Agriculture In! (721 and counting...)

by Jeff Brez in Durban

Should agriculture be on the climate change agenda? What impact would this have? The ball is in the court of COP 17 attendees to assess the game changing impact of negotiations at COP 17 in Durban.

If you are at the COP – come to booth 18 to show your skill at getting ‘Agriculture In!’ 721 COP attendees have already played.

IFAD teamed up with the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU) to design the game and raise awareness on agriculture’s role in climate change at COP 17 in Durban.

‘Agriculture In’ is a ball game with 3 targets designed to address the significance of agriculture and how it can contribute to poverty reduction, food security, building resilience, and improving environmental outcomes including reducing GHG emissions.

The Targets:

• Green Climate Fund
• SBSTA Work Programme
• Mitigation Finance for Farmers

These are all opportunities for negotiators to ensure that the worlds 1 billion poor rural people, most of whom rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, benefit from climate finance.

“Poor smallholder farmers, typically women are on the front line of climate change impacts yet they don’t benefit enough from climate finance,” says Elwyn Grainger-Jones, Director of IFAD’s Environment and Climate Division, “climate finance can help scale up investments in sustainable agriculture and research that will help them adapt to changing weather conditions and contribute to global food security.”

“Agriculture is the foundation of most African economies and the most climate-sensitive sector so it is imperative that it forms part of the agenda at this year’s COP17,” said Ishmael Sunga, CEO of SACAU. “This game not only highlights that but also the specific areas of intervention such as the need for the establishment of Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) Work Program on Agriculture that covers both adaptation and mitigation and addresses the needs of African farmers.”

Journalists and all those attending the COP (especially negotiators!) are invited to test their ball skills while getting a better understanding of agriculture and its importance at stand 18 of the ICC/DEC.

Prizes allocated for winners name the many benefits for farmers and wider communities if agriculture is included: Improved Food Security, Lasting Poverty Reduction, Enhanced Biodiversity, Reduced GHG Emissions, More trees, More Resilient Livelihoods.

Making Climate-Smart “The New Normal in Agriculture"

by Jeff Brez in Durban

Anticipation is building that sectoral text under the LCA may lead to the approval by the Parties of a work programme under SBSTA for agriculture here in Durban. The demand on the ground from farmers communities and governments for climate-smart agriculture as a means to tackle poverty reduction, food security, climate resilience, improved environmental outcomes and reduced emissions is already strong and continues to grow. Many feel that a SBSTA Work Programme would help agriculture take early action to determine the long-term investments needed to transform agriculture to meet future challenges.

Tina Joemat-Pettersson, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of South Africa, opened the Agriculture and Rural Development Day, this past Saturday, and told journalists, “Agriculture must adapt to a changing climate and at the same time contribute to reducing emissions. We have a huge dichotomy between smallholder and large-scale farming, but… smallholder farming is now also being seen as an opportunity for food security as well as economic growth… not just as a social development programme.”

Governments and development institutions, including IFAD, the World Bank, FAO, and others together with other partners have made great strides in promoting climate-smart approaches that meet the needs of farmers and poor rural people. There is also a call for climate finance to benefit smallholders and the rural poor – where poverty is concentrated – through both adaptation and mitigation financing. It is hoped that the Green Climate Fund, in this sense, will prioritize financing for approaches that reward “multiple benefit outcomes” (aka “co-benefits” in negotiation language): poverty reduction, food security, climate resilience and emissions reductions through climate-smart agriculture.

Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of IFAD, The U.N.’s rural poverty agency, delivered a keynote address at ARDD urging negotiators to recognize that “Government officials once believed that they had to choose between feeding their people and protecting nature. Now they realize that they can and must do both.” He continued, “negotiators need to recognize the critical importance of enabling smallholder farmers to become more resilient to climate change and to grow more food in environmentally sustainable, climate-smart ways,” he added.

The world’s 500 million smallholder farms will have to significantly increase their production and will have to do it in the face of more frequent extreme weather events and shifting weather conditions brought by climate change. The development community must continue its efforts to come together with governments to make climate smart practices the new normal in agriculture

“Out in their fields, farmers are already adapting to the changing climate and realizing that they must respect and preserve the environment if they are to feed their families and produce a surplus for markets,” Nwanze said. “And policymakers at the country level are citing the impact of extreme weather on their crop production and asking for climate change to be addressed in rural development projects.”

