Keynote address by IFAD President at the Agriculture and Rural Development Day
Climate-smart smallholder agriculture is up to us
Distinguished Ministers,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Let me start by thanking the organizers of ARDD who have done such a superb job of bringing us together this year.
And thanks, also, to our COP 17 host, the beautiful country of South Africa represented this morning by my dear friend and colleague, Minister Joemat-Pettersson – the Africa Agriculture Minister of the Year, I might add, as seen in Africa investor (Ai). Congratulations and thank you for welcoming us so warmly to Durban.
It is fitting that this COP is taking place in Africa, which faces some of the biggest challenges from climate change, but which also holds great promise.
The situation of people like Hassan in Ethiopia's Rift Valley speaks volumes about the challenges faced by poor rural people in Africa, but also their hope for the future.
Whether this hope is fulfilled, or whether it remains an empty promise, will depend on making progress – not just the progress of words, but the progress of action.
What is clear is that there must be a fundamental reform of agriculture and food systems – we cannot continue on the current course. And climate change is accelerating the speed change.
We all know that there are major challenges in the climate negotiations, compounded by the health of the global economy. But I see growing momentum towards a rapid change of thinking on how we look at agriculture. I see long-held attitudes -- shaped in a different era, during the original Green Revolution -- changing quickly.
We are already witnessing tangible changes, significant changes in thinking and mind-sets, that lead me to believe that for Hassan, and the hundreds of millions of poor men, women and children like him, there is cause for hope.
Changes in thinking and mind sets
Perhaps the most important change is the growing recognition that the environment and agriculture are tightly bound together, and that one cannot be addressed without the other.
It is an understanding that we are seeing in the field, from smallholder farmers who are experiencing the erosion of the very ecosystems on which they depend, in which climate change is just one causal factor and risk magnifier.
It is an understanding that we are seeing from our IFAD's Member States, who have witnessed the impact of extreme weather on crop production and food security, and who are increasingly asking for climate change to be addressed in their rural development projects.
Since I was last with you at ARDD1 in Copenhagen, we have seen two years of particularly extreme weather patterns, with devastating effects on agriculture.
Floods in Pakistan and Thailand, drought in Russia and famine in the Horn of Africa are just a small sample of the events that have caused headlines around the world.
In my travels to the countries we work in, I am seeing the change in mind set. Government officials – who once believed that they had to choose between feeding their people and protecting nature – now realise they can, and must, do both.
They are learning what many of us in this room already know, that the best practices in agriculture – in other words, smart agriculture – also happen to be climate smart.
Climate smart agriculture
To meet demand from a growing and more affluent population, global food production will need to rise 70 per cent in less than 40 years. Production in developing countries will need to almost double. Some of this could be met by reducing post-harvest and post marketing food losses - but the bottom line is that there will be more pressure on the land to produce.
The message during the first Green Revolution was relatively simple: apply better seeds, increase fertilizer and improve irrigation and yields will increase.
But we have known for years now that we will need a new Green Revolution with a more nuanced message if we are to meet the challenge of feeding more than 9 billion people by 2050.
We know that there is no magic bullet, no secret formula that will allow small farmers to respond to climate change and eliminate poverty and hunger overnight.
Instead, we need to maximise the use of natural processes and ecosystems. We must reduce excessive use of external inorganic inputs. And we must also enhance the diversity of production; using a mix of traditional and new technologies.
This is not a simple message or a simple approach. It requires thousands of different approaches, each one tailored to local communities, climatic conditions and ecosystems. It is knowledge-intensive, not input-intensive.
The ideas may not be new, but ideas on their own are merely theory. What gives me hope, and inspiration, is the growing evidence that the ideas of this new Green Revolution are taking root and being applied in developing countries affected by climate change.
These climate smart approaches can be seen in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Smallholder farmers are already using them and they are working.
These approaches typically maintain and enhance groundcover, lead to healthy soil that can retain nutrients and moisture and enhance biodiversity. And these lead to better yields, greater profits, improved climate resilience and reduced emissions.
