Women make up more than half of IFAD’s project participants, while over 60 percent of its active project portfolio is youth-sensitive, reaching more than 12 million young people globally. Photo: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Feb 11 2026 (IPS)

The global aid system is crumbling amidst chronic underinvestment in rural areas, posing a systemic threat to food systems everywhere.

With 1.3 billion young people in the world today – the largest generation in history, and nearly half of them living in rural areas – investing in their entrepreneurial potential is key.

Speaking during a press briefing on February 10, 2026, at the International Fund for Agricultural Development‘s (IFAD) 49th Governing Council, the president, Alvaro Lario, said investing in young entrepreneurs and women farmers unlocks new pathways for employment and ensures that rural areas become thriving engines of stability, prosperity and sustainable growth.

The overarching theme of the ongoing session of the Governing Council is “From Farm to Market: Investing with Young Entrepreneurs” and is being held at a pivotal moment when the global aid system is in urgent need of reinvention.

“We are at a very complex time of geopolitical fragmentation and constrained budgets for many countries. Food systems are going through various regular shocks that include climate shocks. So, rural transformation means economic growth, creating jobs and building stability,” Lario stated.

Lario advocated for public-private partnerships that connect farmers with private companies, which invest directly in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) through blended finance, guarantees, and various forms of debt or equity, ultimately increasing access to rural finance. Public finance alone cannot deliver the transformation of food systems, raise rural incomes, or create decent jobs.

IFAD’s president, Alvaro Lario, with Tony Elumelu, chairman of UBA, and Heirs Holdings and founder of the Tony Elumelu Foundation. Credit: IFAD/Hannah Kathryn Valles

SME-driven value chains are critical to rural development. IFAD’s assessments show that SME-focused value chain projects are more likely to deliver transformational impacts – in other words, where incomes increase by more than 50 per cent because of the project. The Project for Rural Income through Exports in Rwanda (PRICE) increased returns to farmers through the development of export-driven value chains for coffee, tea, silk farming and horticulture.

In brief, he said the private sector accounts for more than 90 per cent of global food systems’ activity and that it complements public sector financing in a critical way by providing technology, market access, and logistics. Emphasising that these are the elements that allow small farms, pastoralists, fishers, rural entrepreneurs and other agri-food enterprises to grow and prosper.

Overall, at the Governing Council, Lario underscored the immense strategic and business value of investing in rural economies, presented new impact data and priorities for 2028-2030 and outlined the most effective models for scaling up productive investments. He was joined by Tony Elumelu, Chair of United Bank for Africa and Heirs Holdings, and founder of the Tony Elumelu Foundation, in outlining a new deal for rural economies.

They spoke at length about how to accelerate the shift to channel more private investments to rural economies. On young African entrepreneurs and facilitating their access to financing, he said as currently constituted, a bank cannot lend without collateral and consideration of social repayment.

“Since the regulatory environment does not permit banks to lend without taking these issues into consideration, countries create development financing institutions that can take some of the risks. And, also, having development financing institutions and global financing that help to de-risk transactions so that banks can come in and provide the capital,” Elumelu said.

“One of the reasons my wife and I established the Tony Elumelu Foundation is to support young African entrepreneurs. Access to capital is critical for entrepreneurship development. But oftentimes, people lack what it takes to access it. The Foundation has provided USD100 million. And every year, we identify young African entrepreneurs who have business ideas and train them on how to actualise these ideas.”

Further emphasising that access to capital, “while important, is not the only condition that will make you succeed. Business education is important. So we train them, appoint mentors for them, create a networking platform for them, and then provide them with the knowledge they need to receive capital. To date, in Africa, we have funded over 24,000 young African entrepreneurs. And the good news is that about half of these people are females.”

Elumelu said youth-centred interventions significantly boost agro-entrepreneurship as a key driver for economic growth, job creation, and stability while addressing the youth opportunity deficit.

“Nearly 21 percent of those who are funded in Africa are in agriculture and agribusinesses.  And out of these 21 percent, which is about 5,600 beneficiaries, 55 percent of them are females. So in a way, we are trying to help bridge that capital gap, finance gap. But that is not enough. It’s just a tiny drop of water in the ocean. So we need even more partnerships.”

Elumelu further drew on his Africapitalism philosophy, which is a call to action for businesses to move beyond short-term profit-seeking and instead make investments that generate socio-economic benefits for the communities in which they operate. And his foundation’s decade-long experience building Africa’s largest entrepreneurship ecosystem speaks to how entrepreneurship, private capital, and market-driven solutions can transform rural economies, expand food systems, and close the youth opportunity gap.

IFAD is an international financial institution and a United Nations-specific agency that invests in rural communities, empowering them to reduce poverty, increase food security, improve nutrition, and strengthen resilience. It has thus far provided more than USD 25 billion in grants and low-interest loans to fund projects in developing countries.

The Governing Council is IFAD’s highest decision-making body that, among other things, provides a forum for Governors to share their insights on priority areas for strategic action to lift the livelihoods of rural people.

This session also takes place at the beginning of the International Year of the Woman Farmer, declared in recognition of the key role that women farmers around the world play in agrifood systems and their contributions to food security, nutrition and poverty eradication.

Empowering youth and women entrepreneurs to initiate and expand agribusinesses serves as a vital catalyst for economic development and creates lasting positive impacts. Women make up more than half of IFAD’s project participants, while over 60 per cent of the active project portfolio is youth-sensitive, reaching more than 12 million young people globally.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

A family from the Q'eqchi Mayan indigenous people of Guatemala gathers to share a meal cooked with firewood. Life in many rural areas of Latin America continues to be marked by scarce resources and inequality, in comparison with urban areas. CREDIT: IDB

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 31 2024 (IPS)

Rural life in Latin America and the Caribbean continues to be marked by poverty and inequality compared to the towns and cities where the vast majority of the population lives. A new focus on rural life in the region could help reveal and address the challenges and neglect faced by people in the countryside.

“Many people in our countryside simply no longer have a way to live, without services or incentives comparable to those in the cities, producing less and for less pay, under the threat of more disease and poverty,” Venezuelan coffee producer Vicente Pérez told IPS."Many people in our countryside simply no longer have a way to live, without services or incentives comparable to those in the cities, producing less and for less pay, under the threat of more disease and poverty." -- Vicente Pérez

In Mexico, whose countryside was home to 24 million of its 127 million inhabitants at the beginning of this decade, according to the World Bank, a study by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) showed that eight out of every 10 rural inhabitants lived in poverty, and six in extreme poverty.

It was in the Mexican capital where experts from ECLAC and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) proposed this January “a new approach” to the concept of rural life in the region, to help public action to reduce inequality and contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The project’s director, Ramón Padilla, told IPS from Mexico City that “we need a new narrative about rural Latin America that goes beyond the traditional static and dichotomous vision, and that sees rural areas not as backward places, but as territories with great potential for development and connections.”

Building a new narrative “is important for a better visualization, treatment and reduction of inequalities in income, infrastructure, education, health, gender, etc.,” added Padilla, head of ECLAC’s Economic Development Unit in Mexico.

“Those who have access to electricity, drinking water, communications and transport to work or school in a big city are at a great distance from life in many depressed rural areas,” said Pérez, executive director of the Venezuelan Confederation of Agricultural Producers (Fedeagro).

A woman feeds livestock next to her house in rural Nicaragua. Housing and food conditions are often very precarious in the most depressed rural areas of Central America. CREDIT: FAO

Entrenched rural poverty

Hilda, the head of her household in Los Rufinos, a village of 40 families in the middle of a sandy dry forest in the northwestern department of Piura, Peru, told visitors from the Argentina-based Latfem regional feminist communication network what it is like to live without electricity and drinking water, to cook with firewood and, among other hardships, to get her granddaughters the schooling she did not have.

In their dirt-floored houses with fences and walls made of logs, plastic and tin sheeting, the women in Los Rufinos cook in the early hours of the morning for the men of the village who go to work in the agro-exporting fruit plants in Piura, the departmental capital.

“When there is no moon, the night is really dark, you can’t see a thing. It’s not like in the city, where there is so much light,” Hilda commented to the Latfem representatives.

In Peru, a country of 33.5 million inhabitants (80 percent urban and 20 percent rural), 9.2 million people are poor, according to the government statistics institute. Poverty measured by income affects 24 percent of the urban population and 41 percent of the rural population, while extreme poverty affects 2.6 percent of the urban population and 16.6 percent of the rural population.

Farther north, in a rural area of the department of Cundinamarca in central Colombia, Edilsa Alarcón showed on the television program “En los zapatos de” (In the Shoes of), on the Caracol network, how she goes every day to two small fields near her home to milk four cows, her family’s livelihood.

Women farmers work in a field in Guatemala. In rural areas of Latin America, women have more precarious or lower paid jobs than men, and barely a third of them have access to forms of land ownership. CREDIT: Juan L. Sacayón / UNDP

She carries 18 liters of milk on the back of a donkey every morning, which she sells for 14 dollars, barely enough to live on. She owns no land and her biggest expense is renting pastureland for 860 dollars a year.

Colombia’s rural areas are home to 12.2 million people (51.8 percent men and 48.2 percent women), 46 percent of whom live in poverty, according to ECLAC.

“Gente de Guate”, produced by Guatemalan Youtubers , collects and delivers food, household goods and even cash for families in the countryside who barely scrape by in houses with four walls made of corrugated metal sheeting, boards and logs, wood stoves and a few chickens running around among corn and cooking banana plants.

Of Guatemala’s 17.2 million inhabitants, 60 percent live in poverty and between 15 and 20 percent in extreme poverty, according to figures from official entities and universities. Half of the population lives in rural areas, where poverty affects two thirds of the overall population – and 80 percent of indigenous people – and extreme poverty affects nearly one-third of the total population.

Schoolchildren walk through a suburban area in Mexico. The need to secure services such as education, health and communications, along with better incomes, continues to drive the displacement of rural dwellers. CREDIT: IDB

Regional data

Some 676 million people live in Latin America and the Caribbean, of whom 183 million are poor (29 percent), and 72 million are in extreme poverty (11.4 percent), according to ECLAC data for 2022 and 2023.

While 553 million people (81.8 percent) live in towns and cities, 123 million (18.2 percent) live in rural areas. And while in urban areas poverty stands at 26.2 percent and extreme poverty at 9.3 percent, in rural areas 41 percent of the inhabitants are poor and 19.5 percent are extremely poor.

Gender inequality also persists, stubbornly. One figure that reflects it is that only 30 percent of rural women (58 million) have access to some form of land ownership, their jobs are often more precarious and less well paid, and at the same time they spend more time on household and family care tasks.

The exodus from the countryside continues, first to the cities of each country, then abroad. In countries like Venezuela many rural dwellers alternate their life and work between their plots of land in the countryside and a slum in a nearby town every few days. CREDIT: Correo SurErbol

Time to migrate from the countryside

Latin America has experienced a massive exodus from rural to urban areas in the 20th century and so far in the 21st. “In 1960, less than half of the region’s population lived in cities. By 2016 that proportion had risen to over 80 percent,” wrote Matías Busso, a researcher at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

This process, driven by the search for better employment opportunities and living conditions, first fueled the expansion of the region’s major cities – to form megalopolises such as São Paulo and Mexico City – and more recently migration to foreign destinations, such as the United States.

The largest migratory phenomenon abroad that the region has known, the exodus of more than seven million Venezuelans in the last decade, has involved numerous urban and suburban inhabitants, but also people from many rural areas.

Pérez said that, in addition, in countries like Venezuela there is now a tendency to move from the countryside to urban areas, “but not to the big cities, like Caracas or Maracaibo, but to nearby towns or small cities, maintaining their ties to the plot of land where the family has crops or a few animals.”

“New shantytowns form in small towns next to agricultural areas, such as coffee plantations in the Andes (southwest) or grain fields in the (central) Llanos, and people work for a few days in some urban job and then return to the countryside at the weekend. A sort of double life,” said Pérez.

View of a suburban area neighboring the city of Medellín, in northwestern Colombia, where urban and rural features are combined. ECLAC and IFAD are promoting a new narrative to consider the potential of many areas that should not be pigeonholed as exclusively urban or rural. CREDIT: Medellín city government

Seeking a new narrative

New realities such as these prompted the ECLAC-IFAD initiative to “overcome the traditional view that contrasts rural and urban areas, recognizing the existence of different degrees of rurality in the territories and greater interaction between them,” according to its advocates.

“The project seeks to replace the dominant narrative – which is reductionist and marginalizing – of rural areas as static and backwards, with one that recognizes the challenges and opportunities of today’s new rural societies,” said Peruvian economist Rossana Polastri, regional director of IFAD.

The basis of the initiative is that between what is defined as rural and urban – the limit in countries such as Mexico is to consider urban areas as those with more than 2,500 inhabitants and rural areas as those below that level – there is a variety, degree and wealth of possibilities and opportunities to address issues of equity and development.

Padilla from Mexico said that a first element of the work they propose is to collaborate with the public bodies in charge of designing and implementing policies for rural areas, since “technical work, well grounded in concepts and theories, has to go hand in hand with a dialogue with the public sector.”

“A second element is continuous dialogue with the communities. The new understanding has to be translated into participatory solutions, in which each community and each territory creates a new vision, a renewed plan for sustainable development,” said the head of the project to build a new approach to rural life in Latin America.

A rural settlement in the state of Pernambuco, in Brazil's semiarid ecoregion. Tanks that collect rainwater from rooftops for drinking water and household usage have changed life in this parched land, where 1.1 million 16,000-litre tanks have been installed so far. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2020 (IPS)

After centuries of poverty, marginalisation from national development policies and a lack of support for positive local practices and projects, the semiarid regions of Latin America are preparing to forge their own agricultural paths by sharing knowledge, in a new and unprecedented initiative.

In Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, the Gran Chaco Americano, which is shared by Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, and the Central American Dry Corridor (CADC), successful local practices will be identified, evaluated and documented to support the design of policies that promote climate change-resilient agriculture in the three ecoregions.

This is the objective of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo, an initiative financed by the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and implemented by the Brazilian Semiarid Articulation (ASA), the Argentinean Foundation for Development in Justice and Peace (Fundapaz) and the National Development Foundation (Funde) of El Salvador.

DAKI stands for Dryland Adaptation Knowledge Initiative.

The project, launched on Aug. 18 in a special webinar where some of its creators were speakers, will last four years and involve 2,000 people, including public officials, rural extension agents, researchers and small farmers. Indirectly, 6,000 people will benefit from the training.

“The aim is to incorporate public officials from this field with the intention to influence the government’s actions,” said Antonio Barbosa, coordinator of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo and one of the leaders of the Brazilian organisation ASA.

The idea is to promote programmes that could benefit the three semiarid regions, which are home to at least 37 million people – more than the total populations of Chile, Ecuador and Peru combined.

The residents of semiarid regions, especially those who live in rural areas, face water scarcity aggravated by climate change, which affects their food security and quality of life.

Zulema Burneo, International Land Coalition coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean and moderator of the webinar that launched the project, stressed that the initiative was aimed at “amplifying and strengthening” isolated efforts and a few longstanding collectives working on practices to improve life in semiarid areas.

Abel Manto, an inventor of technologies that he uses on his small farm in the state of Bahia, in Brazil’s semiarid ecoregion, holds up a watermelon while standing among the bean crop he is growing on top of an underground dam. The soil is on a waterproof plastic tarp that keeps near the surface the water that is retained by an underground dam. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The practices that represent the best knowledge of living in the drylands will be selected not so much for their technical aspects, but for the results achieved in terms of economic, ecological and social development, Barbosa explained to IPS in a telephone interview from the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, where the headquarters of ASA are located.

After the process of systematisation of the best practices in each region is completed, harnessing traditional knowledge through exchanges between technicians and farmers, the next step will be “to build a methodology and the pedagogical content to be used in the training,” he said.

One result will be a platform for distance learning. The Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, also in Recife, will help with this.

Decentralised family or community water supply infrastructure, developed and disseminated by ASA, a network of 3,000 social organisations scattered throughout the Brazilian Northeast, is a key experience in this process.

In the 1.03 million square kilometres of drylands where 22 million Brazilians live, 38 percent in rural areas according to the 2010 census, 1.1 million rainwater harvesting tanks have been built so far for human consumption.

An estimated 350,000 more are needed to bring water to the entire rural population in the semiarid Northeast, said Barbosa.

But the most important aspect for agricultural development involves eight “technologies” for obtaining and storing water for crops and livestock. ASA, created in 1999, has helped install this infrastructure on 205,000 farms for this purpose and estimates that another 800 peasant families still need it.

There are farms that are too small to install the infrastructure, or that have other limitations, said Barbosa, who coordinates ASA’s One Land and Two Waters and native seed programmes.

The “calçadão” technique, where water runs down a sloping concrete terrace or even a road into a tank that has a capacity to hold 52,000 litres, is the most widely used system for irrigating vegetables.

A group of peasant farmers from El Salvador stand in front of one of the two rainwater tanks built in their village, La Colmena, in the municipality of Candelaria de la Frontera. The pond is part of a climate change adaptation project in the Central American Dry Corridor. Central American farmers like these and others from Brazil’s semiarid Northeast have exchanged experiences on solutions for living with lengthy droughts. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

And in Argentina’s Chaco region, 16,000-litre drinking water tanks are mushrooming.

But tanks for intensive and small farming irrigation are not suitable for the dry Chaco, where livestock is raised on large estates of hundreds of hectares, said Gabriel Seghezzo, executive director of Fundapaz, in an interview by phone with IPS from the city of Salta, capital of the province of the same name, one of those that make up Argentina’s Gran Chaco region.

“Here we need dams in the natural shallows and very deep wells; we have a serious water problem,” he said. “The groundwater is generally of poor quality, very salty or very deep.”

First, peasants and indigenous people face the problem of formalising ownership of their land, due to the lack of land titles. Then comes the challenge of access to water, both for household consumption and agricultural production.

“In some cases there is the possibility of diverting rivers. The Bermejo River overflows up to 60 km from its bed,” he said.

Currently there is an intense local drought, which seems to indicate a deterioration of the climate, urgently requiring adaptation and mitigation responses.

Reforestation and silvopastoral systems are good alternatives, in an area where deforestation is “the main conflict, due to the pressure of the advance of soy and corn monoculture and corporate cattle farming,” he said.

Mariano Barraza of the Wichí indigenous community (L) and Enzo Romero, a technician from the Fundapaz organisation, stand next to the tank built to store rainwater in an indigenous community in the province of Salta, in the Chaco ecoregion of northern Argentina, where there are six months of drought every year. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

More forests would be beneficial for the water, reducing evaporation that is intense due to the heat and hot wind, he added.

Of the “technologies” developed in Brazil, one of the most useful for other semiarid regions is the “underground dam,” Claus Reiner, manager of IFAD programmes in Brazil, told IPS by phone from Brasilia.

The underground dam keeps the surrounding soil moist. It requires a certain amount of work to dig a long, deep trench along the drainage route of rainwater, where a plastic tarp is placed vertically, causing the water to pool during rainy periods. A location is chosen where the natural layer makes the dam impermeable from below.

This principle is important for the Central American Dry Corridor, where “the great challenge is how to infiltrate rainwater into the soil, in addition to collecting it for irrigation and human consumption,” said Ismael Merlos of El Salvador, founder of Funde and director of its Territorial Development Area.

The CADC, which cuts north to south through Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, is defined not as semiarid, but as a sub-humid region, because it rains slightly more there, although in an increasingly irregular manner.

Some solutions are not viable because “75 percent of the farming areas in the Corridor are sloping land, unprotected by organic material, which makes the water run off more quickly into the rivers,” Merlos told IPS by phone from San Salvador.

“In addition, the large irrigation systems that we’re familiar with are not accessible for the poor because of their high cost and the expensive energy for the extraction and pumping of water, from declining sources,” he said.