Simple maths draws the connection between climate change poverty reduction and agriculture into stark relief. 1.4 billion people live today in extreme poverty, under US$1.25 per day. One billion of them live in rural areas, and the majority of those depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. IFAD’s experience with climate smart agriculture in 40 countries, through 22 loans and 15 country-specific and regional grants is just one testament to this.

Climate-Smart Smallholder Products: a new product label ?

by Jeff Brez, from COP 17 in Durban

At Agriculture and Rural Development Day (ARDD) at COP 17 in Durban, IFAD teamed up with Cafédirect and Fairtrade Africa to offer a learning event on “Getting Climate-Smart Smallholder Products to Market.” The case study was based on an IFAD public private partnership in São Tomé and Principe with the Government, communities, Cafédirect and other private sector companies. Read about the project, the objectives of the event, the moderator and speakers here.

The two main questions posed by moderator extraordinaire Matthew Wyatt of DFID, were simple. Can smallholders offer climate-smart products? Will consumers pay for them? He led a lively and focused discussion - thanks Matthew!

Cafédirect’s Wolfgang Weinmann said, “Access for smallholder farmers to added-value markets like climate-smart and ethical products clearly is the way forward. Plus, of course delivering high quality and absolute traceability. Our partnership with IFAD has been fantastic and allowed us to ensure, in a relatively short time span of 2 years, a great product for the UK market that delivers tangible economic, social and environmental impact for the São Tomé and Principe smallholder cocoa farmers.”

There was consensus that there is potential for smallholders to benefit from a “climate-smart” label , because:

1. Smallholders are natural providers of climate-smart products
2. Niche market opportunities such as organics and Fairtrade are bringing premiums to smallholders in São Tomé and Principe, where cocoa exports have increased ten-fold since 2004 through public-private partnerships
3. While climate smart smallholder agriculture is an undefined concept for consumers, they may be willing to pay more for a “climate smart” product if they better understand the full benefits to farmers , the environment and to them as well

Scaling up of a “climate smart concept ” would depend on:

1. Providing smallholders with knowledge sharing, technical support, and access to finance and markets
2. Developing metrics to demonstrate to consumers the benefits that accrue to farmers and to environment
3. Development and positioning of a “climate smart” label under either an existing product label or on its own

Nokutula Mhene of Fairtrade Africa was cautiously optimistic, “The role of consumers in influencing agricultural practices and policies is often overlooked. The growth of Fairtrade over the past decades is largely attributed to consumer support. Climate smart goods should have a place in the market but need to be integrated into already existing labelling initiatives.”

Carlos Seré, of IFAD said, “In addition to generating new technologies, increasing productivity and looking for ways to save labour to support climate-smart smallholder agriculture, climate-smart practices can be enabled by replacing inputs with knowledge – understanding the biology better and tweaking it. This implies a very robust research agenda and an equally ambitious knowledge sharing component. Shifting from existing systems to climate-smart systems – for example shifting to shade grown systems - can take years to achieve. Smallholders need support during the transition periods. And of course, we can never forget about the incentives for the producers: they have to be there.”

Learn more about how IFAD supported activities are benefiting smallholders and poor rural people in São Tomé and Principe.

Climate-Smart Agriculture: Embrace Complexity!

by Jeff Brez, from COP 17 in Durban

At the IFAD-FAO-WFP Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) side event here in Durban, Foua Toloa, the Head of the Government of Tokelau, a small island country in the South Pacific, made an impassioned plea for climate justice for his country. To achieve climate smart agriculture he called for the revival and integration of traditional practices in addition to financing for research, and adaptation and mitigation actions. “We don’t want to end up a coral shelf under the surface of the sea,” he said. Tokelau has taken the drastic measure of banning the import of pesticides and fertilizer for their coconut production, he told us, because cyclones brought run off and poorly stored chemicals into their lagoons, causing green algae blooms that damaged their crucial fisheries-based livelihoods. For them, a single-benefit approach for agriculture did not work. They need an integrated solution.