They are techniques we, at IFAD, have been using for years because they are well suited to smallholder agriculture and because they increase production at the same time as reducing poverty. I like to characterise these as low-input, high-output pro-poor technologies.
Just this summer, I visited the South Gansu province of China. It is an area that suffers from frequent drought, limited water for irrigation and severe soil erosion. Yet the farmers I met were not only feeding themselves and their families, they were also increasing their incomes.
The farmers were using basic but effective environmental practices such as rainwater harvesting, mulching maize, terracing and using trees to improve soil quality and moisture content.
I also visited a drought-prone region of Burkina Faso where smallholders are using simple water harvesting techniques such as planting pits and permeable rock dams, along with crop-livestock integration. As a result, they have restored land that was once degraded and have increased productivity.
At an IFAD-supported project in the Peruvian Altiplano, the native people have always had to contend with a harsh environment and extreme temperature fluctuations. In recent years, temperature variations and water shortages have become worse.
But today, the local population is better fed and livestock is thriving. Why? Because families are trapping water in pits for irrigation. They are diversifying their crops. They are planting trees that serve as wind breaks and stabilize the soil on the slopes. They are also using stones as heat reservoirs, soaking up warmth from the sun during the day and releasing it slowly at night to reduce freezing.
Scaling up faster
Our challenge is to accelerate the process of changing attitudes and to accelerate the scaling up of sustainable and climate smart agriculture. We must not be complacent. The costs of business as usual grow by the day.
Getting agriculture, especially smallholder agriculture, into carbon markets is something we are working hard to achieve.
But we cannot rely solely on the negotiations to transform agriculture. We are going to have to do this ourselves – as many of the smallholder farmers we work with are already doing – with or without the extra push of pricing in emissions reductions.
Making good use of existing or pledged climate and development funding can make a difference. But we are concerned that without a special effort, most climate financing will be absorbed by the larger players.
IFAD is working to scale-up its climate-smart practices. And we are working to ensure that poor farmers, many of whom earn less than US$2 a day, are able to take a risk on adopting new practices, or planting a new, higher yielding seed.
There is a cost to responding to climate change, but the cost of not responding is even higher. And in order to help channel climate finance to poor smallholders, IFAD recently created an Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme ('ASAP'). Through ASAP we will better integrate climate finance into IFAD-supported investments and rapidly scale up the climate resilience of IFAD's approximately US$1 billion per year of new spending.
We can also do more to fund and use climate-smart research. Agricultural research is fundamental to meeting today's challenges. Agricultural research can ensure that the smallholder, the fisherman, the pastoralist, the forest dweller and the herder have the means to adapt to climate change. It can ensure that poor rural people have the means to produce more and to produce it better.
As you may know, I am a scientist. Over the course of my career, at IFAD and for 30 years at the CGIAR, I have seen first-hand how agricultural research can save money and lives.
In the years ahead, we will need more research to build resilience to climate change.
Our common challenge
As we look beyond today's ARDD meeting, to the COP17 that is taking place around us, there is genuine cause for concern about the speed at which the international process is moving.
But still, I am optimistic about what I see on the ground and in the agriculture community at large.
As I look around the room today, I see an audience of dedicated development professionals who already know that climate-smart smallholder agriculture is the way of the future. It is up to us to launch a major scaling up of sustainable and climate-smart agriculture approaches worldwide. It is not enough to talk about it. We must do it.
We have many of the tools and techniques already at our disposal. We now need a mobilization effort that reaches across sectors towards this goal.
And we can help those pushing for action on climate change by telling them the stories of smallholder farmers who are on the frontline of changing weather patterns and sea level rises.
As we consider what to do next, let us support the climate change negotiations, but let us not wait to take action. Let us use the momentum that is growing, on farms and in government offices around the world, to accelerate change. To make climate smart practices the new normal in agriculture. We can do this ourselves.
The promise of success is great.
We owe it to Hassan, and the two billion men, women and children who depend on small farms. And we owe it to the 9.3 billion people who will need healthy food and a healthy environment to grow it in forty years from now.
What we do today will shape their world tomorrow.
Thank you.
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