By Lennart Båge
ROME, Aug 13 2008 (IPS)

The international debate on effective aid that is shaped by developing countries' needs rather than donors' priorities will be resumed when ministers from over 100 countries, and members of development agencies, donor organisations and civil society gather for the Third High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra Sep. 2-4.

Lennart Båge Credit:

At the head of the U.N. organisation financing agricultural development projects since 2001, Båge has worked for 25 years in international development cooperation, focusing on poverty reduction and rural development.

"The Paris Declaration has helped shape international aid and development over the past three years; it has proved extremely important in bringing together the needs of developing countries to have greater ownership, with the needs of donors for better accountability on the ground," he says. "But the pace of progress remains too slow. Now it is time for developing countries and donors to take responsibility for accelerating action."

IPS: Civil society groups are concerned about the absence of concrete time-bound commitments in the Accra agenda. How can this meeting be prevented from resulting in another vague promise? What are the concrete steps it should take? LB: Civil society is holding its own event in Accra ahead of the High Level Forum. At the forum itself, 80 members of Civil Society organisations have been invited to take part in the debates. The Advisory Group on Civil Society (AG-CS) has been actively involved, and has launched an extensive consultation. In addition, the role of civil society in achieving aid effectiveness is the topic of one of the roundtables. The conclusions from the roundtable discussions should factor into the finding and conclusions that come out of the high level forum, and should help result in more concrete steps.

IPS: Are the concerns of rural poor adequately heard by the international donor community? LB: The bigger question is whether the concerns of poor rural people are being heard by their governments. Paris is a partnership process. One of the reasons we, at IFAD, are striving so hard for ownership and country-led development is so that the voices of poor rural people do get heard by governments and that these concerns are part of development actions.

But donors too need to hear what rural poor people have to say. And to hear, you need ears. To improve our hearing at IFAD, we created the Farmers' Forum – an ongoing, bottom-up process of consultation and dialogue between small farmers, rural producers' organisations, IFAD and governments. It meets every two years and is focused on rural development and poverty reduction.

At the country level, IFAD has a planning and monitoring instrument – the country strategic opportunities programmes – it uses to align its programme of work with the operational activities of other donors and national development strategies, as well as for learning and accountability within respective countries.

IPS: Although the U.N. Secretary-General has recently stressed the need to invest up to 20 billion dollars a year in agriculture, the proportion of official development assistance to agriculture is only a fraction of what it was in 1979. How could the Accra Agenda for Action – which is expected to result from the Accra meeting – lead to more effective investment in reducing rural poverty and hunger, and help smallholder farmers play an active role in addressing the current crisis? LB: I fully agree with the Secretary-General that there is an urgent need for a step change in the level of aid to agriculture. There is tremendous potential for smallholder farmers to increase production and thereby to help to feed their own families and to increase the supply of food.

AAA (Accra Agenda for Action) can lead to more effective investments by helping to ensure that governments have plans and budgets for investment in rural agriculture that focus on delivering results, and by focusing donor funds on supporting such plans in a predictable and well coordinated way. Sustainable agriculture development yields measurable results. But to increase production, poor farmers need access to microfinance to pay for fertiliser, seeds and tools, they need access to technology to boost production, and they need clear title to the land on which they farm.

The AAA aims to ensure that all stakeholders are adequately represented in decision-making processes – including smallholder farmers and their organisations. The recognition in the AAA that country ownership includes ownership by poor people themselves is especially important in this context.

IPS: Women are hardest hit by the effects of the current crisis. Is the gender dimension integrated in food security policies in terms of financial resources? Is there a specific budget line dedicated to women within the food security programmes? LB: Women play key roles in agricultural societies. In most developing countries, they perform much of the agricultural work and produce most of the worlds' food crops. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, women contribute about 80 percent of the total food production; their contribution is about 65 percent in Asia and 45 percent in Latin America. In rural communities in particular, women play a central role in ensuring food security; when women have access to income they tend to spend a higher percentage on food for the family, while men tend to spend more on themselves. When there is less money for food, women go hungry.

Despite women's critical roles, they have less access to the assets, services and knowledge that would enable them to perform these roles more effectively. Women's role in agriculture remains largely unrecognised in policy and resource allocation; only a very small proportion of ODA for agriculture reaches women. Sustainable agricultural development must take into account the role and needs of women.

IFAD has always focused on smallholder agriculture. Since women are often the majority of smallholder farmers and producers of food crops, they have been major beneficiaries of IFAD projects. The same is true for IFAD's microfinance projects. Unless the productivity of women farmers and women food producers is sharply increased, we will be unable to increase food security or protect our environment.

IPS: What is IFAD doing to improve its own aid and development effectiveness? LB: Under our ambitious 'Action Plan to improve IFAD's development effectiveness', IFAD has implemented major reforms to improve the quality, relevance and effectiveness of its work and to ensure that the investments we make really do deliver results. These reforms have delivered radical changes to the development of country strategies to make them more results-focused and more responsive to the requirements of the countries in which we work, and to the way in which IFAD-financed projects are designed and supervised. They also include new approaches to innovation, knowledge management, partnerships and improvements in IFAD's management of its own key resource – its people.

According to the latest Survey on Monitoring the Paris Declaration, undertaken by OECD-DAC (the Development Action Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a grouping of 30 wealthy nations), IFAD is performing well on several of the commitments in the declaration, including use of country systems. We are committed to doing better still, and I am confident that the further implementation and consolidation of our reforms will enable us to do so.

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By Lennart Båge
BERLIN, Oct 5 2007 (IPS)

The world&#39s rural poor are hardest hit by climate change. But their concerns do not draw the focus of public debate, says Lennart Båge, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome.

