A Latin American rural family. Credit: Santiago Billy / FAO

By Marco Knowles
ROME, Sep 3 2024 (IPS)

Last July, we were confronted with alarming statistics: 733 million people experienced hunger in 2023, equivalent to one in eleven people globally. In Africa it was even higher, with one in five people going hungry. Climate change is a significant driver of this crisis.

Paradoxically, well intentioned policies to combat global warming may also be a cause of hunger, particularly for small-scale farmers in poorer countries, unless these policies are accompanied by measures to curtail their socio-economic downsides.

Gradual changes in temperatures and rainfall patterns reduce returns to farming, on which poor people largely depend, and sudden events like floods and droughts devastate their crops and livestock. According to the World Bank, climate change could push as many as 135 million more people into poverty by 2030. Urgent action to curb climate change is therefore essential to the fight against poverty and hunger.

Paradoxically, well intentioned policies to combat global warming may also be a cause of hunger, particularly for small-scale farmers in poorer countries, unless these policies are accompanied by measures to curtail their socio-economic downsides

However, if we are not careful, climate mitigation efforts can undermine progress on eradicating poverty and hunger. A recent example is the European Union´s Regulation on Deforestation-free products that was introduced in June 2023. This regulation is intended to ensure that products bought and consumed in Europe do not contribute to deforestation through the expansion of agricultural land for the production of cattle, wood, cocoa, soy, palm oil or coffee.

On the one hand, reducing deforestation is essential to combating climate change and can benefit many of the 1 to 2 billion people who depend on forests for their livelihoods.

But on the other hand, the costs of these policies fall disproportionately on rural poor people that do not have the resources and capacities to comply, including those that currently rely on clearing new lands for their livelihoods – estimated to account for about a third of deforestation.

As governments of 17 countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia had forewarned, the EU’s Regulation is already having severe negative impacts among poorer people in poorer countries, in particular small-scale farmers.

Without support, they face huge challenges in complying with the complex, new procedures, and at the same time they often lack the capacities and resources to maintain or increase their agricultural production without expanding the land area under cultivation – this is even more true in a context of a changing climate change that reduces farming yields.

While progress on the climate agenda must continue at pace, the socio-economic trade-offs of climate policies for different population groups – especially the most vulnerable – need to be considered from the outset. Countries, especially those in which poverty and hunger are concentrated, need to be supported and encouraged to couple green policies with measures that enable smallholder farmers to meet new conditions or to transition to new and dignified livelihoods.

Social protection – which includes policies and programmes aimed at addressing poverty and vulnerability – can play a key role in easing these transitions. In the short-term, by providing regular cash income in compensation for any adverse social impacts of climate policies and, in the longer-term, by combining these payments with technical support, skills training and livelihood interventions that can help people to adjust to and thrive under new policy regimes.

This approach is already being implemented in several countries.

In China, a forest protection act affected approximately one million public forestry workers and 120 million rural households by reducing access to forest resources. To mitigate these impacts, public employees received assistance, such as job placement services, unemployment benefits and pension plans. As a result, two-thirds of the affected employees were either transferred to alternative jobs or retired, while 124 million households benefited from an income transfer.

In Brazil and Paraguay, social protection and complementary agricultural programmes are supporting rural households to adopt more sustainable and profitable farming practices. Paraguay’s Poverty, Reforestation, Energy and Climate Change (PROEZA) programme, provides households participating in the country’s flagship social protection scheme, Tekoporã, with technical support and additional cash. Thanks to this, small-scale farmers are adapting their agricultural practices to be more resilient to ever more frequent droughts while also increasing their production of native crops such as yerba mate.

Similarly, in Brazil, the Bolsa Verde programme provides cash payments to beneficiaries of the national social cash transfer programme, Bolsa Familia, in exchange for maintaining or restoring forests, protecting water sources, and promoting sustainable agriculture.

Governments should be encouraged and supported in introducing and scaling-up social protection measures to ensure the poorest and most vulnerable do not bear the burden of addressing the climate crisis and greening the consumption of people in wealthier parts of the world.

We must therefore prioritize an approach that pays close attention to the social as well as the environmental consequences of policies to address climate change. Social protection programmes have a critical role to play building a future that is mutually beneficial to People and Planet.

Marco Knowles leads the FAO´s Social Protection Team. His areas of expertise include increasing access to social protection in rural areas and in leveraging on social protection for climate action. He also has substantive experience in providing evidence-based food security policy assistance and capacity development support.