The most viable alternative, he added, is making better use of rainwater, by building tanks, or through techniques to retain moisture in the soil, such as reforestation and leaving straw and other harvest waste on the ground rather than burning it as peasant farmers continue to do.

“Harmful weather events, which four decades ago occurred one to three times a year, now happen 10 or more times a year, and their effects are more severe in the Dry Zone,” Merlos pointed out.

Funde is a Salvadoran centre for development research and policy formulation that together with Fundapaz, four Brazilian organisations forming part of the ASA network and seven other Latin American groups had been cooperating since 2013, when they created the Latin American Semiarid Platform.

The Platform paved the way for the DAKI-Semiárido Vivo which, using 78 percent of its two million dollar budget, opened up new horizons for synergy among Latin America’s semiarid ecoregions. To this end, said Burneo, it should create a virtuous alliance of “good practices and public policies.”

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Young Agriprenuer Programme is promoting youth participation in agribusiness with hands on skills training in farming and entrepreneurship. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Apr 30 2020 (IPS)

In Rwanda, Benimana Uwera Gilberthe, a scholar and pepper producer, experienced first-hand the challenges of breaking into agribusiness.

While in Nigeria, Ayoola Adewale is trying to understand if poultry egg farming will prove a profitable and viable business opportunity to the youth of the continent’s most populous nation. Also in Nigeria, Esther Alleluyanatha is understanding the link between young people leaving their villages for larger cities, the remittances they send home, and the implications on rural livelihoods and agriculture productivity.

In understanding this, these three young researchers are in fact providing answers to greater questions about agriculture on the continent. Like:

• What will it take to attract more African youth into agriculture — a sector the World Bank says could be worth $1 trillion in the next 10 years?
• And what supportive polices and investments are needed to develop this sector?

Adewale, Alleluyanatha  and Gilberthe are just three of the 80 young African scholars that are tackling the business of agriculture through the innovativeness and freshness that comes with youth — while obtaining their masters or doctoral degrees in the process.

They are awardees of the Enhancing Capacity to Apply Research Evidence (CARE), a three-year project that was launched in 2018 by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), with funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

The project aims “to build an understanding of poverty reduction, employment impact, and factors influencing youth engagement in agribusiness, and rural farm and non-farm economies,” according to IITA Director General Nteranya Sanginga.

“Grantees were offered training on research methodology, data management, scientific writing, and the production of research evidence for policymaking. They are mentored by IITA scientists and experts on a research topic of their choice and produce science articles and policy briefs about their work,” Sanginga explained.

He has long championed the idea that developing agriculture is key to addressing the urgent challenges of food insecurity, poverty and youth unemployment on the continent.

• Indeed, according to IFAD, agriculture makes business sense because it has high returns per dollar invested. An IFAD study, The Economics Advantage: Assessing the value of climate change actions in agriculture, states that for every dollar invested through one of its smallholder programmes, farmers could earn between $1.40 and $2.60 over a 20-year period by applying climate change adaptation practices. 

“Youth brings energy and innovation to the mix, but these qualities can be best channelled by young Africans themselves carrying out results-based research in agribusiness and rural development involving young people. Youth engagement is key,” Sanginga said.

Young farmers and brothers Prosper and Prince Chikwara are using precision farming techniques at their horticulture farm, outside Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/ IPS

Commercial agriculture the answer to youth unemployment?

Adewale, a PhD candidate at the University of Ibadan, works as a technical assistant at the Federal Operation Coordinating Unit for Youth Employment and Social Operation (FOCU-YESSO) in Abuja.  

YESSO is tasked with providing access to work opportunities for Nigeria’s poor and vulnerable youth. 

• Nigeria, which has a population of over 180 million, had 19.58 percent youth unemployment in 2019, according to estimates by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

“Commercialised agriculture holds immense potential as a way out of poverty,” Adewale told IPS. 

• Nigeria is also a net food importer, spending an average of $22 billion annually. The country imports rice, fish, wheat and poultry products with milk and tomato paste accounting for more than $1,4 billion of the food import bill.

“Youth involvement in commercialised agriculture is growing and seems to be the way out of the current unemployment rate. However, government and private sector support is required if youths will compete favourably, thrive sustainably and raise coming generation of commercial agriculture entrepreneurs,” Adewale said.

For her research topic she wants to understand if poultry egg production is a profitable and  technically efficient venture for youth farmers,  specifically assessing the impact of the Commercial Agriculture Development project (CADP).

• CADP is a World Bank-assisted project targeted at strengthening agricultural production systems and facilitating access to market for targeted value chains among small and medium scale commercial farmers in Cross River, Enugu, Lagos, Kaduna and Kano states. 

“Commercial agriculture, across all value chains, holds potential to boost productivity, profitability and economic growth of Nigeria and indeed Africa,” she said. “The study will provide insight into how commercial agriculture programmes are sustainable as well as provide direction into how commercial agriculture can be harnessed for African agriculture.”

Money in agriculture

Alleluyanatha, also from Nigeria, is also concerned about the high rate of unemployment among youth — particularly in urban areas.

“There is a need, therefore, to discourage the exodus of youths from rural to urban areas and to encourage them to go into agriculture, which is known to be the major source of livelihood in the rural areas,” Alleluyanatha said. 

She is researching youth migration and remittances and the implications on rural livelihood and agriculture productivity in Africa. She aims to do this by comparing households with youth migrants and those without. 

In Rwanda, Gilberthe  and his under-graduate classmates started growing pepper for export after securing a contract with the country’s National Agricultural Export Development Board. 

“The venture was successful and we gave youth in my areas the idea on how agribusiness can be a decent job if you do it professionally and invest in it,” Gilberthe told IPS. “I used to have at least $210 each time we sold our product.”

Youth aged between 14 and 35 years make up 39 percent of Rwanda’s population but, according to Gilberthe, many are not participating in agribusiness owing to limited agribusiness skills, lack of start-up capital, limited access to land, and information on agribusiness opportunities.

• Indeed it is a issue across the continent. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) notes that Africa needs targeted interventions focused on making agriculture a viable employment option for Africa’s youth who are held back from joining it by lack of land, credit, quality farm inputs, machinery and skills.

Gilberthe is researching how being part of financing schemes impact the incomes of youth agripreneurs.

He believes policies for youth engagement in agribusiness should also include trainings about running such businesses. In addition, he believes such policies should also make provisions for more agribusiness financing schemes.

“In Rwanda, youth engaged in agribusiness have a problem of not owning land and most of them use their parent’s land but their income is limited and they need access to credit,” he said.

• Rwanda, one of Africa’s smaller countries per square kilometre, has a land area of just under 27,000 square kilometres. About 69 percent of the land is used for agriculture, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.

“I think differently about agriculture now,” says Gilberthe. “As a young researcher I have discovered the opportunities and barriers for youth engaged in agribusiness and this research is giving me a chance to contribute toward policy formulation about youth engagement in agribusiness.

“Through my findings I will be able to prove wrong youth who take agriculture as the work for old and village people and other people who still think that agriculture cannot improve your income.”

Excerpt:

Planeta Hatuleke, a small scale farmer of Pemba District in Southern Zambia, stands in a maize field. This year, she hopes that she will not be one of the country’s 2.3 million food insecure people thanks to the climate smart agriculture techniques she implemented while planting her crop in November. Courtesy: Friday Phiri

By Friday Phiri
LUSAKA and PEMBA DISTRICT, Zambia, Jan 15 2020 (IPS)

It is early Saturday morning and Planeta Hatuleke, a small scale farmer of Pemba District in Southern Zambia, awakens to the comforting sound of rainfall. As the locals say, the “heavens have opened” and it is raining heavily after a prolonged dry spell. 

“This is welcome after two weeks of a dry spell,” says Hatuleke with a sigh of relief. “The rainfall pattern has not been consistent so far; we could be headed for a repeat of last season” she adds pessimistically.

• The 2018/19 farming season was characterised by drought and prolonged dry spells, which, according to the government Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU), left 2.3 million people severely food insecure and in need of humanitarian food assistance.

Hatuleke along with her 8-member family members are part of the hunger stricken population. Last farming season, the family harvested only five 50Kg-bags of maize, 10 short of their annual food requirements.

“It has not been easy to feed my family since the five bags finished. I am grateful to government for relief food support but for big families like mine, we have to supplement through other means,” says the 55-year old widow. “As a family, we have been surviving on sales from our gardening activities.”

• Statistics from DMMU show that at least 70,000 metric tonnes of relief food (maize grain and maize meal) has been distributed to the affected people between September 2019 and January 2020.
• According World Food Programme (WFP) country director for Zambia, Jennifer Bitonde, the United Nations’ food agency “requires $36 million to effectively support the government in responding to the crisis.”
• WFP is currently supporting the government’s response by delivering government-supplied maize meal, as well as by procuring and delivering pulses to ensure a nutrition-sensitive food basket. WFP is also working closely with partners to monitor food distributions and guarantee that resources reach those most in need.
  • In a statement after receiving a contribution of $3.39 million from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to help meet the immediate food needs of drought-affected people in Zambia, Bitonde added that “USAID’s contribution represents approximately 10 percent of the total needs and will allow WFP to ensure that drought-affected people will not go to bed hungry during this year’s lean season.’’
  • Other partners who have made a contribution to WFP Zambia include the Swedish government, which has contributed $2 million, and the Italian government with a contribution of $ 610,000.

Last October, the three U.N. food agencies—the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and WFP—called for urgent funding to avert a major hunger crisis and for the international community to step up investment in long-term measures to combat the impact of climate shocks and build the capacity of communities and countries to withstand them.

They warned that a record 45 million people across the 16-nation Southern African Development Community would be severely food insecure in the next six months starting from October 2019.

At the time, they reported that there were more than 11 million people experiencing “crisis” or “emergency” levels of food insecurity (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Phases 3 and 4) in nine countries: Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, Eswatini and Lesotho. 

“Late rains, extended dry periods, two major cyclones and economic challenges have proved a recipe for disaster for food security and livelihoods across Southern Africa,” said Alain Onibon, FAO’s Sub-Regional Coordinator for Southern Africa.

“As it could take many farming communities at least two to three growing seasons to return to normal production, immediate support is vital.  Now is the time to scale up agricultural emergency response. We need to ensure farmers and agro-pastoralists take advantage of the forecasted good rains, assuming they happen, as this will be crucial in helping them rebuild their livelihoods.”

While Southern Africa has experienced normal rainfall in just one of the last five growing seasons, persistent drought, back-to-back cyclones and flooding have wreaked havoc on harvests in a region overly dependent on rain-fed, smallholder agriculture.

Interestingly, Zambia is experiencing both climate extremes at the same time. While farmers in the southwestern parts of the country are anxious about the rainfall pattern that has been erratic so far, their counterparts in the northeast are battling flash floods, adding pressure on the already overstretched resource base.

Over 300 families have been reported as being affected by floods in the Mambwe and Lumezi districts of Zambia’s Eastern Province.

And Zambian President Edgar Lungu, continues to urge government technocrats to work at finding a lasting solution to the climate problem.

“So as we provide relief, I think that we should put our heads together. My Permanent Secretaries are here so we can work together to find a lasting solution,” said Lungu when he toured and interacted with flood victims on Jan 9.  

• It is unanimously agreed globally that climate change is due to human activities that cause damage (either directly or indirectly) to the environment. Such activities include overexploitation of natural resources, pollution and deforestation, among others.

Experiencing a critical energy deficit, with over 2 million food-insecure people to feed due to a climate-induced droughts and flash floods in a single year, are key lessons for leaders and ordinary people alike.

This December, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25), Zambia’s Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources Ndashe Yumba highlighted the adverse effects of climate change on his country’s natural resource-sensitive sectors, such as energy and agriculture, and how the country was moving away from a business-as-usual approach.

“There is still increasing evidence that climate change is negatively impacting critical sectors of our country,” said Yumba during a high-level event at COP25.

“In the recent past, drastic reduction in precipitation and rising temperatures in Zambia has led to a reduced agricultural productivity by about 16 percent and subsequently slowed down our economic growth. While Zambia is still pursuing her aspirations on socio-economic development, it is mindful of the need to maintain a healthy environment in order to achieve sustainable development…a recipe to a healthy climate is a healthy environment,” he added.

Back in Pemba District in Southern Zambia, Hatuleke is hoping that climate smart agricultural principles which are routed in sustainable environmental management, and which she has recently implemented, will bring her a better harvest this year. 

“I ripped my field and planted early; just after the first rains in mid-November and as you can see, my maize is at tussling stage,” she says. “I am hopeful of a good harvest, provided it consistently rains in the remaining half of the season.”

Young farmers and brothers Prosper and Prince Chikwara are using precision farming techniques at their horticulture farm, outside Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Experts say that unless Africa promotes new and innovative farmers, the continent will be at the mercy of other nations for its food security. Credit: Busani Bafana/ IPS

By Busani Bafana
IBADAN, Nigeria, Jan 9 2020 (IPS)

Africa will starve or survive on expensive food imports because it is not growing new farmers, research shows. And the challenge remains among researchers, policy makers, public and private sector actors to get African youth interested in agriculture on a continent where a growing number of people go to bed hungry every night.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), a global research institute that generates agricultural innovations to meet Africa’s most pressing challenges of hunger, malnutrition and poverty, has long been promoting several programmes to attract and keep youth in agriculture.

But it has been a tall order to convince the youth that agriculture is the key to creating food and jobs in Africa, IITA Director General Nteranya Sanginga told IPS.

“I have wanted the youth to define what agriculture is all about, for them agriculture is pain, penury and poverty,” Sanginga said. “We need to transform that mind-set and get them to understand that agriculture could be a source of wealth, business and pleasure.”

In 2012 the institution launched the IITA Youth Agripreneur, a programme that enrols 60 youth for hands on training in agriculture and entrepreneurship in 24 centres across Africa each year.

Sanginga said unless Africa promotes new and innovative farmers, the continent will be at the mercy of other regions for its food security.

• Africa has 257 million hungry people, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).
• While Africa holds 65 percent of the world’s uncultivated, arable land and adequate water resources, the continent spends more than $35 billion annually importing food — a bill projected by the African Development Bank (AfDB) to balloon to $110 billion by 2025.
• About 237 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are suffering from chronic under nutrition, which is derailing past gains in eradicating hunger and poverty, said the FAO in a joint 2019 report, Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition.
• The report underlines the need to accelerate action to achieve the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal of achieving zero hunger as well as global nutrition targets amidst challenges of youth unemployment and climate change.
• “Agriculture and the rural sector must play a key role in creating decent jobs for the 10 to 12 million youths that join the labour market each year,” the FAO said.

At the heart of the food challenge is the diminishing labour pool. Smallholder farmers keep Africa fed.  Agriculture contributes about 30 percent to the continent’s GDP but the sector is hampered by poor productivity and low investment and the average age of a smallholder farmer in Africa is 60. Yet young farmers are not being produced fast enough to close the labour gap in agriculture production.

Agriculture has a negative image of not being attractive enough for the more ambitious, tech-savvy youth who would rather hustle in urban areas than become farmers.

“When we project farming as a viable economic opportunity for young people, we should tell them it is a process and you have to get your hands dirty,” says Lawrence Afere (35), founder of Springboard, an online network of producers and rural entrepreneurs in Ondo State of Nigeria.

Springboard is working with more than 3,000 members across six states in Nigeria growing plantains, beans and rice. The network gives the farmers inputs and training and buys back the produce for processing and value addition.

It has been a tall order to convince the youth that agriculture is the key to creating food and jobs in Africa, IITA Director General Nteranya Sanginga told IPS. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

The solutions to tackling youth unemployment in Africa are varied but a key solution is to sell agriculture as a business, says Sanginga who initiated the “Start Them Early Programme(STEP)”, which promotes agribusiness studies to primary and secondary school students through club participation, course work and experimental learning.

Furthermore, the IITA has taken a research approach to getting more young people in agriculture. 

• The institute launched a fellowship programme under a three-year research grant called “Enhancing Capacity to Apply Research Evidence (CARE)”, a policy for youth engagement in agribusiness and rural economic activities in Africa.
• The action-oriented fellowship targets young academics and professionals and graduate students at the post-course work/research stage of their programmes. It is funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and has awarded 30 research fellowships in 2019.
• The fellowship provides opportunities for the youth by improving the availability and use of evidence for inclusive and “youth friendly” policies on youth engagement in agribusiness and rural economic activities. The duration of the research is six months and youth are trained on production of research evidence for policy-making.

University researcher Akilimali Ephrem is a 2019 fellow under the CARE programme. He is researching traits for successful agriprenuers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I identified that young people were not attracted towards agriculture. They underestimate the value of agriculture and this has to do with our culture in the DRC,” Akilimali told IPS in an interview.

“Youths are struggling to get jobs yet they are completing their studies and I saw that this CARE project was a way forward because it looks at how best we can engage the youth in agribusiness as an alternative to employment,” said Akilimali, whose research title is ‘Perceived social norms, psychological capital and youth agripreneurial intention in DRC’.

“Everyone is saying that the youth should find a life in agriculture and agribusiness but nobody has ever asked whether these youth would like to do so or have a desire to do so. Probably we should start by increasing their desire to go into agribusiness otherwise we shall be targeting the wrong people,” said Akilimali, who identified psychological capital – a positive developmental mind set – as a key ingredient for any successful agribusiness entrepreneur.

• Young people in Africa will make up 42 percent of the global youth population and account for 75 percent of people under the age of 35 on the continent, according the 2019 World Population Data Sheet published by the Population Reference Bureau, a United States-based organisation that informs on population, health and the environment.
• In the parlance of the youth, agriculture is not ‘cool’ because of its association with back breaking long hours of work in the field for little gain.
• Limited access to credit, finance, land and appropriate productivity boosting technology has combined to exclude the youth from the business of farming.

Already, Africa’s food and beverage markets are projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, according to the AfDB.  

AfDB president, Akinumwi Adesina has said making agriculture profitable and  ‘cool’ for young people through investment is the solution to pulling millions of Africans out of poverty and a means to stem the tide of youth migration to Europe in search for a better life.

But development researcher Jim Sumberg, from the Institute of Development Studies in the United Kingdom, is not convinced agriculture is the silver bullet.

Sumberg says the idea of agriculture as a vast domain of entrepreneurial opportunity for young people is being grossly over sold, noting there are opportunities for some and for others it is a case of hard work for little reward.

“I believe the idea that a large proportion of young people are leaving rural areas and/or farming is over-played,” Sumberg, told IPS via e-mail.

“There is no real evidence. Further, why would anyone want to “lure” young people into tedious, poorly paid work? It makes no sense! It is true that a modernised agriculture will provide some job opportunities (for youth and others), but I doubt it will be the millions and millions of jobs often promised.”

Sumberg said he had little patience with the idea of changing people’s mind sets so that they see “farming as a business”. It can only be a business if there is the potential for profit, and at the moment there are many situations where the potential is not there.

In the popular municipality of Estación Central, in Santiago de Chile, a Haitian hairdresser has established a barber shop where Creole is spoken and the nationals are served. At the end of this year, migrants will have sent 466 billion dollars to family and friends in their countries of origin. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Nov 30 2018 (IPS)

At the end of this year, migrants will have sent 466 billion dollars to family and friends in their countries of origin. Despite this record amount these remittances have little to no effect on the dire economic state of affairs in those home countries. Earlier this week in Brussels, a group of experts convened to think of ways to make the sent money work in a way that benefits more than just a few lucky families. 

Though relatively stable as a percentage of the world population, there have never been more migrants than today. Out of the one billion people that moved away from their places of birth, some 258 million have found a place abroad while 760 million remained within their own states. Despite it being a heated political debate in the global North, only one third of all international migration is directed from South to North. The overall majority, some 100 million people, move between states in the global South.

These numbers were presented by Laura Palatini, Belgium and Luxemburg’s mission chief for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Palatini was the first of five speakers on an international conference, organised by IOM, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), several Brussels municipalities and local and international NGOs at the Brussels Parliament this Tuesday.