Tekalign Mamo, Minister of State, Advisor to Ministry of Agriculture, for Ethiopia, shared that while there is an understanding that agro-ecological approaches are key to building climate resilience, and farmers see the advantages, there are nonetheless challenges for farmers. The farmers face enormous challenges to leaving organic material on the soil to feed and protect it because they use the organic material for fuel, fodder and other uses.

The Government is supporting the use of a range of organic materials including grasses and livestock-noxious weeds to feed the soil and provide organic matter for composting. But farmers, communities and households all have specific needs and lifestyles, so they need to be the ones to define what is climate smart agriculture in their context. They, too, need integrated solutions.

For a long time now, there has been universal acknowledgement that uncertainty of climate impacts must not slow our response and action. What we heard at the side event, from speakers and attendees alike, is that complexity must also not slow our response and action. To unlock the correct responses in complex circumstances, the solution is knowledge sharing, institutional support, and gender-focused extension services that interact with empowered farmers organizations.

Elwyn Grainger-Jones, IFAD’s Director of Environment and Climate, said CSA is more knowledge intensive than the 30-year old green revolution approach. Now there is a wide range of possible approaches that are knowledge intensive and require more social mobilization. We need more of this without imposing generic solutions, and must look across landscapes for solutions that work for farmers rather than only look at specific sector projects.

A REDD+ programme in Ethiopia, Minister Mamo offered, is financing an approach that links food security, food production and poverty reduction through a 2005 national strategy. The combination of: rehabilitation of 9 million hectares of land to increase productivity; and a productive safety net programme that addresses food insecure areas for 7 million + people through food or cash transfer to families has put more kids in school, and led to better health. This, Minister Mamo stressed, is a testament to the need for cross-sectoral approaches based in national level planning.

Peter Holmgren, Director of FAO’s Climate, Energy and Tenure Division pointed out that, “It is only the farmer that can define what is smart in the end.” He also mentioned how REDD+ should be part of a package built into landscape approaches to agriculture. Only then can we get leverage and finance for agriculture.

Carlo Scaramella, Director of Climate change and Disaster Risk Reduction at WFP, reminded attendees that CSA needs to deliver multiple benefits to vulnerable communities - in terms of food and nutrition security, community and women's empowerment, livelihoods resilience and environmental rehabilitation. It must be driven by a people-centred approach. At the same time, government leadership is key for scaling up from the community to the national level.

Dennis Garrity of ICRAF (World Agroforestry Center) had the last word, reminding us all that there are huge opportunities for scaling up climate-smart agriculture through knowledge intensive but low cash investments. Here is what he said, more or less: “We need radically different scaling up methodologies for different solutions: cash intensive irrigation solutions where financial and technical inputs are key. But there are also solutions in agro-ecological approaches that are nearly cash-zero in terms of outside needs, so scaling up can be done with community mobilization and farmer to farmer knowledge sharing to get tremendous results. In Niger 5 million hectares have been transformed through agro-ecological approaches, in Mali 500 thousand hectares… gov’t investment almost zero but still great outcomes for farmers and communities.”The event took place on Friday, 2 December, organized by the United Nations Rome-Based Agencies, IFAD, FAO and WFP, and was ably moderated by Dyborn Chibonga, CEO of the National Association of Smallholder Farmers in Malawi.

Let's make climate change talks inclusive

by Prof. M.S. Swaminathan Member of Parliament of India, Rajya Sabha, and Chairman, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and Kanayo F. Nwanze, IFAD President

Price volatility and the persistence of widespread and hidden hunger underline the need for enhancing the productivity and profitability of smallholder agriculture in an environmentally sustainable manner.

When world leaders sit down again to discuss climate change, we hope that the people who live and work on the world's 500 million small farms will be with them, at least in spirit. Their voice — and the issue of agriculture as a whole — has, for too long, been missing from the conversation. But without increased support to smallholder farmers now, the number of hungry people will grow, and future food security will be placed in jeopardy.

