Happy Seeder

Especially for smaller farms, the investment costs of these technologies may be prohibitive. Municipalities could therefore procure them and rent them to farmers at a subsidized price or provide them without charge, as was done in India (DA&FW 2018). In Morocco, the World Bank supported a project, the “Plan Maroc Vert,” which introduced such technologies in a bid to increase efficiency and reduce burning in the agriculture sector (World Bank 2014).

Raising Awareness

Raising awareness about air pollution and the damage it does is important and increases the demand for cleaner air. To effectively tackle the

BOX 3.15

Reusing Crop Residues as Fertilizer with the Happy Seeder

The Happy Seeder is an agricultural device that cuts crop residues, sows seeds into the soil, and deposits the sown crop residues over the area with the sown seeds as a natural fertilizer. By recycling crop residues in this way, farmers have less incentive to burn them, and stubble burning is reduced.

The environmental and economic effects of a range of in situ management practices were assessed in India, and the Happy Seeder was associated with the largest potential of reducing air pollution caused by burning stubbles. Use of the Happy Seeder instead of burning would reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by more than 78 percent. This would significantly reduce agriculture’s contribution to overall GHG emissions in India and lower social costs in terms of particulate air pollution (Shyamsundar et al. 2019).

Systems using technology like the Happy Seeder can improve profits by 10–20 percent compared with farming practices involving burning. The higher profits stem from slightly higher yields and lower input costs for land preparation (Shyamsundar et al. 2019). This investigation shows the potential to gain air quality while simultaneously enhancing economic profits for farmers using innovative technologies like the Happy Seeder, and one of the authors stresses the potential for scaling up the adoption of such programs (CIMMYT 2019).

The Indian government has substantially increased subsidies for the in situ residue management (DA&FW 2018) and provides needed tools such as the Happy Seeder at low costs to farmers in an attempt to combat agricultural fires at the end of the harvesting season. With the scheme, which involves subsidies amounting to US$75 million, farms making up a total area of around 0.8 million hectares have been able to use the Happy Seeder technology in northwestern states of India. Scaling up the figures, it is estimated that direct farmer benefits amounted to US$131 million within one year.

problem of air pollution regarding its adverse effects on human life, it is imperative to raise residents’ knowledge and awareness. Although most of the measures are based on the premise that governments want to tackle the issue of air pollution, it is also crucial to nurture the general population’s demand for such interventions. Furthermore, the dissemination of such information gives residents a better understanding of why some measures to curb air pollution are taken. This lends more legitimacy and credibility to the governments’ actions while simultaneously giving residents a way of monitoring the progress and the means to have some kind of checks and balances over government actions in this respect.

Properly informing residents about the current state of the air is an important step to take, but it necessitates the expansion of existing ground monitoring systems. To raise awareness about air pollution and its adverse effects, regular (day-to-day or real-time) monitoring of air pollutants and dissemination of this information to the public is an important precondition. As shown in the previous section, Middle East and North Africa economies often lack the appropriate infrastructure, in the form of ground monitoring stations. Monitoring stations to measure PM2.5 concentrations are especially scarce in the region, hampering the dissemination of information about the most harmful pollutant not only to the public but also to researchers who conduct scientific studies based upon this information.

The region’s economies have been starting initiatives to raise awareness about environmental issues in general as well as about air pollution in particular. Awareness on air pollution, its sources, and impacts has been considered low in the region. For example, through the subsidization of energy, raising energy efficiency has been perceived as rather unimportant by the general population given the low prices (El Khoury 2012). However, some countries in the Middle East and North Africa have initiated several campaigns to raise awareness about the various sources of air pollution (box 3.16).

Raising awareness about polluted air necessitates well-planned communication strategies, which can help build a broad base of support for abatement policies. To reach the general population with information about air pollution, it is crucial to broadly disseminate information about current trends in air quality as well as the potential effects of low quality; this information should be clear and easily understood. This can come in various forms such as introducing a traffic light system that indicates varying degrees of air pollution, as is done in Abu Dhabi (discussed earlier in box 3.2). To reach a broad base of residents effectively, information should also be spread via different channels (for example, newspapers, billboards, TV, radio, and social media) together with material