These one billion migrants each year send home approximately 466 billion dollars. “It is said that if remittances would be country, it would have the right to claim its seat in the G20,” says Valéry Paternotte of Réseau Financité, a Belgian network of organisations for ethical finance, “It is three times the annual budget of development aid world-wide.”

But according to Paternotte, the numbers need a closer look. “In Belgium for instance, 38 percent of all remittances are destined to neighbour France and 4 percent for Luxembourg while Senegal, Congo, Rwanda and Bangladesh together account for less than one percent.” Then again, the estimate of 466 billion is most probably an underestimation, as not all countries are being taken into account, second and third generations are not included, nor are informal remittances – migrants travelling with envelopes, small transfer agencies and possible other unknown practices of sending money home.

Nevertheless the 6.4 billion flowing annually into Morocco is just as important for the economy as the entire phosphate sector or tourism. The nine billion dollars sent to Congo by members of the diaspora accounts for twice the country’s annual budget. Remittances are an indispensable source of income for 750 million people worldwide. Research in 71 developing countries indicates that a 10 percent rise in remittances leads to a 3.5 percent drop in the number of people living with less than one dollar a day.

Researchers on the topic agree that remittances are a stable source of income for developing countries that are not affected by economic shocks or cycles of regression and growth. Moreover, they are the first form of help that reaches regions affected by natural disasters or epidemics. This became most evident with the last ebola crisis in Sierra Leone and the recent earthquake in Nepal.

But as of yet, the money flow doesn’t lead to structural changes in the countries of origins whose economies remain in a dire state. “The first obstacle is that the money received is spent, not invested in the local economy,” says Paternotte, “and this is understandable. In the world’s least developed countries less than a quarter of adults have access to a bank account. The received money is kept under the mattress. That is a very practical but very important barrier to saving and investing in the local economy.”

Traditional banks seem not to be interested in putting up branches in developing areas, let alone rural zones in those developing areas, the expert explains. “Moreover, social projects – schools, hospitals, cooperative farms – aren’t invested in due to poor returns. That is a characteristic of the system and not very different in our own country,” the Belgian national says.

Besides that, lots of migrant communities lack financial literacy, which together with cultural factors leads to inefficiency. Pedro de Vasconcelos, manager of the Financing Facility for Remittances at IFAD in Rome, gives the example of a Filipino community in Italy.

“We found out that they couldn’t say no when someone called for money,” he says, “it’s in their culture. It was a revelation for many of them when we told them that you can refuse when there’s not a good reason. Then we began to save. Two hundred out of every thousand euros, which is a lot. With all these savings we started investing in rural areas around their home town which used to be an agricultural area but now had become an importer of food. From three farms for laying hens we quickly went to five. On Facebook, the diaspora followed everything that happened in the homeland.”

Several of the investors in Italy moved back after the project turned out a success. “Because they see that there are possibilities there. That work can be created. The Philippine government is now looking at how this project can be scaled, to achieve real economic growth through the Diaspora.”

De Vasconcelos’ example shows that remittances can play a role in reversing or even stemming migration. But according to agronomist Jean-Jacques Schul of the Belgian NGO, IDAY International, an important factor should not be overlooked: the involvement of the local government.

“Remittances carry a risk,” Schul says, “because thanks to the money from abroad, the government does not have to listen to its citizens. They can survive without the government’s support. And without a government that listens to its citizens, nobody sees a future in their own country. Which makes them leave. It is a vicious circle. ”

The solution? When it comes to any kind of transfers of funds to the South, civil society and the government must be encouraged to start a constructive dialogue.

“Provide a policy in which remittances, or at least a part of those, serve to start up projects together with the government. If development aid is made available, make sure that citizens’ movements can check where that money is going. That is hardly the case now. Only with collaboration between citizens’ movements and the government will sustainable change occur. Nobel Prize winners Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton have been proclaiming this for years, why don’t we listen?”

Some of the academics, representatives of international organisations and former government authorities in social areas who took part in the workshop to launch the alliance to end rural poverty in Latin America at the FAO regional headquarters in Santiago, Chile. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Aug 31 2017 (IPS)

Experts in Latin America warned about the serious risk that would be posed if the fight against hunger, still suffered by 33 million people in the region, is abandoned, while proposing new alternatives and insights which include linking social protection with economic growth.

More than 25 high-level experts met in Santiago, Chile on Aug. 28-29 in a workshop to launch the Alliance to End Rural Poverty, sponsored by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

After debating “concrete and feasible proposals” to address the problem, they announced that they would take their initiatives in the next few weeks to the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean, a region with a population of over 640 million.“There are a series of new spaces for policies that are aimed at different purposes, such as social protection or climate change mitigation, but that at the same time can generate pathways out of poverty for the extreme poor.” -- Alain De Janvry

“The Alliance is a group that began to generate knowledge and proposals and to interact with the countries in the region to once again sink our teeth into the challenge of reducing rural poverty,” said Carolina Trivelli, a former Peruvian minister of social development and Inclusion who heads the Peruvian Studies Institute.

“We need a very strong narrative to put the eradication of rural poverty on the agenda of the countries and the region. For many, it is currently a not very attractive challenge because it goes unnoticed and the rural poor are out there in remote areas,” the expert told IPS.

Besides, “the rural poor have declined in number so it’s as if there was no longer a need to worry about them. But the opposite is true. We do need to worry because rural poverty has consequences not only for the lives of the poor but also for the national economies, for inequality and for the possibility of creating more integrated countries,” she added.

Trivelli, who will draft the workshop’s conclusions, stressed that “because the rural poor of today are not the same as they were 20 years ago, the initiatives to help them cannot be the same either.”

“We need policies to address different kinds of rural poor, in different territories, but they have to be smart policies that allow us to reinforce what already exists,” she said.

According to Trivelli, “there are many social programmes that reach poor people in rural areas, but we can add productive or economic development components that allow us to use the social protection platform to boost economic opportunities for the rural poor.”

Alain de Janvry, a professor from the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics at the University of California-Berkeley, cited an example to illustrate.

“Rural poverty in Latin America is increasingly indigenous: 40 per cent of the rural poor are indigenous,” said David Kaimowitz, head of natural resources and climate change at the Ford Foundation, during his presentation at the workshop to launch the alliance to end rural poverty in the region. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

“We have carried out a study on a monetary transference made in Mexico, after NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and in compensation for the low prices of maize due to competition from maize imported from the United States,” the academic told IPS.

“A cash transfer was made to all producers of maize and basic grains. These transfers were specifically to farmers – to the male head of the household. The funds were multiplied by two: for every peso received they used it to generate another peso. The second peso was generated by how they used the first peso in a productive investment,” he said.

According to De Janvry, “the potential that is being explored is that social protection can have positive impacts together with economic initiatives, and can eventually generate employment, incomes and economic growth – a strategy to generate profits.”

“Economic efficiency and productivity,” said the expert, stressing the initiative’s intergenerational impact.

“Educating children and giving them better health coverage makes it possible to keep them from falling into poverty because they have poor parents who have not educated them or given them proper healthcare. The idea is to give them the possibility to pull out of poverty thanks to education and improved health,” he said.

De Janvry advocated the promotion of small-scale family farming and rethinking social protection policies in rural areas, but also called for “identifying critical sectors in rural poverty such as indigenous poverty, problems of discrimination and the relation with the preservation of natural resources, such as climate change mitigation.”

“There are a series of new spaces for policies that are aimed at different purposes, such as social protection or climate change mitigation, but that at the same time can generate pathways out of poverty for the extreme poor,” he said.

For Trivelli, the new proposals of policies to end rural poverty “require new institutional arrangements” since “there is no ministry taking care of the rural poor, different sectors and levels of government have to pitch in, besides many private sector actors.”

“Extractive industries, for example, that operate in rural areas, and we have to get these institutions involved, different ministries, public entities, levels of government, private companies and organisations of farmers and rural dwellers themselves to reach agreements,” she said.

But the plans of the emerging Alliance are facing key constraints, such as the backdrop of a difficult decade for the region in terms of economic peformance, as projected by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“The macro-fiscal context in the region is not the most positive. Clearly the battle for public resources is increasingly fierce, and therefore the narrative is very important,” Trivelli acknowledged.

In her opinion, “we have to make a good case for why governments should invest in ending poverty instead of doing a bunch of other things for which there are also lots of interest and pressure groups.”

During the launch of the Alliance,, FAO regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean Julio Berdegué said it was necessary “to not lower our guard” in the fight against poverty in the region, stating that 27 per cent of the rural population living in extreme poverty “is not an insignificant proportion.”

“We cannot evade the link between poverty and inequality,” he said, pointing out the people hit hardest by extreme poverty are indigenous women in remote areas.

Berdegué described the emerging Alliance as “a regional public good that transcends FAO and IFAD,” which will mobilise Latin America’s wealth and experience “to give the best support to the governments of the region interacting with them and with their organisations committed to ending rural poverty.”

Through the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)’s Plan for Food Security, Nutrition and Hunger Eradication, the region was the first in the developing South to commit to eradicating hunger by 2025, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) which have set that goal for 2030 at a global level.

IFAD expert in public policies Lauren Phillips told IPS that the joint efforts together with FAO and other institutions that will join the Alliance “aim to propose better solutions to end extreme poverty in the region, which is very important for local people.”

“We are thinking of focusing on some key ideas where there is already evidence of the possibility of public policies achieving benefits, and also focusing on certain countries,” she said.

For Phillips, “we have to think strategically about where are the possibilities of achieving the most… we have to also think about the political situation of the countries and where we have evidence about the routes we need to take to make progress over the next few weeks.”

“We have to always think about what is feasible and realistic and what are the governments’ capacities,” the expert said. “We know that the governments of some countries need more technical support to implement the public policies.”

She believes that “it is a huge challenge faced by all developing regions, including Latin America. Perhaps the capacity to develop strategies exists, but to implement them is always harder due to a lack of resources and capacities.”

Indigenous women, such as these farmers on the outskirts of Sucre, Bolivia’s official capital, are part of a group with the most difficulties to overcome extreme poverty in Latin America, and therefore require specific policies to give them equal opportunities. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Aug 29 2017 (IPS)

“There are 33 million rural dwellers in Latin America who are still living in extreme poverty and can’t afford a good diet, clothes or education, and we are not going to help them move out of poverty if we use the same strategies that worked 20 years ago,” FAO regional representative Julio Berdegué told IPS.

Since 1990, rural poverty in the region was reduced from 65 per cent to 46 per cent, while extreme poverty fell from 40 per cent to below 27 per cent.

But while the proportion of rural extreme poor decreased by 1 percentage point a year between 1997 and 2007, the rate of decrease was only 0.2 per cent a year between 2007 and 2014.

To break that pattern in the most vulnerable rural group, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) are launching this last week of August in Santiago, Chile the “Alliance to end rural poverty in Latin America.”

FAO regional representative Julio Berdergué. Credit: FAOALC

“There is a strong deceleration in the reduction of poverty, five times slower than before, only just 0.2 per cent per year,” noted with concern Berdegué, who attributed the phenomenon, among other causes, to a regional economic slowdown which has had an impact on employment and incomes.

“The strong, sustainable, solid solution to rural poverty is economic development in rural areas. Quality jobs, better wages: that is the best strategy to reduce rural poverty,” said Berdegué, who is also FAO deputy director-general, in the body’s regional office in the Chilean capital.

For Berdegué, “social policies compensate for the effects of economic development, but what we want is for people to stop being poor because they have better jobs and not because of good social programmes…that is a second best option.”

In his interview with IPS, the Mexican senior U.N. official said the region has already done a great deal to reduce poverty and extreme poverty and what remains is to eradicate the most difficult part of poverty, harder to combat because it is structural.

He cited the example of Chile, where less than three per cent of the rural population suffer from extreme poverty, but the people affected are indigenous women in remote areas, which makes the task of rescuing them from deep poverty especially complicated.

According to Berdegué, the policies and programmes created and implemented in Latin America to eradicate poverty successfully served their purpose ,“but not necessarily the same strategies and same programmes are the ones that will work for us in the final push” of putting an end to hard-core, entrenched poverty.

Luiz Carlos Beduschi, a Brazilian academic and policy officer in the FAO regional office,pointed out to IPS that one of the most significant programmes to combat poverty in Nicaragua consisted of giving extremely poor people chickens, pigs or pregnant cows along with technical assistance.

“A woman from District 7, in the periurban area of Managua, discovered a dormant entrepreneurial potential. She was given a cow, and today, eight years later, she has 17 cows. Her oldest daughter left to study and graduated as a dentist. The woman sold three cows to finance a clinic (for her daughter) in the neighbourhood. She is now involved in the economic and social fabric of that area,” Beduschi said. Her second daughter is now studying medicine.

He added that the beneficiaries of this programme do not so much need advice as other elements such as credit at an interest rate lower than the 20 to 30 per cent offered by local creditors.
“We have to design a new plan for new times,” he concluded.

Launching the new Alliance
More than 25 experts, researchers and decision-makers are meeting Monday 28 and Tuesday 29 in Santiago, summoned by FAO and IFAD to seek new strategies and instruments to combat rural poverty.

In this new Alliance Launch Workshop, the participants are identifying and disseminating a politically viable and technically feasible package of proposals to be implemented by Latin American governments, for each country to face the challenge of ending rural poverty from an innovative perspective.

The activities of this initiative will be carried out from now until July 2019, and will count on FAO resources for the initial phase.

Berdegué said the first successful result of the Alliance was bringing together this group of experts with the commitment of “putting their shoulders to the wheel” in seeking innovative solutions to put an end to rural poverty.

“We want to release the 1.0 version of a proposal that we are going to offer to the countries. Not more of the same, because that has us at a five times slower rate. And we want to produce the first ideas, the best that we can, but we don’t want to spend the next six months writing documents. The best that we can, the sooner we can, and with those instruments we will go to the countries,” he said.

“The meeting will be a successful one if we come out of it with a very concrete working plan, detailed in such a way that the following week we can be going to the countries, as we have already started to do in Ecuador and Nicaragua,” he told IPS.

“We have a specific work agenda for collaboration to put these ideas into practice, with public programmes and policies,” he added.

Among the new tools that are being discussed in the world and in Latin America, Berdegué pointed out the concept of a universal basic income, which has its pros and cons, and is hotly debated.

There is also the issue of rural labour markets “which are in general in a state of true disaster, with high levels of informality and very low female participation rates, among them young women who have received 10 to 12 years of schooling and have no job offers in line with this human capital they have acquired.”

And a crucial issue in the new agenda, not taken into account in the past decades, is inequality.

“Many of these 33 million poor are poor because they are first victims of inequality. A rural indigenous woman, in a less developed area, is victim of more than four inequalities: gender, ethnicity, rural and territorial. Besides, economic inequality, on grounds of social class,” Berdegué said.

“Good quality employment, better wages, that is the best strategy for reducing rural poverty. And we have an accumulation of inequalities that, if we do not solve them, it will be very hard to return to the rate of one percentage point of reduction of rural extreme poverty,” he concluded.

Academics, as well as government officials and representatives of social organisations are taking part in the FAO and IFAD meeting, joining forces to think about how to keep on combating rural poverty with the goal of eradicating it.

About 7,000 farmers are benefitting from this IFAD-supported project and the buffalo population has risen to more than 9,100 in the district. Credit: GJUS

By Shahiduzzaman
BHOLA, Bangladesh, Aug 22 2017 (IPS)

Visitors might be confused after arriving in Char Chatkimarai, a tiny island of eight square miles situated in the extreme south of Bangladesh close to the Bay of Bengal. Many might think they have just landed in an amazing part of a big national park of buffalo.

It is an eye-catching sight to say the least. Whichever direction one looks, there are buffalo everywhere, moving together in herds and sometimes playfully running after each other or resting with their bodies submerged in water.“Our income is slowly increasing and we can take care of our families better than before." --Hanif Hawlader

This buffalo island did not happen overnight. It is the poor people of this island who worked for decades to turn the place into buffalo land, building and rebuilding after floods, cyclones and tidal surges hit the island year after year.

The islands were inundated several times, including Char Chatkimarai, which was completely washed away and inhabitants of the island lost their loved ones and all their assets. But the people never gave up, rising every time to rebuild their lives and dreaming of a better future.

Each disaster that hit the people made them more determined to work harder. Their struggle for a better life attracted the attention of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a United Nations organisation that came up with a support programme for the island.

The government of Bangladesh welcomed IFAD’s initiative and agreed to work together to give the people of the island a fighting chance for a better life.

With IFAD support, Grameen Jano Unnayan Sangstha (GJUS), a local NGO, launched a four-year programme to provide modern technology for rearing buffalo in five sub-districts of Bhola, a southern district of the country. Ever since, the situation on the island started to improve.

About 7,000 farmers are benefitting from this IFAD-supported project and the buffalo population has risen to more than 9,100 in the district. The total buffalo population in the country is 1.464 million heads that are used for household subsistence farming as well as for extensive free range farming in the saline coastal region. Often buffalo are used as draft animals and partially for milk and meat production.

Zakir Hossain, Executive Director of GJUS, said, “Rearing buffalo is not profitable due to its high mortality rate, which is about 12 percent, and low productivity. But farmers keep buffalo in remote islands as they do not have any alternatives for survival.”

“Its products are healthier than other animals such as cow or goat,” Zakir added.

Mentioning the key activities undertaken with IFAD support on the island, Zakir said that training has been introduced for buffalo farmers to be able to adopt modern technology, keep up with continuous technical advice and health treatment services and introduce feed technology for high yielding bulls and artificial insemination technology.

The farmers are also helped to set up linkages between producers and milk purchasers and access markets and undertake promotion activities surrounding buffalo milk, milk-based products and meat, also ensuring regular vaccination.

As per the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistic (BBS) (2015-1016), the contribution of livestock to GDP is 1.66 to country’s GDP. Experts state that there are more options and opportunity to expand the sector.

Char Chatkimarai lies between two giant rivers: Tetulia and Meghna. The population of about 3,000 is ultra-poor and the literacy rate is very low. Girls and women’s lives are quite restricted. Most of them are victims of child or forced marriages.

Recently a team led by Benoit Thierry, Country Program Manager, Asia and the Pacific Division of IFAD traveled for over one and a half hours by small speed boat to reach Char Chatkimarai from Barisal division. Thierry met about 50 buffalo farmers and the people who live on this little island.

Nazim Hawlader, a 50-year-old farmer who is also a group leader, said, “Rearing buffalos was never profitable. Traditionally we have been rearing buffalos but had no treatment facilities when some buffalos had diseases. Now we have such services and this gives us new hope for survival.”

Nazim commended GJUS  for introducing modern technologies for rearing the animals, saying, “They have trained us, advised to take care of our animals in a scientific way and have provided treatment facilities.”

As a result, he said, the buffalo mortality rate has been reduced and the number of buffalo is increasing and they are producing more milk than before.

Hanif Hawlader, 55, another buffalo farmer, said, “Our income is slowly increasing and we can take care of our families better than before. Children are going to school, getting nutritious and healthy food and we also have sanitary toilets.”

He said that there is still a need for good feed at accessible cost and free fields for grazing.

Mohammad Majnu Sarkar, Assistant Manager of Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), a government apex development organization, said, “We have given strong emphasis not only on Char Chatkimarai but also on the five sub-districts of Bhola and other adjacent districts where there is high potential for rearing buffalos.”

He added that the target is to reduce the buffalo mortality rate from 12 percent to 5 percent and continue transferring modern technology to improve herd health. Manju Sarker expressed confidence that most farmers will cross the poverty line and become self-sufficient within the next few years.

“At present buffalo milk, milk products and meat covers about 40 percent demand of Bhola district but it is gradually increasing after the project began. With such promising results, this project can be replicated in other parts of the country, particularly in the district adjacent to Bhola,” said veterinary doctor and Assistant Director of UJUS, Khalilur Rahman.

