And the political shape-shifting of the last few years has confused generalisations about which party the marginal, rain-shy voter, and the poor, sodden pedestrian, are likely to favour.
"The dry season over the southern Amazon is already marginal for maintaining rain forest," Fu said.
What our results suggest is that when the atmospheric situation is marginal — will it rain or won't it?
(And yes, in the Global North it can produce just as much food per acre as conventional agriculture. In the marginal and fragile rain-fed lands of the Global South, it outperforms conventional agriculture in productivity, energy use, resilience and smallholder income).
The positive aspect of irrigation is that, by intensifying food and forage production in the most favourable lands, it can allow a country to reduce excessive pressure on marginal lands now under rain-fed cultivation or grazing.
To avoid competition for prime agricultural areas, lands that receive adequate rainfall but are marginal due to highly variable timing of rain are potentially ideal locations to grow drought-tolerant biofuels.
"Rain-fed agriculture in marginal areas in semiarid and subhumid regions is mostly at risk," Mr. Diouf said on a visit to the southern Indian city of Chennai.
Lentil, however, is commonly grown in developing countries on marginal lands with poor soil in rain-fed environments [14].
But, on the other hand, many of Namibia's rural population eke out an impoverished existence on marginal land that's wholly dependent on rain.
Acid rain, they said, was at best a marginal problem and primarily due to natural phenomena.
Two backfills, referred to as marginal and high quality backfill, along with three representative annual rain events are examined.