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Women from the village of Boula-Ngara, in Chad, build a windbreak fence to protect the nearby river, enabling them to cultivate a market garden to meet the food needs of their families. Credit: FAO/Sia Kambou

By Marco Knowles
ROME, Apr 5 2024 (IPS)

Climate change is exacerbating inequalities between and within countries, disproportionately affecting poor households in rural areas. In fact, we know that more than half of the resources of the poor – a large part of whom are small-scale farmers – are lost due to climatic hazards. This has negative impacts on the incomes of these people and their ability to meet their essential needs, including food.

As the new FAO report The Unjust Climate finds, floods widen the income gap between poor and non-poor households in rural areas by approximately USD 21 billion a year, and heat stress by more than USD 20 billion a year.

Despite the critically important role that small-scale farmers play in growing the food that feeds us and in stewarding the natural resources that determine the health of planet Earth, only 1.7 % of climate finance currently reaches them

Every year, over a trillion dollars are allocated to combating climate change and its consequences. Far too little of this financing reaches the most vulnerable. Shockingly, despite the critically important role that small-scale farmers play in growing the food that feeds us and in stewarding the natural resources that determine the health of planet Earth, only 1.7 % of climate finance currently reaches them.

Decision makers are therefore faced with a massive challenge – what policy instruments can they rely on for directing climate finance to poor small-scale farmers to enable them to adapt to the changing climate?

As The Unjust Climate highlights, social protection policies and programmes are an important part of the solution. Encompassing interventions such as cash transfers, public works programmes, social insurance and vocational training, these programmes are specifically designed to reach the poor and the vulnerable.

They enable small-scale farmers to invest in new technologies, diversify incomes, adopt new farming assets and accumulate savings, to better adapt to climate change. Moreover, the ministries and agencies that manage these programmes have the necessary expertise for working with vulnerable population groups, as well as the information systems for identifying them and payment systems through which to deliver assistance.

A number of countries are already directing climate finance towards impoverished small-scale farmers through social protection. This is not just helping them survive, it is empowering individuals, households and communities to build a better future for themselves and our planet. In Paraguay, the “Poverty, Reforestation, Energy and Climate Change” (PROEZA) project, has a social protection component that incentivises poor women and Indigenous Peoples to adopt sustainable agroforestry practices.

By combining these cash payments with tailored technical support, small-scale farmers are able to adapt their agricultural practices to be more resilient to the droughts to which they are increasingly exposed due to climate change, and to increase the production and marketing of native crops such as yerba mate.

In Botswana, a social protection programme is being used to upskill male and female small-scale farmers so that they can be employed as eco-rangers and restoration workers – at once improving the health of communal rangeland ecosystems and allowing people to earn higher incomes that are less susceptible to climate change.

In Tunisia, vulnerable small-scale farmers in the Government’s social protection system are being supported to graduate from poverty through an intensive support package combining sustainable agricultural practices, climate-proofed off-farm income generation and in-kind grants.

Evidence that we, at FAO, have gathered from across the world confirms that these types of programmes are effective in simultaneously improving people’s wellbeing, as well as achieving goals related to both adapting to, and mitigating, climate change.

And yet, despite the proven social and environmental benefits of directing climate finance to small-scale farmers through social protection, there are still far too few cases where this is being done. When we reviewed programmes financed through the world’s major climate funds, we found that of 484 programmes reviewed only 3% channelled financing to small-scale farmers through social protection.

It is time to step up and take action to channel more climate finance into social protection so as to better reach small-scale farmers.

Firstly, we need to share and discuss evidence and experiences through sustained and broad-based policy dialogue at every level – from the local to the global. This will help trigger a shift in mindsets from considering social protection as a handout in times of emergencies towards considering social protection as strategic investment in achieving inclusive, climate-resilient and low-carbon development that leaves no one behind.

Secondly, members of the boards of institutions such as international climate funds (such as the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility and the Adaptation Fund) and multilateral development banks (for example, the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank), which mobilise, house and channel climate financing, have a crucial role to play in ensuring that the investment frameworks of these institutions explicitly recognise the importance of social protection in inclusive climate action.

Thirdly, we need to engage and support communities themselves to mobilise and join forces to call for the scaling up of social protection as a tool for inclusive climate action, through collective action at the local level and through wider civil society partnerships that bring together small-scale farmers and other marginalised groups within society, so that together we can harness the power of social protection to address the climate crisis.

Unless we, as a global community, put in place concrete measures that enable small-scale farmers to overcome the challenges they face due to climate change, we will fail to rise to the challenge of eradicating poverty, hunger and malnutrition. This can no longer wait: urgent investment in social protection for inclusive climate action is an imperative.

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