A study titled “Opportunities of Buffalo Farming in Bangladesh’ found that buffalo milk contains less water, more solids, fat and protein and slightly more lactose than cow’s milk. It seems thicker than cow’s milk because it generally contains more than 16 percent total solids compared with 12-14 percent in cow’s milk.

In addition, its fat content (6-8 percent) is usually 50-60 percent higher (or more) than cow’s milk. Buffalo milk has considerably higher energy value than cow’s milk because of its higher butter fat content. It is commercially more viable than cow milk for products such as butter, butter oil, soft and hard cheeses, condensed or evaporated milks, ice cream, yogurt and butter milk because of its lower water content and higher fat content.

Most significantly, the lower cholesterol value should make it more popular in a health conscious market. Also, buffalo meat is very tender and tasty and a healthy red meat substitute for beef. It is faster to cook, easier to digest, and has no allergenic effect.

The study, jointly conducted by a group of experts from Bangladesh Open University, SAARC Agriculture Centre, Sylhet Agricultural University, and the Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Discipline of Khulna University also put forward a number of recommendations, including buffalo milk and meat market and infrastructure development and private investment to be explored and encouraged to invest in buffalo development in the country.

Deputy Commissioner of the District Mohammed Selim Uddin said the government is very supportive of the project. He said there are about 42 Char lands and each of these have excellent potential for rearing buffalos and cows.

Giving it high importance, the government is now planning to build several Mujib Kellah in the Char (island) region, where people and animals will stay safe during natural calamities like cyclone, floods or high tidal surges. Each Kellah will also have sweet water reserve instead of saline water for public use.

The project initiators are now planning to give a brand name for buffalo products, aiming to make them popular and market throughout the country.

Four women’s groups from Mohalbari, Surail and Damoir villages in Northern Bangladesh participated in a two-day leadership and mobilization training in Dinajpur to spread the initiative of successful women-led cooperatives improving the livelihood of the rural poor. Among the 51 participants, most were landless women coming from Hindu, Muslim and indigenous communities. Credit: IFAD

By Mahfuzur Rahman
DHAKA, Aug 18 2017 (IPS)

When one thinks of Bangladesh, its political leadership naturally comes to mind as the leaders of the country’s major parties are women, including the Prime Minister, the Opposition Leader and the Speaker of the National Parliament.

When it comes to gender equality in daily life, the reality is still different, but many women in Bangladesh are breaking barriers by taking traditionally male jobs – once unthinkable. Take the case of six rural women working in a refueling station in the port city of Narayanganj near the capital Dhaka, a job that entails a degree of personal risk.A 2015 World Bank report said women in Bangladesh account for only 27 percent of the total labour force - a scenario the government and its development partners are determined to change.

Happy Akhter of Magura, Lippi Akhter of Moulvibazar and Rikta of Patuakhali districts are among the six women employees of the refueling station, set up by Saiful Islam, a former police officer, in 2001.

“It’s important to utilise the potential of everyone, including women. And the well-off section of society should come up to support them,” Islam told the Narayanganj correspondent of UNB, a national news agency.

Lippi Akhter added, “My satisfaction is that I can support my family — two daughters and one son — with what I get from this job. I’m not at all worried about myself but I want my children to be educated.”

Asked about their security as they are dealing with male motorists, Lippi said, “We’re safe here as our owner is an ex-police officer. We appreciate his concern about us. He has also made arrangements for our accommodation.”

Taking such a job, where the women have to deal with transport workers, is a matter of great courage as violence against women is widespread.

In the district where these women are working, a 15-year-old girl was raped a by a group of transport workers in a moving truck on the night of August 2. Police arrested the driver hours after the incident. During a preliminary investigation, he confessed to committing the crime with the other men.

In a press statement, Naripokkho, a women’s rights body, said, “The society is being affected due to the repeated incidents of violence against women and children. We’re aggrieved and concerned in such a situation.

“Some 280 women and children fell victims to rape from January to June this year,” Naripokkho said referring to a report of Ain o Shalish Kendro, a human rights body.  It said 39 more were the victims of attempted rape during the period, while 16 were killed after rape, and five committed suicide after rape.

Citing police data, Naripokkho said 1,914 rape cases were filed and 1,109 rape incidents took place between April and June, indicating 12 rape incidents every day.

As elsewhere in the world, women account for almost half of Bangladesh’s total population. Today, the country’s total population is 1.65 million, including 49.40 per cent women, according to the Bangladesh Election Commission.

However, a 2015 World Bank report said women in Bangladesh account for only 27 percent of the total labour force. Nepal has the highest female labour participation rate of 80 percent. “The labour market [in Bangladesh] remains divided along gender lines and progress towards gender equality seems to have stalled,” the World Bank said.

According to a 2014 study by Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a civil society think tank of Bangladesh, “…the contribution of women to the national income has continued to remain insignificant when compared to men because of the under-representation of their contribution to the national income accounts.”

Worldwide, women account for about one-third of the workforce in the unorganised sector. But the International Labour Organization says in Bangladesh, only 3.25 percent of employed women are working in the public sector and 8.25 percent in the private sector. The remaining 89.5 percent are employed in the informal sector with varying and often unpredictable earning patterns – or as it so often happens, work without any payment at all.

Non-recognition of women’s unpaid activity, the CPD study says, also leads to undervaluation of their economic contribution.

The situation is slowly changing as the government takes on various projects with support from international partners. To give women’s empowerment a boost, particularly in the country’s impoverished north, the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) of Bangladesh in collaboration with International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has launched a project on Climate Resilient Community Development (CRCD) Project with a greater focus on gender parity.

The six-year project will be implemented in six districts, Gaibandha, Kurigram, Rangpur, Nilphamari, Lalmonirhat, and Jamalpur, which are known as poverty pockets.

The project seeks to achieve at least 33 percent of women in the overall labour market, and 15 percent in construction-related areas with relevant actions like subsidised courses for women, inclusion of informal sectors and incentives to employers to employ females, functional literacy, and skill development training.

The project follows a gender sensitive design, noting that 10 per cent of households in the project areas are headed by women, and most of these households are extremely poor.

As it does always, IFAD is promoting the active participation of ‘Labour Contracting Society (LCS).  Coastal Climate Resilient Infrastructure Project (CCRIP) is one of them.

CCRIP Project Director A.K.M. Lutfur Rahman said poverty alleviation, education, irrigation, agriculture, women’s empowerment and tree planting are the social aspects of the project apart from its engineering aspects, and women are participating.

The project is expected to contribute to the construction of gender sensitive infrastructure that meets the needs of both women and men. In line with national development policies and IFAD’s Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Policy, the goal is to empower women and men to ensure equal access to project benefits.

As security concerns prevail due to the growing violence against women, Professor Sharmind Neelormi of the Department of Economics of Jahangir Nagar University in Bangladesh stressed the importance of ensuring a gender-friendly working environment in the project areas, in addition to revisiting the wage rate.

Professor Sharmind came up with the suggestions on August 1 last in Dhaka while presenting the findings of a study she conducted with support from LGED and IFAD.

Talking to IPS, MB Akther, Programme Director & Interim Country Director of OXFAM Bangladesh, said women’s empowerment is a continuous process. A woman needs five to six years of multidimensional supports, he said. She also needs help in building market linkages for income-generating activities.

Akther said providing capital resources to women is not the only solution. They should also know how to invest resources for generating income and for that they need trainings, raising knowledge and cooperation to build market linkages.

“ICT, particularly the operation of mobile phones, is also an effective tool for women to search job markets or market prices for a product,” he said, adding that he is aware of the IFAD projects.

Talking about women’s contributions to both the household economy and the national one, Dr Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad, Chairman of Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation, a public-sector apex development body, told IPS in October last year that women’s contributions come from their participation both in formal and informal sectors, and even those, who work outside home in formal or informal sectors, also take care of household chores.

“If women’s household-level activities and their works in informal sectors are economically evaluated and added to the national income, Bangladesh may already be a middle-income country,” he added.

Women laborers engage in a development project in Bangladesh. Credit: LGED

By Shahiduzzaman
DHAKA, Aug 13 2017 (IPS)

Breaking all the social barriers and taboos, poor women in Bangladesh are now engaged in rural development works across the country as labourers.

The Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) of Bangladesh initiated the move in the early 1980s, a time when a section of the so-called local elite and influential people stood in their way to move forward.

The engineers of LGED walked a long way to make this happen. They brought the working women under a platform named ‘Labour Contracting Society’ or ‘LCS’. Most of the LCS members are poor women from local communities. The LGED in cooperation with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) have been successful in formally shaping the LCS concept.

IFAD as an important development partner of Bangladesh, working with the government for the last four decades and supporting the country in alleviating poverty and strengthening the rural economy.

The participation of women in the LCS for rural development is on the rise and they are replacing formal business contractors who have no accountability once the work is done.

The LGED has laid out eligibility criteria for the LCS members, particularly for the women living within a 2-km radius of the work station to include those who are unemployed, divorced or separated from their husbands, widows, destitute, with physically challenged person/s in their families, those who do not have more than 0.5 acres of land, including the homestead, and who are adults and physically fit to take on construction work. There are also men in LCS but their numbers are insignificant.

These poor women have proven that they can build rural roads and markets, and maintain them in the long run better than the private contractors. They also own their own work as their community asset, which can never be expected from the business contractors.

IFAD is promoting the active participation of LCS members in most of their projects in the country, the Coastal Climate Resilient Infrastructure Project (CCRIP) being one of them. LGED considers CCRIP as a ‘Silver Bullet’ for eradicating rural poverty and unemployment.

CCRIP Project Director AKM Lutfur Rahman said apart from engineering aspects of infrastructure development, they consider its social aspects, too. “So, we call it ‘Social Engineering’, in a broader sense ‘engineering for poverty alleviation, education, irrigation, agriculture, women empowerment and tree plantation and so on’.”

LGED and IFAD are planning to further strengthen the LCS and diversify their effective involvement in the projects. As part of this, both the organisations recently supported a study conducted by Professor Sharmind Neelormi of the Economics Department of Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, on the LCS.

The study found that the concept of a ‘Labour Contracting Society’ is a proven successful formula for reaching out to the target groups and implementation of their work. Higher quality of work coupled with an increase in daily labour income and skill development form a strong base for further strengthening and expansion of this model.

Earlier this month, Professor Neelormi presented the key findings of the study at an LGED seminar in Dhaka. She put forward a set of recommendations to further improve the LCS. The key recommendations include ensuring gender-friendly working environment in project areas; revising the wage structure in the schedule considering seasonality, location-specific requirements and inflation adjustment; exercising the practice of ‘Force Majeure’ as contractual agreement; ensuring life and injury insurance during road maintenance and market construction works; and ensuring the use of retro-reflective vests.

LGED’s engineers and IFAD staff from its project areas, experts and representatives from other partners such as the World Food Programme (WFP), German KFW, Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), and the Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (BMP)actively participated in the seminar.

Almost all the participants agreed with the study findings and the recommendations. Professor Sharmind drew attention of the project planners to the review some issues of LCS such as revising the wage structure to consider seasonality, location-specific requirements and inflation adjustment; and harmonisation of the daily wage rate and policy for profit-sharing across projects.

She said, “living in uncertain realities, no overnight change can be expected. Issues need to be challenged from the institution itself. It might not be possible for a local project implementing agency to ensure the safeguard.”

Jona Goswami of BMP said it is encouraging for rural women that job opportunities are created for them. She emphasised safety and security of female LCS members, saying they often become victims of violence, harassment and abuse either in their own houses or in workplaces. “So, the project authorities must ensure a gender-friendly working environment and they should be flexible about their personal issues,” Goswami said.

In an interview, Professor Md Shamsul Hoque of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) commended the initiative, saying, “It has proved through all projects that the LCS approach of constructing minor infrastructure has not only increased the income of the poor women and men but also enhanced their technical and management skills. The concept of LCS can now easily be embraced in the country’s other development programmes as well as other developing nations.”

Akond Md. Rafiqul Islam, General Manager of Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation, commenting on the income sustainability of LCS members, said LGED can include more partner organisations (POs) of PKSF in the projects.

The POs are helping select the LCS members and provide financial services to them, which is an important tool for the members’ income sustainability, he said. “After receiving training, many LCS members have now turned into micro entrepreneurs and they are doing well.”

PKSF is an apex development organisation for sustainable poverty reduction through employment generation.
Rafiqul Islam suggested building up an effective linkage between LCS and POs for supporting the LCS members’ income-generating activities and building them as sustainable micro-entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, Professor Hoque said different ministries and non-governmental organisations are now engaging LCS in different titles in their development activities. Some of them are the Bangladesh Water Development Board, Department of Forest, Department of Disaster Management, Department of Agricultural Extension, Cash for Work Program, World Food Program (WFP), CARE Bangladesh, BRAC and Oxfam International.

Press Conference on IFAD report at the UN Foundation (06/14/17)

By Roshni Majumdar
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 15 2017 (IPS)

A new report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) says the flow of money from migrants—commonly located in developed countries—to their families in lower income countries has doubled over the last decade.

Dubbed the remittance flow, it increased by 51 percent—from 296 billion dollars in 2007 to 445 billion in 2016—lifting families out of poverty across the world.

Migrants in the United States typically send the largest amount of money, making the U.S. the biggest benefactor, closely followed by Saudi Arabia and Russia, according to the report.

In fact, the top ten countries, largely in Europe and the Gulf Council, account for half of the annual flows.

The increase in flow of money brings good news. First, it increases the leverage of migrant workers all over the world. Second, it boosts sustainable development in countries which benefit from the money, notably China, India and the Philippines, which tops this list.

Asia receives nearly 55 percent of the total money sent from developed countries.

The money sent is used by families to achieve personal goals, such as improving healthcare, educa-tion and food security. This is why, despite the seemingly staggering numbers, Gilbert F. Houngbo, the President of IFAD, said “It is not about the money being sent home, it is about the impact on people’s lives.”

Still, even if the leading blocs account for half of the flow, they represent a tiny fraction of their country’s GDP.

For instance, migrant earnings in the U.S. account for almost 4 percent of the GDP, while the money they send back to their families represents only 0.65 percent of the GDP.

Generally, 85 percent of a migrant’s income remains within the host country.

The value of the money sent back cannot be underestimated—most families rely on this income, which can make up to 60 percent of the household income in rural areas.

However, many criticize the high costs of transactions, especially in rural areas which receive the bulk of remittances.

Pedro de Vasconcelos, lead author of the IFAD report speaks at a press conference (06/14/17).

Speaking about the prospect of building better infrastructure to ensure easy and cheap flow of money, Pedro de Vasconcelos, the lead author of the report, told IPS that it was particularly im-portant in rural areas, “where remittances count the most, and where we can have them count more.” He added that “simply opening a saving account can transform the lives of people” and can go a long way towards eradicating poverty.

In the end, there is a lot of room for innovation and growth as the demand for migrant labour will continue to grow in developed countries.

To understand the scale of this flow, it is important to understand the number of people involved: one in every seven people in the world is directly impacted—either as a sender or a beneficiary. This means that a billion people in the world are involved in the transaction in some way. Even when times get tough, as during the financial crisis of 2008, remittance flows remained steady.

There are two overarching reasons that explain the growth of the flow, and why it’ll continue.

First, it reflects the demand for migrant labour as populations in high-income countries grow older with advances in medicine.

Second, migrant workers are committed to make ends meet for their families at home, and readily make sacrifices—such as eating fewer meals—to ensure money they can send home. This is why this corridor of money has been increasingly referred to as “Family Remittances.”

The flow of money has greatly exceeded migratory flow, which only grew by 28 percent over the last decade. This means that there are as many 800 million people across the world who are reliant on migrant workers, who are about 200 million in number.

Josefina Stubbs, candidate for president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Credit: Courtesy of Josefina Stubbs

By Mario Osava and Baher Kamal
BRASILIA, Feb 6 2017 (IPS)

Josefina Stubbs, from the Dominican Republic, may become the first woman to preside over the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which is dedicated to eradicating rural poverty.

IFAD is a United Nations agency created in 1977 to invest in poor farmers in developing countries, who represent three-quarters of the world’s poor and undernourished.

Stubbs has accumulated 35 years of rural development experience, most recently in IFAD, as Regional Director of the Latin America and the Caribbean Division (2008-2014) and later as Associate Vice-President of the Strategy and Knowledge Department, before being nominated for president of IFAD by her country.

She holds a BA in Psychology and Master’s degrees in Sociology, Political Science and International Development, and has also worked for Oxfam and the World Bank.

The elections will take place on Feb. 14-15 during the IFAD annual meeting at the agency’s Rome headquarters. In her favour, Stubbs led, as vice president, the process of designing the agency’s Strategic Framework 2016-2025, besides her in-depth knowledge of how IFAD functions.

In its 40 years of experience, IFAD has earmarked 18.4 billion dollars for rural development projects that have benefited a total of 464 million persons. And the Fund’s soft loans and donations mobilised far greater sums contributed by governments and other national sources, as co-financing.

Boosting the crop yields of small farmers, protecting the environment, training poor peasant farmers, and empowering young people and women will be her priorities if she is elected president of IFAD.

She described her ideas and plans in this interview with IPS during her visit to Brasilia in the first week of February.

IPS: What direction and priorities will you adopt as president of IFAD if you are elected?

JOSEFINA STUBBS: I will dedicate myself to working with the governments of the IFAD member countries, in particular with low- and middle- income countries, so they can advance towards fulfilling the Agenda 2030 in the rural sector and achieving Sustainable Development, with two goals: food security and poverty reduction. Implementing the Agenda 2030 in the countryside, supporting women and young people, and protecting the environment will be vital for the future of the rural sector.

This requires increasing agricultural and non-farm productivity, to produce more and better, in order to supply a continually growing population, while stimulating small-scale farming to create more employment, services and income. A vibrant rural sector is needed to keep people in the countryside, especially the young.

We have to support women more strongly in the productive area, and in the processing of agricultural products as well, encouraging the creation of companies to amplify the benefits. This way new inclusive production chains are generated, and their active involvement in the market is bolstered. Organising farmers is key to boosting the volumes of production and trade, and to improving the quality standards of the products which reach increasingly demanding consumers.

Public policies are the umbrella under which IFAD can work more closely with governments. One example is Brazil, where we work with the national, state and municipal governments in policies to expand markets and transfer technologies. IFAD’s activities in Brazil were limited eight years ago, but now we have agreements with all nine states of Brazil’s Northeast region, providing financial support and technical assistance. This is an experience that should be strengthened and taken to other countries.

IPS: And is any region going to be given priority, Africa for example?

JS: IFAD’s priority lies where the rural poor are, training them and governments in the search for solutions. In Africa we have provided many resources and we have to keep doing so. The African economy is strongly tied to the rural sector, both because of the employment and because the urban and peri-urban markets demand more quality food. Africa has IFAD’s support because of its poverty rate, but so do Asian countries such as India, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

IPS: For the first time, three women are running for the presidency of IFAD. Researchers say that resources achieve more efficient results against poverty and hunger if they are given to women. What should IFAD do for rural women, who make up over 60 per cent of the agricultural workforce in regions of the South and are victims of inequality?

JS: Governments must be encouraged to ensure a greater presence of women in all of the activities financed by the Fund. But we must do it in an innovative way, breaking down traditional barriers to women’s access to public and private goods, loans, technology and the markets. We need to create new instruments specifically adapted to women’s lives, their needs, so that they can be useful to them. It is absolutely urgent to increase the participation of women and their role in the decision-making process about the investments that are made in their communities, and for them to be active subjects in the implementation of these investments.

IPS: But technical and scientific development has gone into large-scale agricultural production. Would it be suitable for poor women in rural areas?

JS: In agriculture, Brazil has demonstrated coexistence between large-scale and small-scale farmers. It already has new machinery for small-scale producers, such as tractors and harvesters, as well as irrigation. The progress made by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in improving the crops of small farmers is extraordinary. Brazil has developed important technologies for other countries. It has also made headway with productive infrastructure in communities. An example is machinery and refrigerated trucks for goat’s milk, suited for narrow roads. We need technologies adapted to small farms.