The upcoming 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 — marking the twentieth anniversary of the landmark Earth Summit that produced Agenda 21, “a roadmap” for sustainable development — will both need to ensure that agriculture and the world's smallholder farmers are high on the agenda if we are to overcome the many challenges we face in achieving the Millennium Development Goal 1.

The front line
In the last 20 years the global population has risen from about 5.3 billion to seven billion; the reality of climate change has been accepted beyond doubt; and the number of hungry people in the world has remained stubbornly around the one billion mark. Meanwhile, aid to agriculture has only just recently begun to pick up after decades of stagnation. More needs to be done — a lot more — and supporting smallholder farmers must be at the heart of any agenda.

The rural poor across the world, including India, have contributed little to human-induced climate change, yet they are on the front line in coping with its effects. Farmers can no longer rely on historical averages for rainfall and temperature, and the more frequent and extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, can spell disaster. And there are new threats, such as sea level rise and the impact of melting glaciers on water supply.

How significant are small farms? As many as two billion people worldwide depend on them for their food and livelihood. Smallholder farmers in India produce 41 per cent of the country's food grains, and other food items that contribute to local and national food security. Small farmers cannot be ignored, and special attention must be given to the most vulnerable groups — particularly women, who make up a large percentage of farmers in the developing world.

Small farms also add up to big business: In the world's 50 least developed countries, agriculture is the backbone of the economy, accounting for 30 to 60 per cent of Gross Domestic Product and employing as much as 70 per cent or more of the workforce. Addressing the plight of smallholders isn't just a matter of equity, it's a necessity if we are going to be able to feed ourselves in the future. Smallholders farm 80 per cent of the total farmland in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. If we don't help them to adapt to climate change, their achievements — feeding a large portion of humanity — will be endangered.

With appropriate support, smallholders can play a key role in protecting our environment, for example through actions that contribute to carbon sequestration and limit carbon emissions (planting and maintaining forests, engaging in agro-forestry activities, managing rangelands and rice lands, and watershed protection that limits deforestation and soil erosion).

To continue farming in a sustainable way in the face of climate change, rural women and men need to be given the resources to cope with the challenges. Smallholder farmers need support such as resilience-building technologies (including drought- and salt-tolerant seed varieties and new methods of rainwater harvesting), and training in sustainable practices of conservation agriculture, such as minimum-till farming to reduce erosion and moisture loss. Investing in adaptation measures now will be far less costly than in the future.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation, together with the government of India and other partners, have undertaken a range of projects to do just that.

For example, in Tamil Nadu, we have been supporting rural communities to produce and market nutri-cereals like millet, which can easily grow in dry and arid environments. We worked with smallholder farmers to use simple techniques to increase their yields, while also helping rural women create and market modern recipes — for example, a millet malt drink now being sold in major health food stores in India. The result has been not only increased food for the community, but also increased income and non-farm employment opportunities.

To help farmers adapt to increasingly dry conditions, a programme in Chhattisgarh has expanded cultivation of traditionally produced Niger seed oil, which grows well in areas that receive little rain. Land and forest regeneration were promoted to improve soil structure and moisture levels, and solar energy technology and biogas digesters have been introduced, which reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as the need for fuelwood. Another project in the northeast has helped restore degraded jhumland and has benefited almost 40,000 households in 860 villages.

Climate-resilient sustainable agriculture requires knowledge. Successful projects such as these can provide a model for others to follow. Knowledge transfer that brings the benefits of research from the laboratory to the farm is essential.

Programmes targeted at vulnerable groups such as women and tribal communities are particularly important. IFAD-supported programmes and projects in India promote tribal development by building and strengthening grassroots institutions that enable vulnerable people to plan and manage their own development, negotiate improved entitlements, and broaden their livelihood opportunities. Conferences and talks among world leaders can do many things but they don't feed people. We hope that leaders will keep in mind those who do: the smallholder farmers. Price volatility and the persistence of widespread, endemic and hidden hunger underline the need for urgent attention to enhancing the productivity and profitability of smallholder agriculture in an environmentally sustainable manner. This is the pathway to increasing agriculture's contribution to climate change mitigation as well as to sustainable food security.

Originally published in The Hindu