Lennart Båge Credit: IFAD

His hope is apparently well-founded: together with senior representatives of other UN agencies, the IFAD president, who is from Sweden, has been asked by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to provide inputs for the inter-governmental discussions on climate change.

Båge spoke to Ramesh Jaura during a visit to Berlin this week. Some excerpts.

Q: Climate change has been in focus at the high-level meeting convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon end of September at the UN headquarters and at a conference organised by U.S. President George Bush. Has the plight of the rural poor been adequately focussed?

Lennart Båge: No.

Q: Plain and simple &#39no&#39. How would you then highlight the concerns of the rural poor?

LB: One has to realise that we have about 3 billion people living in rural areas in developing countries. That&#39s almost half the population of the world. Two-and-a-half billion are involved in farming. One-and-a-half billion are small-holding farmers. More than one billion live on less than one dollar a day. Of the one billion living in absolute poverty, 800 million live in rural areas.

This gives you the magnitude of the challenge of development in reaching the MDGs. That needs much more attention, much more resources and much more investment. But in terms of climate change one has to realise that all these people – most poor, most vulnerable, living in very vulnerable areas to climate change, will suffer the most. They will have the biggest challenge to become more resilient and manage a profound climate change.

Q. Which means the gap between the developing and developed countries will be widened further?

LB: I would hope that the world community would see not only the need to eradicate poverty to reach the Millennium Development Goals but also to invest much more in rural areas – that imperative has been there for a long while. But the fact is that ODA (official development assistance) provided to the agricultural sector has been steadily declining. (Since the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, it amounted to only 7.5 billion dollars, or 14 percent of total ODA, compared to nearly 15 billion dollars, or 25 percent of ODA ten years before.)

Q. Why such a steep decline?

LB: Well, that&#39s a very good question. For IFAD, we are one hundred percent through our mandate involved in development of agriculture. We also wonder why the world has not seen the plight of a billion people – probably because they are not living in urban areas.

Q: Has IFAD done enough to draw the world community&#39s attention to the rural poor?

LB: Certainly we should have done more to draw attention to the rural poor, we have tried to make the case; we have made a case. But we can see that they have not been seen and heard and invested into.

Q: What now in the face of climate change?

LB: Poor rural people are indeed the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. They are the least able to adapt and cope. They live on ecologically fragile land – mountains, coastal areas and deserts. They depend on vulnerable sectors like agriculture, fisheries and forestry. They also lack the institutional and financial capacity to protect themselves.

Q: What should be done?

LB: We have to understand that the focus of efforts to help the world poor has until now been all on adaptation, to assist them in adapting to inevitable climate change. But I think one also has to realise that the rural poor can be a partner of the world community in mitigation. They can do tremendous services in managing actual resources, in developing farming and managing forests. We must enable them (the rural poor) to be part of the solution. This is the big challenge.

In view of this I hope that the climate change negotiations will develop the means to compensate farmers for their services by way of managing natural resources, and the way they mitigate climate change.

Q. Compensate – in what way?

LB: Well, you have financial mechanisms that are tried, tested, developed in order to give incentives for mitigating climate change. So the point is to find a mechanism that is sufficient and rewards the efforts they make.

Q: Make the effort for what?

LB: To keep forests, to grow food in a sustainable way.

Q: You have been in office for more than six years now. Is there anything you have learnt through the long intensive years at the helm of IFAD?

LB: First of all it has confirmed my belief that the starting point of every development for eradication of poverty are the poor themselves, poor men and women, poor communities – that is where you have the energies, that&#39s where you have the dedication and the determination to work for a better life. That&#39s also where you get the knowledge for the needs, of solutions to start. What we should do is to assist the poor in their aspirations. One-anda-half billion small holding farmers are an asset for the world. Because they can feed the world. They can be part of a solution with their dedication, with incomes. We need to support them, we need to invest in their priorities.

Q. Is this recognised by international, multilateral institutions?

LB: Maybe in speeches. Very often our system is based on experts from the North. We can contribute. But the starting point has to be the knowledge of the people in the South.

Q: Which means development is a process that takes place on the ground. But are multilateral institutions, experts from the North, really keeping pace with the developments and processes on the ground?

A: We do need to assist – as the word says – and not tell. Listen, understand, to be humble about our own lack of knowledge, to realise that development is not just one-dimensional; it is complex; it is very much anchored in societies rich in culture, rich in heritage. Ours is help where help is needed, with investments, loans, education, financing, by bringing in new tools for unlocking the potential of production through rural finance. There are many tools but they have to be used, they have to be designed, they have to be put together in programmes with the users.

Q: Which means donor coordination?

LB: Donor coordination, yes. But it is not one or the other. The starting point is not donor coordination. The starting point is coordination with the poor people who will benefit. They have to be the starting point. And then we have to coordinate among donors so that there is coherence.

Q: At the level of the European Union, there is very often talk about the need for donor coordiantion, better donor coordination. How does it work within the multilateral institutions? Are you satisfied with that?

LB: Well, coordination can always be better. I think it has improved significantly in recent years – through the Paris Declaration (agreed in March 2005 between 100 government ministers, heads of agencies and other senior officials).

Let me tell you what IFAD is doing. We work with a wide range of partners in the international development community. They include other United Nations agencies, to increase the effectiveness of global development efforts. Our many other partners in countries and communities include governments, non-governmental organisations, community-based organisations and poor rural people themselves.

Q: What message do you expect for the poor from the global climate change conference in December in Bali?

LB: My hope is that there will be a strong message saying we care about the plight of the poor in the rural areas, we see their needs not only for adaptation but also we see them as strong partners for mitigation and that their work, that their potential is recognised.

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