Food security depends on small-scale producers. In Africa 60 per cent of the basic food basket of the middle-class comes from local small-scale farmers. If we don’t increase this production, we lose the opportunity to promote food security in these countries. This has been proven. In the Dominican Republic, 80 per cent of basic products come from small-scale producers.

Increasing national productive capacity brings more benefits than spending on imports. It is a battle won which we have to make visible.

IPS: Does the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) share this view?

JS: The work of the three agencies based in Rome – IFAD, FAO and the World Food Programme (WFP) – must create synergy. They have a key role in supporting governments in meeting the goals of Agenda 2030 in the rural sector. With the specific mission of each agency, we must increase our impact – in investment for the rural poor through IFAD, by strengthening national and global policies that facilitate the achievement of food security and poverty reduction with the work carried out by FAO, and by reinforcinge the humanitarian responses in the rural sector, with the WPF has been doing for decades.

IPS: With regard to the environment, how can IFAD and small-scale farmers contribute to protecting nature and the climate?

JS: Climate change issues and the adequate management of environmental resources have to be seen in a broader perspective in the rural sector. I will keep defending ‘climate-smart agriculture’ with eco-friendly practices that also generate income. But in addition, we have to pay attention to the management of environmental resources such as water, energy, tourism, or agro-forestry, which also generate economic and environmental benefits for the rural and urban sectors. We must seek to empower communities, particularly indigenous communities, so they become effective and efficient managers of natural resources.

IPS: Water is another growing environmental problem.

JS: First of all, we have to safeguard our basins, reforest, preserve. Then we have to change the irrigation systems, replace flood irrigation with new techniques. Sometimes the solution is simple. Rainwater collection, such as in the Northeast of Brazil, is an example. Coming up with solutions implies listening to the local population, not imposing approaches to development that are not what people need.

IPS: How will IFAD keep up or accelerate poverty reduction, with the goal of eradicating it by 2030?

JS: By the deadline set for the Millennium Development Goals, one billion people had been lifted out of poverty. Now the challenge is to keep them afloat, but we still have one billion poor people in the world. We have to sustain our achievements and expand the results. We have to combine conditional cash transfer programmes with an increase in productivity, support for small-scale producers in their production and services companies, support for the expansion of access to technologies as an instrument to expand the benefits of development. We have to create a rural sector where the youth see a future and want to stay.

Excerpt:

ADB president Takehiko Nakao speaks at the Food Security Forum in Manila. Credit: Diana G. Mendoza/IPS

By Diana G Mendoza
MANILA, Jun 25 2016 (IPS)

Farming and agriculture may not seem cool to young people, but if they can learn the thrill of nurturing plants to produce food, and are provided with their favorite apps and communications software on agriculture, food insecurity will not be an issue, food and agriculture experts said during the Asian Development Bank (ADB)’s Food Security Forum from June 22 to 24 at the ADB headquarters here.

The prospect of attracting youth and tapping technology were raised by Hoonae Kim, director for Asia and the Pacific Region of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Nichola Dyer, program manager of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), two of many forum panelists who shared ideas on how to feed 3.74 billion people in the region while taking care of the environment.

“There are 700 million young people in Asia Pacific. If we empower them, give them voice and provide them access to credit, they can be interested in all areas related to agriculture,” Kim said. “Many young people today are educated and if they continue to be so, they will appreciate the future of food as that of safe, affordable and nutritious produce that, during growth and production, reduces if not eliminate harm to the environment.”

Dyer, citing the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimate that 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted every year worldwide, said, “We have to look at scaling up the involvement of the private sector and civil societies to ensure that the policy gaps are given the best technologies that can be applied.”

Dyer also said using technology includes the attendant issues of gathering and using data related to agriculture policies of individual countries, especially those that have recognized the need to lessen harm to the environment while looking for ways to ensure that there is enough food for everyone.

“There is a strong need to support countries that promote climate-smart agriculture, both financially and technically as a way to introduce new technologies,” she said.

The Leaders Roundtable on the Future of Food was moderated by the DG IPS Farhana Haque Rahman. The President of ADB, Takehiko Nakao was a panellist along with Ministers of Food and Agriculture of Indonesia and Lao PDR, FAO regional ADG and CEO of Olam International. – Credit: ADB

The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific estimated in 2014 that the region has 750 million young people aged 15 to 24, comprising 60 percent of the world’s youth. Large proportions live in socially and economically developed areas, with 78 percent of them achieving secondary education and 40 percent reaching tertiary education.

A regional paper prepared by the Asian Farmers Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA) in 2015, titled “A Viable Future: Attracting the Youth Back to Agriculture,” noted that many young people in Asia choose to migrate to seek better lives and are reluctant to go into farming, as they prefer the cities where life is more convenient.

“In the Philippines, most rural families want their children to pursue more gainful jobs in the cities or overseas, as farming is largely associated with poverty,” the paper stated.

Along with the recognition of the role of young people in agriculture, the forum also resonated with calls to look at the plight of farmers, who are mostly older in age, dwindling in numbers and with little hope of finding their replacement from among the younger generations, even from among their children. Farmers, especially those who do not own land but work only for landowners or are small-scale tillers, also remain one of the most marginalised sectors in every society.

Estrella Penunia, secretary-general of the AFA, said that while it is essential to rethink how to better produce, distribute and consume food, she said it is also crucial to “consider small-scale farmers as real partners for sustainable technologies. They must be granted incentives and be given improved rental conditions.” Globally, she said “farmers have been neglected, and in the Asia Pacific region, they are the poorest.”

The AFA paper noted that lack of youth policies in most countries as detrimental to the engagement of young people. They also have limited role in decision-making processes due to a lack of structured and institutionalized opportunities.

But the paper noted a silver lining through social media. Through “access to information and other new networking tools, young people across the region can have better opportunities to become more politically active and find space for the realization of their aspirations.”

Calls for nonstop innovation in communications software development in the field of agriculture, continuing instruction on agriculture and agriculture research to educate young people, improving research and technology development, adopting measures such as ecological agriculture and innovative irrigation and fertilisation techniques were echoed by panelists from agriculture-related organizations and academicians.

Professor David Morrison of Murdoch University in Perth, Australia said now is the time to focus on what data and technology can bring to agriculture. “Technology is used to develop data and data is a great way of changing behaviors. Data needs to be analyzed,” he said, adding that political leaders also have to understand data to help them implement evidence-based policies that will benefit farmers and consumers.

President of ADB Takehiko Nakao – Credit: ADB

ADB president Takehiko Nakao said the ADB is heartened to see that “the world is again paying attention to food.” While the institution sees continuing efforts in improving food-related technologies in other fields such as forestry and fisheries, he said it is agriculture that needs urgent improvements, citing such technologies as remote sensing, diversifying fertilisers and using insecticides that are of organic or natural-made substances.

Nakao said the ADB has provided loans and assistance since two years after its establishment in 1966 to the agriculture sector, where 30 percent of loans and grants were given out. The ADB will mark its 50^th year of development partnership in the region in December 2016. Headquartered in Manila, it is owned by 67 members—48 from the region. In 2015, ADB assistance totaled 27.2 billion dollars, including cofinancing of 10.7 billion dollars.

In its newest partnership is with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which is based in Los Banos, Laguna, Philippines, Nakao and IRRI director general Matthew Morell signed an agreement during the food security forum to promote food security in Asia Pacific by increasing collaboration on disseminating research and other knowledge on the role of advanced agricultural technologies in providing affordable food for all.

The partnership agreement will entail the two institutions to undertake annual consultations to review and ensure alignment of ongoing collaborative activities, and to develop a joint work program that will expand the use of climate-smart agriculture and water-saving technologies to increase productivity and boost the resilience of rice cultivation systems, and to minimize the carbon footprint of rice production.

Nakao said the ADB collaboration with IRRI is another step toward ensuring good food and nutrition for all citizens of the region. “We look forward to further strengthening our cooperation in this area to promote inclusive and sustainable growth, as well as to combat climate change.” Morell of the IRRI said the institution “looks forward to deepening our already strong partnership as we jointly develop and disseminate useful agricultural technologies throughout Asia.”

DG IPS Farhana Haque Rahman – Credit: ADB

The ADB’s earlier agreements on agriculture was with Cambodia in 2013 with a 70-million-dollar climate-smart agriculture initiative called the Climate-Resilient Rice Commercialization Sector Development Program that will include generating seeds that are better adapted to Cambodia’s climate.

ADB has committed two billion dollars annually to meet the rising demand for nutritious, safe, and affordable food in Asia and the Pacific, with future support to agriculture and natural resources to emphasize investing in innovative and high-level technologies.

By 2025, the institution said Asia Pacific will have a population of 4.4 billion, and with the rest of Asia experiencing unabated rising populations and migration from countryside to urban areas, the trends will also be shifting towards better food and nutritional options while confronting a changing environment of rising temperatures and increasing disasters that are harmful to agricultural yields.

ADB president Nakao said Asia will face climate change and calamity risks in trying to reach the new Sustainable Development Goals. The institution has reported that post-harvest losses have accounted for 30 percent of total harvests in Asia Pacific; 42 percent of fruits and vegetables and up to 30 percent of grains produced across the region are lost between the farm and the market caused by inadequate infrastructure such as roads, water, power, market facilities and transport systems.

Gathering about 250 participants from governments and intergovernmental bodies in the region that include multilateral and bilateral development institutions, private firms engaged in the agriculture and food business, research and development centers, think tanks, centers of excellence and civil society and advocacy organizations, the ADB held the food security summit with inclusiveness in mind and future directions from food production to consumption.

Migrants at Lampedusa, Italy. Credit: Ilaria Vechi/IPS

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, Jun 15 2015 (IPS)

One in five migrant workers – about 50 million people – lives and works in Europe, making the region home to a quarter of global remittance flows, according to a new report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Migrants living in Europe sent 109.4 billion dollars in remittances to lower-income European countries and to the developing world last year.

And the actual figures for many countries could be substantially higher than official estimates due to the frequent use of informal channels to transfer money.

“We need to make sure that this hard-earned money is sent home cheaply but more importantly that it helps families build a better future for themselves, particularly in the poorest rural communities where it counts the most,” said Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of IFAD, about the report’s findings.

IFAD estimates that globally 80 billion dollars could be available for investment if migrant workers and receiving families in rural areas were given more options to use their funds.

Of the total remittances sent by migrants living in Europe, about one-third (36.5 billion dollars) remained within 19 countries in Europe, while two-thirds (72.9 billion dollars) were received by poor families in over 50 developing countries outside Europe.

The report comes at a time when Europe is taking heavy criticism over its policies towards migrants, especially with respect to the Syrian refugee crisis.

In the last two decades, the Mediterranean – the most lethal of Europe’s barriers against irregular migration – has claimed nearly 20,000 migrant lives.

Figures for 2014 and this year indicate that the phenomenon is on the rise, with more migrant deaths than ever before.

However, people to continue to brave the perilous crossing, or over land borders, and an estimated 150 million people worldwide now benefit from remittances coming from Europe.

The report says that most remittances are spent on staples like food, clothing, shelter, medicine and education. However, studies indicate that up to 20 per cent of remittances could be available for savings, investments or to repay loans for small businesses.

With 40 per cent of remittances going to rural areas, the report also suggests that remittances play a critical role in the transformation of vulnerable communities. In fact, remittances are estimated to equal at least three times official development assistance to developing countries.

“The immense potential of remittances for development is still largely underutilized but it is within our capacity to make every hard-earned euro, ruble, pound, krona, or Swiss franc sent home count even more,” said Nwanze.

Western Europe and the Russian Federation (26 total sending countries) are the main sources of migrant remittances in Europe.

The top six European sending countries account for 75 per cent of the flows: the Russian Federation (20.6 billion dollars), the United Kingdom (17.1 billion), Germany (14 billion), France (10.5 billion), Italy (10.4 billion) and Spain (9.6 billion).

“Remittances offer a unique opportunity to bring millions into the formal financial sector,” said Pedro De Vasconcelos, co-author of the report and Coordinator of the Financing Facility for Remittances at IFAD.

“Given the frequent interaction between remittance senders, receivers and the financial system, remittances could spark a long-term and life-changing relationship.”

While significant progress has been made over the last few years to lower transfer costs, De Vasconcelos added that more could be done through increased competition. By reducing transfer costs to 5 per cent, as per the G20 objective set in 2009, an additional 2.5 billion dollars would be saved for migrant workers and their families back home.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A woman planting a shea tree in Ghana to protect riverbanks, and for her economic empowerment. Much still remains to be done to overcome the difficulties women – particularly rural women – face in terms of mobility and political participation. Credit: ©IFAD/Dela Sipitey

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Mar 14 2015 (IPS)

Rural women make major contributions to rural economies by producing and processing food, feeding and caring for families, generating income and contributing to the overall well-being of their households – but, in many countries, they face discrimination in access to agricultural assets, education, healthcare and employment, among others, preventing them from fully enjoying their basic rights.

Gender equality is now widely recognised as an essential component for sustainable development goals in the post-2015 agenda, with empowerment of rural women vital to enabling poor people to improve their livelihoods and overcome poverty.“To improve women’s social and economic status, we need more recognition for the vital role they play in the rural economy. Let us all work together to empower women to achieve food and nutrition security – for their sake, and the sake of their families and communities” – IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze

This year’s International Women’s Day, celebrated worldwide on Mar. 8, marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), which called on governments, the international community and civil society from all over the world to empower women and girls by taking action in 12 critical areas: poverty, education and training, health, violence, armed conflict, the economy, power and decision-making, institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women, human rights, the media, the environment and the girl child.

Despite that call, much still remains to be done to overcome the difficulties women – particularly rural women – face in terms of mobility and political participation.

“Too often, rural women are doing the backbreaking work,” Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), said on the occasion. “To improve women’s social and economic status, we need more recognition for the vital role they play in the rural economy. Let us all work together to empower women to achieve food and nutrition security – for their sake, and the sake of their families and communities.”

This year, the three Rome-based U.N. agencies – the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP) and IFAD – along with journalists and students from Rome’s LUISS, John Cabot and La Sapienza universities met to share testimonials of innovative interventions aimed at empowering rural women in four key areas: nutrition, community mobilisation, livestock and land rights.

A large body of research indicates that putting more income into the hands of women translates into improved child nutrition health and education in all developing regions of the world.

Explaining why women and men need to be involved together to move forward on nutrition, Britta Schumacher, a WFP Programme Policy Officer, described how the Renewed Efforts Against Child Hunger and Undernutrition (REACH) programme had been able to tackle malnutrition and health problems using an approach based on positive gender-oriented objectives.

The REACH programme – a joint initiative of FAO, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), WFP and the World Health Organisation (WHO) – is based on the human right to nutrition security and seeks to transform the way governments and donors approach investment in nutrition to leverage existing investments most effectively and systematically identify priorities for additional investments needed to scale up.

Noting that “the long girls stay at school, the better is their health” because “lack of awareness represents a concrete obstacle to good practices,” Schumacher said that in Bangladesh activities had been carried out under the REACH programme to transfer knowledge within and between members of communities and local authorities, boost rural women’s access to services and strengthen their self-esteem. 

Stressing the need for community mobilisation, Andrea Sanchez Enciso, Gender and Participatory Communication Specialist with FAO, illustrated one of the achievements of FAO’s Dimitra project, a participatory information and communication project which contributes to improving the visibility of rural populations, women in particular.

In Niger, she said, “the Dimitra project encouraged the inclusion of a gender perspective in communication for development initiatives in rural areas … taking greater account of the specificities, needs and aspirations of men and women” and “creating participatory spaces for discussion between men and women, access to information and collective actions in their communities.”

Leading a two-year small livestock project in Afghanistan during the Taliban period, Antonio Riota, Lead Technical Specialist in IFAD’s Livestock, Policy and Technical Advisory Division, said that the project was developed and implemented in a context in which 90 percent of village chickens were managed by women and poultry was the only source of income for the entire community.

According to Riota, the project showed how small livestock can make a difference in rural women’s lives because one of its major results has been that “now women can walk all together” whereas previously they were accused of prostitution if they did so. “Some 75,000 women benefitted from the project and profitability increased by 91 percent,” he added.

Meanwhile, Mino Ramaroson, Africa Regional Coordinator at the International Land Coalition, described two African experiences of women’s networks – the National Federation of Rural Women in Madagascar and the Kilimanjaro Initiative – advocating for their rights to land and natural resources.

In Madagascar, the National Federation of Rural Women, which aims to promote rural women’s rights, improve members’ livelihoods and increase their resilience to external and internal shocks, has been joined by more than 450 rural women’s groups from the country’s six provinces.

The Kilimanjaro Initiative, initiated by rural women in 2012 and supported by the International Land Coalition, uses women’s rights to land and productive resources as an entry point for the mobilisation of rural women from across Africa to define the future they want, claim lives of dignity they deserve and identify and overcome the challenges that hold them back.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Bamboo nursery in Africa. There is debate over whether commercially-grown bamboo could help reverse the effects of deforestation and land degradation that has spread harm across the African continent. Credit: EcoPlanet Bamboo

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Feb 28 2015 (IPS)

Deforestation is haunting the African continent as industrial growth paves over public commons and puts more hectares into private hands.

According to the Environmental News Network, a web-based resource, Africa loses forest cover equal to the size of Switzerland every year, or approximately 41 000 square kilometres.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is also on record as saying the African continent loses over four million hectares (9.9 million acres) of natural forest annually, which is twice the world’s average deforestation rate. And deforestation, according to UNEP, accounts for at least one-fifth of all carbon emissions globally.

The dangerous pace of deforestation has triggered a market-based solution using bamboo, a fast-growing woody grass that grows chiefly in the tropics.“If grown in the right way, and under the right sustainable management system, in certain areas, bamboo can play a role in reversing ecosystem degradation” – Troy Wiseman, CEO of EcoPlanet Bamboo

“The idea of bamboo plantations is a good one, but it triggers fear of widespread starvation as poor Africans may be lured into this venture for money and start ditching food crops” – Terry Mutsvanga, Zimbabwean human rights activist

EcoPlanet Bamboo, a multinational company, has been expanding its operations in Africa while it promotes the industrialisation of bamboo as an environmentally attractive alternative fibre for timber manufacturing industries that currently rely on the harvesting of natural forests for their raw resource. The company’s operations extend to South Africa, Ghana and Nicaragua.

For EcoPlanet and some African environmentalists, commercially-grown bamboo could help reverse the effects of deforestation and land degradation that has spread harm across the African continent.

“If grown in the right way on land that has little value for other uses, and if managed under the right sustainable management system, bamboo can play a role in restoring highly degraded ecosystems and connecting remnant forest patches, while reducing pressure on remaining natural forests,” Troy Wiseman, CEO of EcoPlanet Bamboo, told IPS.

Happison Chikova, a Zimbabwean independent environmentalist who holds a Bachelor of Science Honours Degree in Geography and Environmental Studies from the Midlands State University here, agreed.

“Bamboo plants help fight climate change because of their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide and act as carbon sinks while the plants can also be used as a source for wood energy, thereby reducing the cutting down of indigenous trees, and also the fact that bamboo can be used to build shelter, reduces deforestation in the communal areas where there is high demand of indigenous trees for building purposes,” Chikova told IPS.

But land rights activists are sceptical about their claims.

“The idea of bamboo plantations is a good one, but it triggers fear of widespread starvation as poor Africans may be lured into this venture for money and start ditching food crops,” Terry Mutsvanga, an award-winning Zimbabwean human rights activist, told IPS.

Mutsvanga’s fears of small sustainable farms losing out to foreign-owned export-driven plantations were echoed by Nnimmo Bassey, a renowned African environmentalist and head of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, an ecological think-tank and advocacy organisation.

