The PDD has been put up for the Global Stakeholder Process at the UNFCCC website from 12 October to 25 November 2007.
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The Project has also been put up at the CCBA website for public comments from 17 October to 7 November 2007.
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Over the past 22 years, ADATS has invested Rs 93.8 million in the form of DLDP wages to undertake S&WC works on 71,551 acres of Coolie owned lands. But improving Coolie lands is not enough. However flat and level the fields may be, cultivation will still be at the mercy of erratic, spatial and unpredictable rainfall. The financial risk involved in dry land farming is far too big for small and poor peasant families to bear. Hard earned savings made from wage earnings are lost, family labour is wasted, and assets get disinvested. The emotional insecurity and mental agony are hard to describe. Coolie families need to shift away from overtly rainfall dependent Field Crops to hardy Tree Crops (unlike crops in the stand, trees do not need timely rains).
In order to make this shift, an investment of more than € 1,000 per Hectare is needed — 69% of which on watering arrangements. The total volume of investment required is well beyond the scope of NGO funding. However, the village Coolie Sangha Units possess enough social capital to set up the collective entity that can effectively implement a very good dry land horticulture project in the form of an A/R CDM activity.
The need to shift from Field Crops to Tree Crops has been thoroughly discussed, over and over again, bottom-up in all the village CSUs, for the past 12 years. The Bagepalli CDM Reforestation Project is conceived as the strategy to make this major shift from unsustainable subsistence farming to a more eco-balanced practice possible. All Coolie Sangha Members, including stalwarts, women, youth, landless families, and even children participated in these discussions.
This A/R CDM is now under validation as a CDM Project. Simultaneously, we are trying to get certification under the Climate & Community Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA). This document captures the community biodiversity aspects of the programme in a good and holistic manner, completely rejecting the inevitability of mainstream developments in land use.
We are aware that finding buyers for A/R CERs is going to be a problem, especially the lCERs that we have opted for. But a CDM Project for lCERs, combined with CCBA certification, would result in the A/R lCERs becoming more valuable. We would also be able to tap the voluntary market for VERs.