01%) of the farmer had medium favourable attitude towards CSA as compared to 18.65% and 20.34% having low favourable and high favourable attitude towards CSA respectively. About 57.91% of the coastal farmers had medium practice followed by 22.88% had high and 19.21% had low practice of CSA. Among the 19 identified CSA practices “using of thread pipe/plastic pipe for irrigation” ranked first and indicated highest extent of use by the coastal farmers. The 2 position in the rank order was “cultivation of salinity resistant and high yielding crop varieties,”. Farmers‟ education, annual agricultural income, extension contact, decision making ability, benefit obtained from CSA had significant positive contributions and problem faced in CSA had negative contribution to their knowledge on CSA. Again, farmers‟ education, annual agricultural income, extension contact, training exposure, access to market and benefit obtained from CSA had significant positive contribution whereas farm size had negative contributions to their attitude towards CSA. Furthermore, farmers‟ education, annual agricultural income, extension contact, training exposure and benefit obtained from CSA had positive significant contribution to their practice of CSA. The topmost problem of coastal farmers was associated with economic problem; „higher cost of inputs‟ ranked 1 st and „low price of produced crops‟ ranked 2 xvii

nd nd . For the fully implementation of CSA requires solving associated problems and making available appropriate technologies to the farmers.