“No one can seriously present a bamboo plantation as a cure for deforestation,” Bassey, who is based in Nigeria, told IPS, “and unfortunately the United Nations system sees plantations as forests and this fundamentally faulty premise gives plantation owners the latitude to see their forest-gobbling actions as something positive.”

“If we agree that forests are places with rich biodiversity, it is clear that a plantation cannot be the same as a forest,” added Bassey.

Currently, bamboo is widely grown in Africa by small farmers for multiple uses. The Mount Selinda Women’s Bamboo Association, an environmental lobby group in Chipinge, Zimbabwe’s eastern border town, for example, received funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) through the Livelihood and Economic Development Programme in order to create sustainable rural livelihoods and enterprises by using bamboo resources.

Citing its many benefits, IFAD calls bamboo the “poor man’s timber.”

Further, notes IFAD, bamboo contributes to rural poverty reduction, empowers women and can be processed into boats, kitchen utensils, incense sticks, charcoal and footwear. It also provides food and nutrition security as food and animal feed.

Currently, EcoPlanet Bamboo’s footprint in Africa includes 5,000 acres in Ghana in a public-private partnership to develop commercial bamboo plantations. In South Africa’s Eastern Cape, certification is under way to convert out of production pineapple plantations to bamboo plantations for the production of activated carbon and bio-charcoal to be sold to local and export markets.

Environmentalist Bassey worries whether all these acres were unutilised, as the company claims. “Commercial bamboo, which will replace natural wood forests and may require hundreds of hectares of land space, may not be so good for peasant farmers in Africa,” Bassey said.

EcoPlanet Bamboo, however, insists it does not convert or plant on any land that could compete with food security.

“(We) convert degraded land into certified bamboo plantations into diverse, thriving ecosystems, that can provide fibre on an annual basis, and yet maintain their ecological integrity,” said Wiseman.

Wiseman’s claim, however, did not move long-time activist Bassey and one-time winner of the Right Livelihood Prize, an alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize, who questioned foreign ownership of Africa’s resources as not always to Africa’s benefit.

“Plantations are not owned by the weak in society,” said Bassey. “They are owned by corporations or rich individuals with strong economic and sometimes political connections. This could mean displacement of vulnerable farmers, loss of territories and means of livelihoods.”

Edited by Lisa Vives/ Phil Harris   

Food security and a balanced diet for all must be combined with the knowledge of indigenous peoples’ food systems and livelihoods as a contribution to sustainable development. Credit: IFAD

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Feb 23 2015 (IPS)

Overcoming hunger and malnutrition in the 21st century no longer means simply increasing the quantity of available food but also the quality.

Despite numerous achievements in the world’s food systems, approximately 805 million people suffer from chronic hunger and roughly two billion peoples suffer from one or more micronutrient deficiencies while, at the same time, over 2.8 billion people are obese.

Unfortunately, the debate over how to address this challenge has polarised, pitting agriculture and global commerce against local food systems and traditional ecological knowledge, land-based ways of life and a holistic, interdependent relationship between people and the Earth.“Arrogantly and insolently, humanity has cultivated the idea of development and progress based on the belief that the planet’s resources are infinite and that human domination of nature is limitless” – Carlo Petrini, founder of the International Slow Food Movement

Organised to reflect on this, among other issues, the second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, held at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) from Feb. 12-13 in Rome, discussed solutions that combine the need to ensure food security and a balanced diet for all with the knowledge of indigenous peoples’ food systems and livelihoods as a contribution to sustainable development.

According to IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze, “indigenous peoples’ lands are some of the most biologically and ecologically diverse places on earth … It is only now, in the 21st century, that the rest of the world is starting to value the biodiversity that is a core value of indigenous societies.” Occupying nearly 20 percent of the Earth’s land area, indigenous groups act as custodians of biodiversity.

Participants at the Forum debated the potential of indigenous livelihood systems and practices – thanks to an age-old tradition of inter-generational knowledge transmission – to contribute to and inspire new transformative approaches of sustainable development, synthesising culture and identity, firmly anchored in respect for individual and collective rights.

However, the Forum described how many indigenous communities and ecosystems are at risk due to the lack of recognition of their rights and fair treatment by governments and corporations, population growth, climate change, migration and conflict. According to participants, the on-going exclusion of indigenous people devalues not only the importance of their communities but also the traditional ecological and agricultural knowledge they possess.

“Arrogantly and insolently, humanity has cultivated the idea of development and progress based on the belief that the planet’s resources are infinite and that human domination of nature is limitless,” Carlo Petrini, founder of the International Slow Food Movement, said at a Forum side event focused on the interconnections among nutrition, food security and sustainable development.

“The march towards this idea of progress has left women, youth and elderly people and indigenous populations at the end of the line with no one left to give a voice to them,” he continued. “All the drama of modern reality is now revealing itself: the ‘glorious march’ of progress is now on the edge of a precipice, the present crisis the fruit of greed and ignorance.”

Largely addressing the so-called developed world, the Forum described how many of the good practices and traditional empirical wisdom of indigenous peoples deserve to be studied with care and attention. For example, boosting local economies and agriculture, along with respect for small communities, are ways of reconciling man with the earth and nature.

At the same time, many indigenous communities have certain foods – including corn, taro and wild rice – that are considered sacred and are cultivated through sustainable land and water practices.  This contrasts with the global production, distribution and consumption of food which pays little attention to loss of water and soil fertility, genetic plant and animal erosion and unprecedented food waste.

The Forum also heard how issues related to the paramount role of indigenous peoples’ food systems are central to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects managed by the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) at Montreal’s McGill University in Canada.

“Years of work have documented the traditional food systems of indigenous peoples and their dietary habits to understand matriarchy and the role of women in food security and community peace in Canada,” said Harriet V. Kuhnlein, Professor Emerita of Human Nutrition and founding Director of CINE.

Kuhnlein described one of CINE’s projects, the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project, a three-year community-based project focused on a primary prevention programme for non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus in a Mohawk community near Montreal.

Among others, the project organised community-based activities promoting healthy lifestyles and demonstrated that “a native community-based diabetes prevention programme is feasible through participatory research that incorporates native culture and local expertise,” said Kuhnlein.

According to Forum participants, the reintroduction of local food products is essential for feeding the planet – “here we see real democracy in action,” said one speaker – and a major effort is needed to avoid practices that exacerbate the negative impacts of food production and consumption on climate, water and ecosystems.

There was also a call for the post-Millennium Development Goal (MDG) agenda to ensure a healthy environment as an internationally guaranteed human right, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will replace the MDGS at the end of 2015, encouraging governments to work towards agricultural policies that are compatible with environmental sustainability and trade rules that are consistent with food security.

It was agreed that none of this will be easy to implement and will require both a strong accountability framework and the will to enforce it, including through recognition of corporate responsibility in the private sector.

As the world prepares for the post-2015 scenario, the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum in Rome said that it was crucial to incorporate food security, environmental issues, poverty reduction and indigenous peoples’ rights into discussions around the new goals of sustainable development involving citizens, governments, academic institutions, private corporations and international organisations worldwide.

Edited by Phil Harris

IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanzwe (centre) joins in a traditional Fijian dance at the opening ceremony of the second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples' Forum, February 2015. Credit: IFAD

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Feb 17 2015 (IPS)

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children” – an ancient Indian saying that encapsulates the essence of sustainability as seen by the world’s indigenous people.

With their deep and locally-rooted knowledge of the natural world, indigenous peoples have much to share with the rest of the world about how to live, work and cultivate in a sustainable manner that does not jeopardise future generations.

This was the main message brought to the second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, organised by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) last week in Rome.“We have learned the relevance of the diversity and distinctiveness of peoples and rural communities and of valuing and building on their cultural identity as an asset and economic potential. The ancient voice of the natives can be the solution to many crises” – Antonella Cordone, IFAD

The Indigenous Peoples’ Forum represents a unique initiative within the U.N. system. It is a concrete expression of IFAD’s recognition of the role that indigenous peoples play in economic and social development through traditional sustainable practices and provides IFAD with an institutional mechanism for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of the agency’s engagement with indigenous peoples.

This engagement includes achievement of the objectives of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Despite major improvements in recent decades, indigenous and tribal peoples – as well as ethnic minorities – continue to be among the poorest and most marginalised people in the world.

There are over 370 million indigenous peoples in some 70 countries worldwide, with the majority living in Asia. They account for an estimated five percent of the world’s population, with 15 percent of these peoples living in poverty.  Various recent studies show that the poverty gap between indigenous peoples and other rural populations is increasing in some parts of the world.

“IFAD is making all efforts to ensure that the indigenous peoples’ voice is being heard, rights are respected and well-being is improving at the global level,” said Antonella Cordone, IFAD’s Senior Technical Specialist for Indigenous peoples and Tribal Issues.

“We have learned the relevance of the diversity and distinctiveness of peoples and rural communities and of valuing and building on their cultural identity as an asset and economic potential,” she continued. “The ancient voice of the natives can be the solution to many crises.”

As guardians of the world’s natural resources and vehicles of traditions over the years, indigenous peoples developed a holistic approach to sustainable development and, as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, highlighted during an Asia-Pacific working group session, “indigenous peoples’ livelihoods are closely interlinked with cultural heritage and identities, spirituality and governance systems.”

These livelihoods have traditionally been based on handing down lands and territories to new generations without exploiting them for maximum profit. Today, these livelihoods are threatened by climate change and third party exploitation, among others.

Climate change, to which indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable, is posing a dramatic threat through melting glaciers, advancing desertification, floods and hurricanes in coastal areas.

Long-standing pressure from logging, mining and advancing agricultural frontiers have intensified the exploitation of new energy sources, construction of roads and other infrastructures, such as dams, and have raised concerns about large-scale acquisition of land for commercial or industrial purposes, commonly known as land grabbing.

In this context, the Forum stressed the need for the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of indigenous peoples whenever development projects affect their access to land and resources, a requirement which IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanzwe said should be respected by any organisation engaging with indigenous peoples.

Poverty and loss of territories and resources by indigenous peoples due to policies or regulations adverse to traditional land use practices are compounded by frequent discrimination in labour markets, where segmentation, poor regulatory frameworks and cultural and linguistic obstacles allow very few indigenous peoples to access quality jobs and social and health services.

Moreover, indigenous peoples suffer from marginalisation from political processes and gender-based discrimination.

These are among the issues that participants at the Forum said should be taken into account in the post-2015 development agenda. They said that this agenda should be designed to encourage governments and other actors to facilitate the economic and social empowerment of poor rural people, in particular, marginalized rural groups, such as women, children and indigenous peoples.

A starting point for the architecture of the agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that expire at the end of this year was seen as the recommendations adopted during the two-day Forum (Feb. 12-13).

These included the need for a holistic approach to supporting and strengthening indigenous peoples’ food systems, recognition of traditional tenure, conservation of biodiversity,  respect for and revitalisation of cultural and spiritual values, and ensuring that projects be designed with the FPIC of indigenous peoples.

Participants said that it is important to emphasise the increasing need to strengthen the participation and inclusion of indigenous peoples in discussions at the political and operational level, because targets in at these levels can have a catalytic effect on their social and economic empowerment.

The Forum agreed that giving the voice to indigenous people and their concerns and priorities in the post-2015 agenda represents an invaluable window of opportunity for development.

Edited by Phil Harris    

On average, women in self-help groups in a small fishing town in Tamil Nadu make about 80 dollars each month; it is just about enough to sustain fisher families, who receive free housing from the Indian government. Credit: Nachammai Raman/IPS

By Nachammai Raman
NAGAPATTINAM, India, Feb 12 2015 (IPS)

Geeta Selvaraj and a few other women take turns to prepare meals with just one large gas cooker in a tiny shop.

The piquant smell of masala wafts out to the crowded street to mix with plumes of vehicle exhaust and tantalize customers, who are mostly from the surrounding area of Nagapattinam, a predominantly fishing town in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

“We want self-help groups to be a tool to transform women into individual entrepreneurs. We want to build self-reliant communities." -- Senthil Kumar, reporting and monitoring officer for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
Selvaraj’s income from her catering business has doubled over the last few years as her fisherman husband’s shrinks. “The men are not going out to sea like before,” she tells IPS, but she seems to have come to terms with this reality. “Because we [women] work, we don’t have to ask anyone for money and it helps with the household expenses.”

India is a major supplier of fish in the world and the industry employs an estimated 14.5 million people. The sector contributes about one percent of the country’s total GDP. Nagapattinam’s long coastline makes fishing its second most important industry after agriculture. According to the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, there are roughly 90,000 fishermen in what it calls the ‘fisheries capital’ of Tamil Nadu.

Traditionally, the women in the fishing community in this region stay at home or sell the fish their husbands bring back. But over the past few years, fishermen have been putting out to sea less often because of the scarcity of fish near the Indian coast and the fear of being caught by the Sri Lankan navy if they stray into the island’s territorial waters.

So, women in the community have stepped into the breach to provide for their families. They’re doing this by starting micro-enterprises and they’re the happier for it.

“Besides an income, it gives me a chance to get out of the house and interact with other people and know a little bit about what’s going on in the world,” says Selvaraj.

Micro-enterprises bring big changes

Nagapattinam district has a population of some 1.6 million people and a sex ratio of 1,025 women to 1,000 men. So, women form an important part of all development strategies in the district.

In a bid to weave women into the economic fabric of the region, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is assisting a Post-tsunami Sustainable Livelihood Programme that has given rise to thousands of micro-enterprises in the region, known locally as self-help groups.

IFAD, which is a specialised agency of the United Nations, is working with the local government. The goal is to establish at least 12,000 micro-enterprises in six coastal areas in Tamil Nadu by 2016.

Between 9,000 and 10,000 are already in operation now.

“We want self-help groups to be a tool to transform women into individual entrepreneurs. We want to build self-reliant communities,” says Senthil Kumar, who is the IFAD Reporting and Monitoring Officer for the programme in Tamil Nadu.

Since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, fishing in the coastal areas of Tamil Nadu has taken a big hit. The damage to the fishing industry was about 4.8 billion rupees (about 65 million dollars).

Prior to the disastrous tsunami, fishing was considered a lucrative activity by the standards here. Fishermen on average could make about 300 dollars per month. Now, they say it’s whittled down to half of that.

Firstly, it was because the fishermen had lost their boats and nets. The government offered compensation to about 17,672 affected fishermen, but even after all the equipment was repaired or replaced, the industry did not rally to its pre-tsunami days.

Then, fishermen claim, there’s less fish near the Indian coast since the tsunami, which makes them sail into Sri Lankan waters for a better catch. But the Sri Lankan Navy impounds their boats and detains the fishermen. In the past few months, this has turned into a contentious issue between the Indian and Sri Lankan governments.

“More than 80 boats have been caught by the Sri Lankan navy,” says Govindaswamy Vijayan, a fisherman who owns two fishing boats. “Today we need bigger boats to avoid crossing the international border into Sri Lankan waters and sail out to deep sea. But most fishermen can’t afford them.”

Sustainable plans to sustain fisher communities

With fewer men putting out to sea in the primarily fishing town of Nagapattinam in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, women are stepping into the breach through micro-enterprises. Credit: Nachammai Raman/IPS

The IFAD programme was created with a view to making coastal communities less dependent on fishing. However, as the men in the community refused to consider other trades, the prime beneficiaries of the programme have turned out to be women.

Women’s self-help groups were already burgeoning in the district after the tsunami as a means of income generation.

“When there’s a disaster, women are expected to care for the family. Feeding the children or other family members becomes their first concern and they immediately start getting involved in various activities,” says Vasudha Gokhale, a Pune-based professor at the BN College of Architecture who has studied how women in Tamil Nadu’s coastal areas coped with the tsunami.

But not all these self-help groups were successful because government officials chose their core activities. “Many of the women started micro-enterprises that they had little affinity for,” says Madhavan Krishnakumar, who works for a non-governmental organisation called Avvai Village Welfare Society.

Some of the micro-enterprises that fizzled out were involved in making plastic doors, bricks and candles. Their products were initially sold under the ‘Alaimagal’ brand.

“The government gave them funding incentives, but their entrepreneurial skills were not properly developed. They were not able to do the marketing or face professional competition, so they failed,” Krishnakumar explains.

A few NGOs such as the People’s Development Association were also involved in developing micro-enterprises in the district earlier on, but have now limited themselves to skills training for youth, according to its director, Joe Velu.

“There were too many people doing it. There was a lot of duplication and overlap. We felt it was becoming too much like moneylending.”

When IFAD came into the picture six years ago, the first thing they did was to conduct a survey. “We wanted to stabilise the movement,” says Kumar. “We graded self-help groups based on their performance and found the weaknesses that needed to be addressed to make the groups viable. Then we restructured the weak ones.”

Sufficient earnings, big savings

On average, the women in these self-help groups can take home about 5,000 rupees (about 80 dollars) per month, which a family of four can just about manage on thanks to the provision of free housing for fisher folk affected by the tsunami.

Revathi Kanakaraj belonged to a self-help group that was formed as far back as 2000, but it disintegrated after the tsunami. Then three years ago, she joined a new one under the IFAD umbrella. She finds it rewarding. “I’ve learned about micro-credit and I’ve learned about savings,” she tells IPS.

Financial literacy is one of the key components of the IFAD-assisted livelihood programme because its ultimate aim is to enable women to access credit on their own and encourage the habit of saving. “Previously, women in self-help groups didn’t know about interest rates and banking. But they’re managing their money very well now.”

The Tamil Nadu government reports that self-help groups across the state had a total savings of around 34 billion rupees (543 million dollars) as of 2012. Most of the women interviewed say they contribute between 20 and 120 rupees (0.32-1.92 dollars) per month.

Kasturi Ravi used to look forward to her husband’s return to shore and a nice income from the sale of the fish he had caught. But on Boxing Day ten years ago, her husband was washed back to shore dead in the devastating tidal waves that killed more than 6,000 people here, the worst affected district in India.

As she cleans dried fish for packing in a small salty-smelling shed with other members of her self-help group, she remembers how difficult it was to eke out a living after her husband’s death. She’s proud of where she is now.

She makes an average of four dollars per day. Although not a lot, it’s enough for subsistence. “I’m grateful for this because I can stand on my own feet,” she tells IPS.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Lima Mayor Susana Villarán presenting a model for sustainable urban areas during Voices for Climate at COP20. Credit: Victor Vásquez/COP20

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
LIMA, Dec 4 2014 (IPS)

The international community’s post-2015 development agenda will depend, in key aspects, on whether the delegates of 195 countries meeting now at the climate summit in the Peruvian capital reach an agreement to reduce global warming, since climate change affects all human activity.

Climate change’s effects on agriculture, health, poverty reduction or housing among vulnerable segments of the population mean progress in the search for a solution to global warming will have a major impact on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), said experts consulted by IPS at COP20.

COP20 – the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), taking place Dec. 1-12 in Lima, is to produce a draft of a new binding global treaty, with targets and commitments to curb the rise in global temperatures.

“It’s important to keep the goal, first of all to highlight the importance of climate change to achieve sustainable development, because these things are interlinked and for us the SDGs are a very good opportunity to communicate that,” Lina Dabbagh, the Climate Action Network-International’s (CAN-I) post-2015 development officer, told IPS.

On Thursday, the United Nations Secretariat will state in a report whether in its view climate change should be one of the SDGs, which at the end of 2015 will replace the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the international community’s development agenda.

Dabbagh said the links between poverty and the fight against climate change must be emphasised. She added that “The SDG agenda is a good agenda to find the arguments about how both objectives can be achieved, and how we need to achieve them to get a better life for everybody, including our planet.”

The official position of CAN-I, the umbrella group of environmental organisations active on the issue of climate change within the negotiations, is that it is important to make this link explicit.

“We have to educate people about what will happen and the SDGs are a good opportunity to do so. More people are aware of the SDGs than of the UNFCCC process,” said the German activist, who lives in Mexico.

She said that making the fight against climate change one of the SDGs would be a good way to be heard by people who haven’t previously been reached.

