Epicentar Interantional together with Initiative for Agricultural Development of Kosovo (IADK) were contracted by SKAT consulting for the Swiss-funded Integrated Water Resources Management in Kosovo Program that aims to build long-lasting water resources management capacities at national and river basin levels in line with Kosovo’s socio-economic and political priorities, as well as the needs of future sustainable development. It aims to help replace the current fragmented approach with a more comprehensive and highly participatory approach of managing water resources at river basin scale, aligned with the principles of IWRM and the EU Water Framework Directive (EU WFD).
The main objective of this assignment is to develop and support the implementation of activities aiming at prototyping approaches and practices for reducing the pressures from diffuse pollution from agriculture in selected areas of Kosovo18. This will be based on a thorough analytical process aiming at quantifying the pressures and risks associated with diffuse pollution from agriculture, as well as prioritization (of crops, areas and target farmer groups and other agriculture stakeholders) based on the application of a number of social, economic and environmental criteria.
The assignment involves the design and implementation of a grants programme for farmers, including pre-selection of farmers, design and delivery of specialized trainings, assessing of the newly acquired knowledge of trainees in selection of grantees, support to negotiations with grant recipients on the type of support to be provided by the Program, hands-on training/field activities targeting grantees, evaluation of results of implementation, summary of les- sons learnt and advice on future related activities.
Current contributons and findings:
EPICENTAR together with It’s partners and key experts developed a full functioning survey with set of questions that include five main topics that are crucial for the success of this project. The five main topics of the survey are as follows.
• Structure of the farm and the agricultural practices
• Fertigation
• Irrigation
• Livestock
• Protection
The way the survey was structured gave a detailed analysis about the current state of the farmers in Kosovo and their practices when it comes to irrigation and how that may lead to pollution. The survey was done with the help of our key experts in the fields of livestock, irrigation, and protection. The survey was conducted mostly with in person interviews, with the amount of crop production farmers interviewed being 300, and farmers deal with livestock being 60. The survey was done by trained professionals on the field assisting the interviewee with the questions. This survey was designed in EPICENTAR’S own ES-PAI software.
In a workshop conducted on September 10th, the team of IADK jointly with team and experts from EPI Centar (North Macedonia) went through the data collected and processed from the survey, mainly focusing their attention into main indicators that has impact and pressure on environment (nutrition, pesticide and water use). The team generated a short report for the selected crops which will be considered for the project intervention