DEVELOPMENT: From “Survival or a Better Life”, to Survival and a Better Life

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jacklynne Hobbs

CAPE TOWN, Sep 3 2006 (IPS) - At the recent meeting of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) held in Cape Town, South Africa, the key word was “partnership”.

While the facility is itself based on collaboration between the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank, it also depends on partnerships with other U.N. agencies – and development banks – to carry out its work.

But, what do these partnerships mean in practice? And even more importantly, how do they translate into practical benefits for developing countries, where the GEF focuses its efforts at environmental improvement?

IPS sat down with Rodney Cooke, a director in the Programme Management Department of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), to discuss these questions. IFAD is one of the agencies that implement projects for the GEF, which had its funding replenished with over three billion dollars during the Aug. 29-30 talks in Cape Town.

IPS: Firstly, why put an organisation that focuses on agriculture at the same table with the GEF?

Rodney Cooke: IFAD basically is in the business of rural poverty reduction. Since most people living in rural areas depend directly or indirectly on agriculture, a key route to improving their livelihoods is making their farming systems more profitable. Immediately that takes us, if you’re in poor soils and unreliable rainfalls, into environmental questions.

Who makes environmental decisions (in rural areas)? It’s farmers. These people decide whether they are going to use one farming system or another, whether they are going to cut down the trees.

So the reason there’s a symmetry, if you like, between IFAD and the GEF is that our focus is on poor farmers, people who live in rural areas – and those are the people who make decisions at the local level that affect global environmental concerns.

IPS: Could you give me an example of a project where the GEF and IFAD have been able to work together?

RC: Remember, you have to have a national activity on which the GEF can finance something with global benefits. So, we’ve always got to have some ongoing idea or activity for which we can then go to the GEF and say look, this is something with which we can demonstrate (such benefits).

In Kenya, we have a number of community-based natural resource management, or community-based livelihood improvement programmes. One is on Mount Kenya. (The area in question) is adjoining a protected area higher up the mountain.

So, in our discussions with the GEF, since the national park is a global resource, we have designed a component in that programme which is about contributing to biodiversity preservation on Mount Kenya, and also land degradation reduction – in other words, sustainable land management practices.

IPS: You noted in a presentation at the GEF meeting that the beneficiaries of IFAD projects are people whose first concern is survival and improvement of agricultural productivity, rather than the environment…

RC: If you’re living on a dollar a day in a poor area of land, your concern is how you feed yourself and your children. It reminds me of a round table I ran in Johannesburg at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (in 2002) which had the title ‘Survival or a Better Life’.

IPS: Nonetheless, are you noting a growing environmental awareness on the part of these communities?

RC: The priority of poor people is how to produce enough food for themselves and their families. That’s their concern – that has to be their concern. We can discuss growing a different crop or a crop in a different way, that’s fine.

But, these people know that if it only works for one season, then it doesn’t work. That’s the way their awareness has come forward.

IPS: And is there a “catch on” effect with successful projects? Do people in adjacent communities take note of these initiatives, and try to replicate them?

RC: Yes, we are seeing that; that’s a key measure of IFAD’s effectiveness. Morocco is a good case in point.

What we’re talking about here is sheep and goats in a dryland area in Morocco, which were overgrazing the area. So what we did in our programme was to agree with people (in the area) that they would form themselves into co-operatives based on their clans and village systems, which would agree that they couldn’t carry on (with overgrazing). Our project would provide them with food so that they didn’t allow grazing on certain areas of their rangelands: they would let the rangelands recover, regenerate, because the animals weren’t trampling and eating everything in sight.

And then they agreed that they would actually finance fertilizing, paying their own co-operative money.

This project worked for six years in 200 villages. The key to that success was to have a different approach, a different organisation of the people which they themselves signed up to, designed, and wanted to succeed.