The draft climate agreement, which is to be signed a year from now in Paris, is important not only to the climate change negotiators but for the U.N. sustainable development agenda as well.

The processes are at a key moment and they share the same path as they move towards the second half of 2015: the U.N. General Assembly is to ratify the SDGs in September 2015 and in November the COP21in Paris is to agree on a new climate treaty, to go into effect in 2020.

Turkish boys with a box of recently picked strawberries. The response to the effects of climate change on agriculture will be key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Credit: PNUD

If the delegates at the General Assembly in New York manage to integrate climate change into the post-2015 development agenda, it would give a major boost to the climate negotiators in Paris.

That happened in the case of the Lima COP as a result of the Sep. 23 climate summit in New York, as well as demonstrations held in capital cities around the world, delegates and activists pointed out at the conference.

Above and beyond the talks, the agendas of both processes are interconnected at many points.

In its fifth assessment report, published Nov. 2, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed out that continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would hurt vulnerable populations the most.

Another report released this year, by Britain’s Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), says the IPCC, the most important source for the UNFCCC’s scientific, technical and socioeconomic information, could play the same role for the SDGs.

CAFOD climate and energy analyst Rob Elsworth told IPS.that all of the examples given by the IPCC, all of the issues it touches on, are directly related to the SDGs, which means it is equally relevant for them.

That is clear to civil society organisations focused on the development agenda, which have returned with renewed strength to the climate talks after their disappointment at COP15, held in 2009 in Copenhagen, where the countries failed to reach a hoped-for agreement on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.

“We reengaged in this debate because we are clear you really can’t talk about development without addressing climate change. The work we do with our partners in different countries, be it topics like agriculture or water, can’t move forward if you have a macro problem that undermines those,” said Elsworth.

The first two SDGs defined by the U.N. in July are poverty eradication and ending hunger through food security and sustainable agriculture. Both are directly linked to climate change, experts meeting at COP20 in Lima noted.

On Wednesday, agriculture day at COP20, organisations involved in farming underscored the links between climate change and agricultural practices. They also stressed the importance of small farmers in ensuring a sustainable future.

“The post-2015 agenda has already made goals to ensure that smart agriculture is a central element and all the worldwide agencies are actively influencing that agenda,” said Gernot Laganda, an International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) climate change adaptation specialist.

By 2050 there will be two billion more people to feed, Laganda told IPS.

“If agriculture is not structured is such a way that it is climate-smart then it cannot achieve the sustainability required for the productivity increases without undermining natural resources,” he added.

IFAD presented a study at COP20 that shows investments in access to weather information, technology transfer and disaster preparedness are helping smallholders feed themselves and their families on a warming planet.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Families who live on ‘chars’ – river islands formed from sedimentation – are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters. This family wades through floodwaters left behind after heavy rains in August caused major rivers to burst their banks in northern Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
KURIGRAM, Bangladesh, Oct 29 2014 (IPS)

Jahanara Begum, a 35-year-old housewife, is surrounded by thatched-roof homes, all of which are partially submerged by floodwater.

Heavy rains throughout the monsoon months, beginning in August, left thousands of people in northern Bangladesh homeless or in dire straits as the mighty Brahmaputra, Dharla and Teesta rivers burst their banks, spilling out over the countryside.

Some of the worst hit were the roughly 50,000-70,000 ‘char dwellers’, residents who have been forced to make their homes on little river islands or shoals, the result of years of intense sedimentation along some of Bangladesh’s largest rivers.

“My husband had planted rice and potato on about half an acre of lowland, but the flood destroyed all our dreams." -- 34-year-old Rehana Begum
According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Bangladesh experiences a net accretion of some 20 square km of land per year – “newly formed land of about 52 square km minus eroded land of around 32 square km” – as the coastline shifts, river beds dry up and floods and siltation leave little mounds of earth behind.

“With an assumed density of 800 people per square km,” IFAD estimates, “this means that each year approximately 26,000 people lose their land in Bangladesh.”

Many of those left landless opt to start life afresh on the chars, which lack almost all basic services: a water supply, sanitation facilities, hospitals, schools, electricity, transport, police stations, markets.

“We survive on God’s blessings,” an old man named Nurul Islam, a char resident, told IPS, “and indigenous agricultural practices.”

Sometimes, however, even divine intervention and ancient wisdom is not sufficient to guards against the hazards of such a precarious life. Jahanara recalls the worst days of the flood, when rapid waters swept away most of her neighbours’ household items while she herself was protected only by the slight elevation of her home on the Astamer Char in Kurigram district, about 290 km north of the capital Dhaka.

In the Bhangapara District, some 210 km from Dhaka, the floodwaters were knee-deep, according to Mossammet Laily, a mother of four in her mid-30s whose entire home went underwater this past August. “Everything inside was destroyed in no time,” a visibly moved Laily told IPS.

Her disheartened neighbour, who gave his name only as Rabeya, added, “I had pumpkin, potato, cucumbers and snake-, ribbed- and bottle-gourd in my small garden. All of them vanished in a matter of a few hours.”

As Naser Ali, a local businessmen, explained to IPS, “We never had floods of this magnitude in our childhood. In previous years floodwaters stayed for a couple of days but this time the water stayed for almost a month.”

All over Bangladesh, the impacts of a wetter and warmer climate are making themselves felt among the poorest and most marginalised segments of society. In a country of 156 million people, 70 percent of whom live in rural areas, natural disasters are magnified.

Some 50-80 million people live in flood-prone or drought-prone areas around the country. While statistics about their average income vary, rural families seldom earn more than 50-80 dollars per month.

Natural disasters in Bangladesh have resulted in damages to the tune of billions of dollars, with cyclones Sidr and Aila (in 2007 and 2009 respectively) causing damages estimated at 1.7 billion and 550 million dollars each.

And for the char dwellers, the prospect of more frequent weather-related hazards is a grim prospect.

The Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP), adopted prior to the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, identified inland monsoon flooding and tropical cyclones accompanied with storm surges as two of the three major climate hazards facing the country.

In a bid to protect some of its most vulnerable communities, the government has embarked on the Community Climate Change Project (CCCP) at a total cost of 12.5 million dollars, managed by the Bangladesh Climate Change Resilience Fund (BCCRF), a multi-donor climate change adaptation trust fund supported by the World Bank, among others.

Referring to the project, Johannes Zutt, the World Bank’s country director for Bangladesh, told IPS. “It is increasingly evident that climate change will have enormous impacts on a low-lying delta country like Bangladesh. The CCCP is helping communities living on the frontline to increase their ability to cope with climate-related adversities.”

He also said, “Often, these people have few resources and no real ability to relocate, but they can nonetheless take collective action to increase their resilience to climate change.”

Tens of thousands of char dwellers will be the primary beneficiaries of these ambitious projects.

K M Marufuzzaman, programme officer of Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), a government lending agency working to implement the CCCP at the grassroots level in the Kurigram district in northern Bangladesh, told IPS that the “main mission” is to “minimize environmental risks” and safeguard at-risk communities.

One initiative has involved raising homes five to eight feet above ground level to protect families from being inundated. On the plinth, as it is commonly known, survivors and their poultry and other livestock are sheltered from the many storms and floods that plague the northern regions of the country.

These humble homes, located on a ‘char’ in northern Bangladesh, were half-submerged by severe floods in August that left many river island-dwellers homeless. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Pointing at a tiny bamboo cottage, Mohammad Mukul Miah, a beneficiary of this project, told IPS, “We have built animal homes for goats to avoid the possible spread of diseases. We have also planted bottle- and snake-gourd to eat during times of food scarcity.”

Those like 65-year-old Badiuzzaman, who lives in a tin shed-like structure in Char Bazra on the banks of the Brahmaputra river, 200 km north of the capital, have “planted rice seedlings on the plinth so that when water recedes I can take advantage of the fertile soil to quickly grow paddy.”

Nearby, on one of the many plinths that now dot the 50-by-20-metre Char Bazra, 34-year-old Rehana Begum has planted rice seedlings beside her bamboo-and-jute-woven home. “My husband had planted rice and potato on about half an acre of lowland, but the flood destroyed all our dreams.

“We intend to recover from this by growing seedlings in advance,” she told IPS.

About 20 minutes away, in Char Korai Barisal, many homes still bear the scars of the recent disaster. Standing on the edge of the shoal with her two children, Anisa Begum remembers how and she and her family spent day after fearful day in their submerged home, “sometimes with nothing to eat, holding each other’s hands to avoid drowning in the dark.”

Other families spent entire days on large boats to survive the sudden catastrophe.

It was only those who had their homes on plinths who were spared. If the government’s community resilience scheme unfolds according to plan, 50,000 people on shoals will be living on plinths in the greater Brahmaputra region by next year.

In total, the project aims to cover 12,000 families living on the shoals in northern regions.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Sep 19 2014 (IPS)

At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed themselves to reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion of the hungry.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The latest State of World Food Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2014 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that 805 million people – one in nine people worldwide – remain chronically hungry: 789 million are in developing countries where this share has declined from 23.4 to 13.5 percent.

By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015.

Some 25 countries have made more impressive progress, achieving the more ambitious WFS target of halving the number of hungry. However, the number of hungry people in the world has only declined by one-fifth from the billion estimated for 1990-92.

Major effort needed

The proportion of undernourished people – those regularly not able to consume enough food for an active and healthy life – has decreased from 23.4 percent in 1990–1992 to 13.5 percent in 2012–2014. This is significant because a large and growing number of countries show that achieving and sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.

However, the MDG target of halving the chronically undernourished people’s share of the world’s population by the end of 2015 cannot be met at the current rate of progress. Meeting the target is still possible, however, with a sufficient, immediate additional effort to accelerate progress, especially in countries which have showed little progress so far.

Progress uneven

“By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015”
Overall progress has been highly uneven. All but 14 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases. While sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished.

Marked differences in reducing undernourishment have persisted across regions. There have been significant reductions in both the estimated share and number of undernourished in most countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean – where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has been reached, or nearly reached.

West Asia has seen a rise in the share of the hungry compared with 1990–1992, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

In several countries, underweight and stunting persist in children, even when undernourishment is low and most people have access to sufficient food. Such nutrition failures are due not only to insufficient food access, but also to poor health conditions and the high incidence of diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Food security and nutrition

Hunger is conventionally measured in terms of the prevalence of undernourishment, the FAO estimate of chronic inadequacy of dietary energy. While such a measure is useful for estimating hunger, it needs to be complemented by more measures to capture other dimensions of food security.

SOFI’s suite of indicators measures different dimensions of food security. Information thus generated can guide priority policy actions. For example, in countries where low undernourishment coexists with high malnutrition, specially-designed nutrition-enhancing interventions may be crucial to address early childhood stunting.

With the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals likely to seek to overcome hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, FAO has recently developed and tested a new Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) in over 150 countries to measure the severity of reported food insecurity.

Lessons

Improvements in nutrition generally require complementary policies, including improving health conditions, hygiene, water supply and education. More sophisticated and creative approaches to coordination and governance are needed, with more, and more effective, resources to end hunger and malnutrition in our lifetimes.

With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment continuing and likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome without universalising social protection to all in need, but also to provide the means for future livelihoods and resilience.

The forthcoming Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome on November 19-21 is expected to articulate coherent bases for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition as well as for greater international cooperation and support for enhanced and more integrated national nutrition efforts.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

To meet the challenge of feeding the world’s 805 million hungry people, this year’s State of Food Insecurity report calls for the creation of an ‘enabling environment’. Credit: FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Phil Harris
ROME, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

The number of hungry people in the world has declined by over 100 million in the last decade and over 200 million since 1990-92, but 805 million people around the world still go hungry every day, according to the latest UN estimates.

Presenting their annual joint report on the State of Food Insecurity in the World, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), international Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and World Food Programme (WFP) said that while the latest hunger figures indicate that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of undernourished people by 2015 is within reach, this will only be possible “if appropriate and immediate efforts are stepped up.”

These efforts include the necessary “political commitment … well informed by sound understanding of national challenges, relevant policy options, broad participation and lessons from other experiences.”"We cannot celebrate yet because we must still reach 805 million people without enough food for a healthy and productive life" – WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin

Introducing this year’s report, FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said that the figures indicate that a “world without hunger is possible in our lifetime.”

The three Rome-based UN agencies noted that while there has been significant progress overall, some regions are still lagging behind: sub-Saharan Africa, where more than one in four people remain chronically undernourished, and Asia, where the majority of the world’s hungry – 520 million people – live.

In Oceania there has been a modest improvement in percentage terms (down 1.7 percent from 14 percent two years ago) but an increase in the number of hungry people. Latin America and the Caribbean have made most progress in increasing food security.

However, WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin warned that “we cannot celebrate yet because we must still reach 805 million people without enough food for a healthy and productive life.”

Calling for what they called an ‘enabling environment’, the agencies stressed that “food insecurity and malnutrition are complex problems that cannot be solved by one sector or stakeholder alone, but need to be tackled in a coordinated way.” In this regard, they called on governments to work closely with the private sector and civil society.

According to the report, the ‘enabling environment’ should be based on an integrated approach that includes public and private investments to increase agricultural productivity; access to land, services, technologies and markets; and measures to promote rural development and social protection for the most vulnerable, including strengthening their resilience to conflicts and natural disasters.

Speaking at the presentation of the report, the WFP Executive Director referred in particular to the current outbreak of Ebola in the West African countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea which, she said, “is an unprecedented health emergency which is rapidly becoming a major food crisis.”

“You cannot isolate people without addressing the food and nutrition challenges of those who need assistance,” she added, noting that the populations in these countries are not harvesting or planting according to their regular seasonal requirements while the crisis rages.

“This is rapidly becoming a food crisis that is potentially affecting 1.3 million people today, with an unknown number of how many will be affected in the future.”

“We cannot let the unprecedented level of humanitarian crisis undermine our efforts to progress even further, to reach our planet’s most vulnerable people and to end hunger in our lifetimes.”

The State of Food Insecurity report will be part of discussions at the Second International Conference on Nutrition to be held in Rome from 19-21 November, jointly organised by FAO and the World Health Organization (WHO).

This high-level intergovernmental meeting will seek a renewed political commitment at global level to combat malnutrition with the overall goal of improving diets and raising nutrition levels.

Judith Mwikali Musau has successfully introduced the use of grafted plants for crop and fruit harvesting. IFAD says it is clear that a new revolution in agriculture is needed to transform the sector. Credit:Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
ROME, Apr 16 2014 (IPS)

The Millennium Development Goals deadline of 2015 is fast approaching, but according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), poverty still afflicts one in seven people — and one in eight still goes to bed hungry.

Together with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), IFAD unveiled the results of their joint work Apr. 3 to develop five targets to be incorporated in the post-2015 development agenda."We have a growing global population and a deteriorating natural resource base." -- Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of IFAD

These targets include access to adequate food all year round for all people; ending malnutrition in all its forms with special attention to stunting; making all food production systems more productive, sustainable, resilient and efficient; securing access for all small food producers, especially women, to inputs, knowledge and resources to increase their productivity; and more efficient post-production food systems that reduce the global rate of food loss and waste by 50 percent.

IPS correspondent Silvia Giannelli interviewed Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of IFAD, on the role of rural poverty and food security in shaping the current debate on the definition of a new development agenda.

Q: Do you think it is time to rethink the strategies to achieve the Millennium Development Goals?

A: It’s not only that I think, I know it. And that is why we have Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are being fashioned. The SDGs are an idea that was born in the Rio Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012. The crafting of a new global development agenda is a unique opportunity to refocus policy, investments and partnerships on inclusive and sustainable rural transformation.

The intent is to produce a new, more inclusive and more sustainable set of global development objectives that have application to all countries. These goals – once agreed by governments – would take effect after the current MDGs expire in 2015.

And measurement will be crucial if we are to achieve what we set out. This is why we are talking about universality but in a local context. The SDGs will be for all countries, developing and developed alike. But their application will need to respond to the reality on the ground, which will vary from country to country.

Q: How do the five targets revealed this month fit in this discussion on the post-2015 development goals?

A: The proposed targets and indicators are intended to provide governments with an informed tool that they use when discussing the precise nature and make-up of the SDGs related to sustainable agriculture, food security and nutrition.

These are five critical issues for a universal, transformative agenda that is ambitious but also realistic and adaptable to different country and regional contexts. The targets can fit under a possible dedicated goal but also under other goals. So, it is for governments to decide whether or not they wish to include these targets in the SDGs.

Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of IFAD, says it is clear that a new revolution in agriculture is needed to transform the sector so it can fully live up to its potential to drive sustainable development. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

Q: Why does agriculture represent such a critical aspect within the post-2015 development agenda?

A: We have a growing global population and a deteriorating natural resource base, which means more people to feed with less water and farmland. And climate change threatens to alter the whole geography of agriculture and food systems on a global scale.

It is clear that we need a new revolution in agriculture, to transform the sector so it can fully live up to its potential to drive sustainable development. Target areas should address universal and context-specific challenges, but context-adapted approaches and agendas are the building blocks for any effort to feed the world.

Q: Why is the focus on rural areas so important in order to overcome inequality?

A: The world is becoming increasingly urban, yet cities are still fed by the people working the land in rural areas. And it is in those rural areas where 76 percent of the world’s poor live.

At IFAD we see that the gap between rich and poor is primarily a gap between urban and rural. Those who migrate to urban areas, oftentimes do so in the belief that life will be better in the urban cities.

However they get caught up in the bulging slums of cities, they lose their social cohesion which is provided by rural communities and they go into slums, they become nothing but breeding ground for social turmoil and desperation. One only has to look at what is happening today in what was described as the ‘Arab spring’.

Q: But beyond the issue of exclusion and turmoil, why is key to addressing rural poverty?

A: Because the rural space is basically where the food is produced: in the developing world 80 percent in some cases 90 percent of all food that is consumed domestically is produced in rural areas.

Food agriculture does not grow in cities, it grows in rural areas, and the livelihoods of the majority of the rural population provide not only food, it provides employment, it provides economic empowerment,[…] and social cohesion.

Essentially, if we do not invest in rural areas through agricultural development we are dismantling the foundations for national security, not just only food security. And that translates into not just national security but also global security and global peace.

Q: What risks are we facing in terms of global security, if we don’t face and take concrete action to ensure food security?

A: We just need to go back to what happened in 2007 and 2008: the global food price crisis, as it is said, and how circumstances culminated in what happened in 40 countries around the world where there were food riots.

Those riots were the results of inaction that occurred in some 25-30 years due to these investments in agriculture and the imbalances in trade, across countries and across continents. Forty countries experienced serious problems with food riots, and they brought down two governments, one in Haiti and another one in Madagascar. […] We’ve seen it, [and] it continues to repeat itself.

Q: What role are developed countries expected to play in the achievement of these five targets?

A: All countries will have an essential role to play in achieving the SDGs – whatever they end up looking like. Countries have agreed that this is a “universal” agenda and developed countries’ commitment will have to extend beyond ODA [Official Development Assistance] alone.

At IFAD we [are] seeing that development is moving beyond aid to achieve self-sustaining, private sector-led inclusive growth and development. For example, in Africa, generated revenue shot up from 141 billion dollars in 2002 to 520 billion dollars in 2011. This is truly a universal challenge, but it also requires local and country-level ownership and international collaboration at all levels.

Excerpt:

Critics say small farmers and local markets are ill-served by the prevailing economic model. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Sabina Zaccaro
ROME, Oct 1 2013 (IPS)

Some 842 million people still suffer from chronic hunger, according to the State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI 2013), published Tuesday by the three Rome-based U.N. food agencies.

As high as this number seems, it should still be considered progress, since it is is down from 868 million last year.

Among the reasons behind this progress are economic growth in developing countries, which is improving incomes and access to food; pick-up in agricultural productivity; and increased public and private investments in agriculture.

Remittances from migrants are also playing a role in reducing poverty, according to the U.N. report.

The vast majority of hungry people live in developing regions, while 15.7 million live in developed countries. But despite the progress detected worldwide, strong inequalities in hunger reduction remain.

