119. Despite the availability of research information about SLM options, there is limited adoption of SLM practices at scale by producers in developing countries. For examples, NT farming is only adopted on about 90 Mha of cropland in North and South America and Australia. It is not adopted in developing countries of SSA and SA, where it is needed the most to control erosion, conserve water, sequester C and recycle plant nutrients. There is also a limited adoption of INM, drip irrigation and other SLM practices described in this report. Constraints to SLM adoption can be physical (soil, rainfall, temperature, drought, terrain), economic (lack of resources availability for input, low income, poor terms of trade), social (gender, etc), environmental (climate change, pests and pathogens, dust storms) and institutional (land tenure, access to market, extension services).
120. Land degradation tends to be an inherently complex problem to analyze since conditions vary tremendously not only from region to region, but also from plot to plot within a farm. This makes a complete understanding of farmers' decision-making processes difficult. Consequently, this complexity may affect the rate and scale of adoption of recommended SLM practices and the associated C sequestration. For example, it might make sense for a household to find it in their interest to conserve one of their plots and not another. Moreover, there are substantial non-linearities, both in the underlying physical relationships (e.g., yield may be insensitive to land degradation over a range of degradation, then respond quickly once a threshold is reached, then again be insensitive), and in the farmers’ decision-making process (e.g., various factors may not be binding unless other factors are not binding as in the case of tenure only becoming a potential constraint to adoption of a recommended SLM practice if the practice is profitable; but if the practice is not profitable, it might appear that tenure does not matter, but it might begin to matter if a new, profitable, SLM practice is introduced).
121. Poverty is obviously one of the factors that determine whether or not land users adopt SLM and conserve land. However, the relationship between poverty on one hand and land degradation/ land conservation on the other, is unlikely to be un-ambiguous. It is true that poor households that depend entirely on their land may mine the soil for their sustenance, but there is no general rule that the poor tend to conserve less and degrade more. Indeed the impact of poverty on SLM/land conservation decisions is unlikely to be as simple as is often assumed. What is clear is that those SLM practices that enhance livelihoods and reduce poverty may have a higher chance of being adopted widely.
122. Whether SLM practices are adopted or not depends on their expected returns and profitability relative to the other options available to the producers/farmers. Thus introduction of cash crops (such as orchards and fruit trees) can be an important incentive to scale up SLM practices (Scoones and Toulmin, 1999). The profitability of SLM depends, like the profitability of all other investments, on the whole range of product and factor prices that farmers face. The relationship is certainly not unambiguous. Increasing output prices might lead to more degradation (intensive production becomes more profitable) or to more conservation (if production is more valuable, it makes more sense to try to protect it), or to both, depending on specific local circumstances. Even if a particular SLM practice is profitable, farmers may be unable or unwilling to adopt it because of particular constraints such as insecure tenure or lack of credit. Removal of such barriers may in fact allow the wide scale adoption of SLM practices especially if they are profitable to the producers/farmers.
123. Of course, when there are SLM externalities, there is no reason to assume that privately optimal land conservation decisions will also be socially optimal. But if SLM externalities are the main concern, an intensive effort to persuade farmers to adopt SLM practices may not be helpful since conservation generally tends to be under-adopted from a social perspective, especially when it produces positive externalities. The key in such cases is to develop processes to get farmers to internalize the externalities through mechanisms such as Payments for Ecosystem Services. Such payments may help speed the scaling up of SLM in various parts of the world. To this end, the Latin America and the Caribbean region has pioneered systems of payments for ecosystem services that are aimed at promoting and scaling up specific SLM practices (CIPAV, 2004). Indeed there are on-going payments for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration, water retention, improved soil productivity, prevention of landslides and erosion, biodiversity conservation, etc) based on specific SLM practices (e.g., improved pastures with more than 5-30 trees/ha, riparian zone rehabilitation, shade grown coffee, diversified fruit tree plantation, fodder trees and shrubs, etc) that are being scaled up in the region (e.g., Costa Rica, Colombia, Nicaragua), and in fact these experiences provide a good model for learning and replication in other parts of the world.
124. In addition to the factors discussed above, several specific reasons for slow or low adoption of SLM options include: (i) lack of identification of soil-specific or site-specific technologies, (ii) little awareness of the commonsense based fundamental principles governing sustainable management of soils, (iii) inadequate consideration of SLM synergies and trade-offs, (iv) inappropriate policies, and (iv) lack of specific action plans. These reasons are elaborated below.
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