Sub-Saharan Africa has made only modest progress in recent years and remains the region with the highest prevalence of undernourishment, with one in four people (24.8 percent) estimated to be hungry.

No progress is observed in Western Asia, while Southern Asia and Northern Africa showed “slow progress”. More substantial reductions in both the number of hungry and prevalence of undernourishment have occurred in most countries of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and in Latin America.

Since 1990-92, the total number of undernourished in developing countries has fallen by 17 percent from 995.5 million to 826.6 million. The ambitious target set at the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), to halve the number of hungry people by 2015, remains out of reach at the global level, even though 22 countries had already met it by the end of 2012.

The heads of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) called for nutrition-sensitive interventions in agriculture and food systems as a whole, as well as in public health and education, especially for women.

Last year’s U.N. report received a detailed critique by a group of hunger researchers led by author Frances Moore Lappe. The publication offered specific recommendations mainly in relation to the presentation of hunger estimates and on the report’s methodology.

Researchers found that estimates represent the low end of the scale because they are based on food availability and the caloric requirements required only to lead a “sedentary lifestyle.” A less restrictive FAO threshold leads to an estimate of 1.33 billion hungry in the world rather than SOFI 2012’s 868 million, according to the group.

Another factor of concern was the focus on global hunger, which masks wide regional variation. In fact, progress in China and Vietnam alone account for more than 90 percent of the estimated reductions in the number of hungry people in the world. National success stories, like in Ghana and Brazil, “are lost in the global estimates, as are countries and regions in crisis.”

“This year’s report introduces important innovations, we go beyond the traditional FAO prevalence of undernourishment indicator to measure the various dimensions of food insecurity, in particular the nutritional outcomes of food insecurity,” said Pietro Gennari, director of the Statistics Division at the FAO.

“These can be measured by different indicators. In most cases, these indicators are consistent with the trends of prevalence of undernourishment, but this is not always the case, and we have studied specific countries to understand why we have these divergences and the policy measures that can address them.”

The report underlines that economic growth is key for progress in hunger reduction. “But that is not enough; targeted policies and social programmes are needed to achieve the goal of eradicating hunger worldwide,” Gennari said.

Some contest this emphasis on economic growth.

“The report offers some useful elements, like some of the new index, and more systematic information on food insecurity,” Antonio Onorati from IPC, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, told IPS. “But when it comes to solutions, it proposes old and ineffective recipes.”

“Like the idea that 600 million small producers who are food insecure simply need to increase their productivity in order to put their surplus into the market. As if the local market were functional to small-scale agriculture and to food security. It is not so.”

According to Onorati, local markets are only a reproduction of the global market, “that same market that generates crisis and even death of small farms, and which is finally a key component of food insecurity.”

“We would expect a deeper analysis of the role of local markets,” he said.

Findings of SOFI 2013 will be discussed by governments, civil society and private sector at the Oct. 7-11 meeting of the Committee on World Food Security in Rome.

Yolanda Chaucayaqui shows the scale model of what her town, Yanaquihua, will look like. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
QUEQUEÑA, Peru , Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

Women and young people are central players in dozens of small businesses and environmental protection plans that are changing the lives of poor rural families in the Andes highlands of southern Peru.

The initiatives are financed by the government programme Sierra Sur and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

In her colourful traditional indigenous outfit, Yolanda Chaucayaqui shows a grey scale model that reflects what things were like until recently in her town, Yanaquihua, where deforestation and informal sector mining reigned.

Then she smiles as she shows another, brightly-coloured, scale model, which reflects the future she dreams of: avocado orchards kept green with a drip irrigation system, a water tank – and no mining.

“We want our town to be free of all of these negative things, and we are working to forge the way to a different kind of future,” she tells IPS.

Chaucayaqui rode seven hours in a cart from Yanaquihua to Quequeña, a smaller town in the region of Arequipa where hundreds of campesinos or peasant farmers took part in the last Sierra Sur/IFAD projects fair, on Aug. 3.

The fair was attended by IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze from Nigeria, who told IPS that he was pleased with the advances made, and especially with the strong presence of women.

Peru has been working with the specialised United Nations agency for 20 years, fomenting the creation of small enterprises that improve the lives of poor rural families.

Some 18,000 families have benefited from the second phase of the Sierra Sur programme in the regions of Apurímac, Arequipa, Cuzco, Puno, Moquegua and Tacna.

Of that total, 48 percent of the participants were women committed to business and natural resource management plans, who have managed to join the financial system by opening savings accounts, José Vilcherrez, the head of project evaluation and monitoring for Sierra Sur II, tells IPS.

In these southern regions, 550 business plans are being carried out, each one involving around 20 men and women. On average, 80 percent of each business is financed by the government programme, with loans from IFAD, while the remaining 20 percent comes from the community.“These women win a new space in their families, respect from their husbands and their kids. They start to be listened to.” -- José Vilcherrez

Each project is chosen through a transparent selection process in fairs like the one held in Quequeña, by the local fund allotment committee, made up of residents and authorities from the participating villages and towns.

The businesses are diverse, and women participate in almost all of the activities, from livestock-raising and pasture improvement to bakeries, dairy products, textiles and craft-making.

“These women win a new space in their families, respect from their husbands and their kids. They start to be listened to,” says Vilcherrez, who is evaluating the impact of Sierra Sur on the female population, to determine how support from the programme can be improved.

Women have asked for more information, in order to gain access to new areas of business activity, and to learn about their rights, the expert explained.

Nelly Roxana Cheña presides over a group of local craftswomen in the region of Puno. Thanks to her involvement in Sierra Sur, she discovered her talent for knitting and began to earn money to pay for schooling for her children.

“We have never appreciated our talents,” she tells IPS. “But thanks to the training, we rise at four in the morning, we get our housework done, and we work hard, to pull ahead. We want to continue to receive training,” she enthuses, surrounded by her fellow knitters and balls of yarn and wool caps.

Cheña says the women in her town are actively involved in protecting the environment. There are 127 natural resource management plans in the southern regions, where families are carrying out activities to preserve and administer water sources and soil. The best projects are rewarded with funds from the programme.

“We want to contribute to the recovery of our villages,” says Rosemary Quispe, from Cuzco region. “We want to live in nice, neat houses while preserving the natural resources for ourselves and the next generations,” adds the 19-year-old, one of the many young people taking part in the Sierra Sur projects.

Since late 2012, IFAD has been encouraging youth participation in rural areas of Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Peru, providing financial and technical support through the Young Rural Entrepreneurs programme.

In Peru, 344 young people are involved in 28 rural enterprises, half of them in the south of the country.

“Young people have few opportunities to stay in their village, which fuels poverty and migration,” Wilder Mamani, the head of Procasur, an NGO that works in partnership with IFAD, tells IPS.

Sinthia Yucra, 21, decided to stay in her village, and is generating income for her family by raising chickens.

She lives in the village of Lucre, in Cuzco region, more than 3,000 metres above sea level, where she and nine other young people now have 1,000 hens and another 1,000 chicks. Eight of the 10 people involved in the project are women.

“This has strengthened my family and brought us closer together,” Yucra tells IPS. “I never thought our parents would support us. This is exciting. I have a lot of plans for my village.”

The group, who clarified that they don’t believe in welfare-style assistance, took out a loan to launch the small business and build the sheds. They are now being trained by Procasur technicians and plan to hire an economist, to prepare for selling their products to supermarkets.

IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze, interviewed by IPS at the end of his Aug. 2-8, 2013 visit to Peru and Colombia. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 12 2013 (IPS)

“There is no development without peace. It should be understood that, for there to be development in a country, there must be an internal peace process,” says Kanayo Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

With respect to Colombia, the Nigerian expert in agricultural development said: “We have to create a platform of trust” in abandoned rural communities.

IFAD is the only United Nations agency created to provide financial support to peasants and smallholder farmers. It works with governments, but in bottom-to-top projects. Organised groups of people propose their own initiatives which compete for funding, through the Agriculture Ministry in the case of Colombia.

The funds are managed by the communities themselves. More than 1,700 projects presented by Colombian rural groups obtained support that way through the IFAD-Rural Opportunities project that began in 2007 and is now coming to an end.

IFAD is now launching a new programme in Colombia through the Agriculture Ministry, which will act in war zones, termed “territorial consolidation areas” by the government – a controversial concept involving both questions of security and development.“IFAD is not a top-down institution, it is bottom-up. You walk with the communities. They have to be part of the project. They have to own it.” -- Kanayo Nwanze

“Small and medium enterprises in rural areas are a source of generating social stability in countries,” Nwanze says in this interview with IPS in Bogotá at the end of his Aug. 2-8 visit to Peru and Colombia.

Nwanze met with the presidents of both countries – Ollanta Humala of Peru and Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia – and visited rural communities.

Q: IFAD has wide experience working in conflict zones to bring development and to help to build peace. How can this experience be applied in Colombia?

A: We have found in many parts of Africa and Asia – India is a very good example – where, if there is ability to organise rural populations, women and men and children, and give them opportunities to have gainful employment…youth in particular are less likely to be attracted by rhetoric and extremism.

Just a few days ago we launched a new programme called TOP (Trust & Opportunities Project), which takes the first project into a different dimension, a much higher dimension.

Trust & Opportunities, we believe, will contribute significantly to bringing hope, economic development, and social inclusiveness to rural areas of Colombia. And we hope that this process will contribute to peace and development in Colombia.

Q: Most of the places where the new project will be deployed in Colombia are still war zones. What kind of concrete difficulties could that pose?

A: I can talk from our experiences elsewhere. A good example is…projects involving community development and natural resource management in communities of the northeastern states of India.

The primary impact of that project was not only community development and management of natural resources, but [the fact that] it generated such economic benefits that young people who formally were engaged in extremism now had jobs, and it reduced the rate of insurgency.

You see, IFAD is a unique institution. Apart from being a specialised U.N. agency, which gives us…global legitimacy and trust by populations and governments, [we have] the ability to organise rural populations, so that they have…their own structural governance platform to operate.

You need a mechanism where you can build trust, between the populations in the war zone and the governments. And this is what IFAD is fantastic at doing. We trust and we are trusted by the communities; they see us as their friends. The governments we work with – in Colombia [for instance] – see us as very apolitical [and that] our interests are basically for the populations and for the national policy dialogue.

The difficulties that people often face in these communities is the way…an idea or a concept [is presented to them] – you have to avoid just parachuting in and telling them ‘this is what you have to do’.

IFAD is not a top-down institution, it is bottom-up. You walk with the communities. They have to be part of the project. They have to own it. And that way they are committed to it; when they own it they want it to succeed; if it is parachuted from the top, they reject it.

And there is no other institution that I know of within the U.N. system or within the international financial institutions that goes to the remotest and most difficult areas in the countries. IFAD does.

Q: Is the new TOP in line with Colombia´s policies?

A: First of all, I think it is important to understand that IFAD only works with governments. IFAD does not define for governments what governments should do. IFAD works with governments, partners and rural populations, to define the programme that they want.

Now, President Santos’ major priority today is peace and inclusive development. So what do we do? We say OK.

We have allocated 25 million dollars. That is nothing for Colombia. But what we bring is knowledge and experience on how we work with rural populations. So, we are a facilitator…[and] our programmes are defined by the strategy and the priority of the governments for its people.

Our programmes are not political. But the outputs, the results can have political impact, because they bring about political stability and trust in the community, which is the foundation for peace.

In Latin America – in Brazil, Peru or Guatemala – or in different countries in Africa or Asia, when you go to the community, you see the commitment and the excitement they have, for the simple fact that they are now doing dignified activities that are generating money.

Do you think that they want to take up arms against the government? No. That is so fundamental.

Q: What general impression did you get from your trip to Peru and Colombia?

A: In both countries I was impressed. In Peru, because of the president’s commitment to agriculture and rural development. I’m also impressed with the emphasis that is given to creating peace through investment in development, in both countries.

Unless we have stable and vibrant rural communities, we cannot achieve sustainable development in any country, because you always have this gap between those who have and those who have not. And when the gap gets to [a certain] point, it’s like a string that snaps. And when it snaps, you have political crisis.

Excerpt:

Local campesino Omar Caicedo shows IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze the fruits of his land, in Colombia’s biodiverse Pacific coastal region. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

“I was a hunter. I killed many animals,” said Rosalino Ortiz, a representative of Mashiramo, a campesino organisation that monitors biodiversity in Colombia’s Massif range in the southern department of Huila.

After taking workshops organised by the Rural Opportunities programme of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) “your mentality changes,” Ortiz said. “And I started planning a business” with 23 other campesinos (small farmers), he added.

Now Ortiz talks about ecotourism. And he said “we have more money.”

After receiving training from the programme, he is well-versed in computers, and plans to become a forest engineer “to bring skills to the organisation.”

“It’s one of the best programmes,” said Cielo Báez with the Asociación de Productores Agroecológicos de la Cuenca del Río Anaime (APACRA), an association of agroecological farmers in the Anaime river watershed.

“They transfer the funds to our account. They trust us, the grassroots communities,” she told IPS.

“We decide what we really need, which is the reason for the programme’s success. Many people make those decisions from their desks,” and decide what tools to send communities, without consulting them – materials that end up “piled in some corner,” added Báez, whose association is in the mountainous municipality of Cajamarca in the central department of Tolima.

The families belonging to APACRA, who take turns collectively working on the members’ farms, are no longer intimidated by receiving a 15,000-dollar loan because, said Báez, “we have the support of an accountant and an auditor.”

“IFAD, through Rural Opportunities, has enabled our families to have a better quality of life,” she said. “Because they work in an integral manner, we grow stronger as a whole.

“We have trained with them. We are 15 families with more or less two youngsters each: some 30 youngsters who have had access to education. Now they are still campesinos, but with studies. And we involve the entire family: the elderly, the children,” she added.

The key to obtaining support from Rural Opportunities/IFAD is the word “business.” The programme has managed to bring together campesinos in associations in vastly different parts of the country.

Andrés Silva, director of Rural Opportunities, spoke with Báez and Ortiz under the gaze of IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze, who came to Colombia after visiting projects in Peru backed by the specialised United Nations agency, which was created to support development initiatives among the poorest rural populations around the world.

“This is the horn plantain. This is cacao. Here we have beans. We also have tamarind,” another campesino, Omar Caicedo, showed Nwanze.

Caicedo belongs to the Cooperativa Agropecuaria de Usuarios Campesinos del Patía, a campesino cooperative in the southwest department of Cauca.

Nwanze, a Nigerian expert in agricultural entomology, was familiar with most of the fruits and vegetables he was shown. Until Caicedo pointed to the “hacepuede, an exotic fruit. It’s sweet, you can try it in juice, or just like this. It’s also medicinal. You can drink it when you’re fasting. It helps fight amoebas,” the campesino explained.

The president of IFAD said that “when a few years ago, in my campaign for governments and for the development community to recognise small agriculture as a business, and to make it attractive for the youth, I didn’t know all this was already being done in Colombia.”

Nwanze said he was “very impressed to see young people taking agriculture and agriculture-related activities as a money-generating business.”

IPS has also come into contact with other community projects backed by Rural Opportunities/IFAD, such as Ecopollo, run by female heads of households in the Asociación Municipal de Mujeres Campesinas de Lebrija (AMMUCALE), an association of campesino women in the east-central department of Santander.

Thanks to the large sheds where they raise 1,800 chickens, which they sell in markets and nearby stores, or to local families, some of the women have even managed to send their children to university.

The women involved in Ecopollo – which means ecochicken – say they have raised their children to love the countryside, and their university studies are for them to bring new skills and knowledge when they come back to Lebrija.

Another project is the Corporación de Recuperación Comunera del Lienzo in the town of Charalá, also in Santander, where 70 farming families set up a production chain that stretches from the cultivation of organic cotton to the Museum of Linen.

The museum, which operates in a large corner house in the town of Charalá, displays traditional weaving and dyeing techniques of the Guane indigenous people, who are now extinct in that region, once famous for its fabrics and weaving.

Rural Opportunities/IFAD began its work in 2007 and formally ends this year, after financing more than 1,700 projects. Now it must reinvent itself.

“We won’t invest in the same families,” the programme’s director, Silva, told IPS.

The idea is for the associations that have become small rural companies to share their best practices with other groups of local families, and to help them avoid the mistakes they themselves have made along the way, in order to multiply the experience.

One of the central objectives is to keep people from moving to the cities by offering alternative livelihoods in rural areas.

The campesinos of Mashiramo are focusing on becoming a local network that helps link up other organisations: “We’ll be the businesspeople, who share our knowledge and experience,” Ortiz said.

The result: organised knowledge that can be shared and replicated.

But not only the communities have learned along the way. It has also been a learning experience for the agriculture ministry.

“We have learned we have to support people, seek out knowledge, dig out the treasures from the local cultures, encourage the spread of local talent beyond the families,” Silva said.

IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze, with Peru’s agriculture minister, Milton von Hesse, to his right, meeting with local campesinas in the highlands town of Quequeña. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
QUEQUEÑA, Peru , Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

Some 40 multicoloured tents were set up to showcase the fruits of community-based rural development projects in the main square of this village in southern Peru during a visit by IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze.

The event organised in this highlands community in the southern Peruvian department of Arequipa showed the fruits of 20 years of collaboration between the specialised United Nations agency and this South American country.

Dishes made with the protein-rich quinoa; mushrooms that grow 4,000 metres above sea level; chubby guinea pigs; brightly coloured garments; homegrown honey; different kinds of cheese; and scale models of towns, rivers and valleys were presented while a popular local band played.

On his first trip to Peru, the Nigerian expert who heads IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) visited Quequeña on Aug. 3, where products made by community projects in Arequipa and the neighbouring southern departments of Moquegua, Cuzco and Puno were displayed.

“It’s not strange that Peru has been the laboratory where we decided to launch these initiatives,” Josefina Stubbs, director of IFAD’s Latin America and Caribbean Division, told IPS.

Stubbs, who accompanied Nwanze, said the Local Resource Allocation Committees (LRACs) developed in southern Peru have drawn attention from other countries, like Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia.

Peruvian technical experts involved in the project will soon travel to China to share their experiences, which are focused on meeting needs in communities based on the transparent community management of resources, said Stubbs.

The funds IFAD provides the Peruvian government are transferred to the communities’ own bank accounts, explained the expert from the Dominican Republic.

The project in southern Peru is the oldest of the three that the government is carrying out in rural areas with loans and technical advice from IFAD.

Here in Arequipa, the communities design and implement their own productive initiatives, which help generate income to cover their basic needs. Crop improvement, guinea pig and livestock raising, weaving and gastronomic undertakings using local products are some of the projects.

“IFAD supports the government’s efforts to enable people to produce enough to have access to buy something to feed themselves,” Nwanze told IPS.

On Sunday, the head of IFAD visited the highland villages of Sibayo and Callalli, which are also in Arequipa, before returning to Lima on Monday and flying from there to Colombia, where similar projects are being carried out.

Every three years, IFAD distributes some 300 to 400 million dollars in loans for agricultural and rural development in Latin America, where it supports a range of projects in nearly every country in the region.

Nwanze added that the next step for Peru would be to strengthen the decentralisation of the management of the projects so the “regional authorities take responsibility for the programme and the financing.” He mentioned the progress IFAD has made along those lines in Argentina and Brazil.

Stubbs said the idea was for more villages and towns to adopt this kind of initiative. With that aim, IFAD authorities met Saturday morning with the governor of Arequipa, Juan Manuel Guillén. A working group will now be created to launch this new stage, she said.

For his part, Peru’s minister of agriculture, Milton von Hesse, praised IFAD for seeing campesinos as “the most qualified to decide what kind of technical assistance they need” and for fomenting connections between markets.

The important thing is that the products made by local campesinos make it outside their communities, and even outside the country, he said.

“It has been 20 years of continuous learning; we have also made mistakes,” he told IPS. “But what is important is that successful experiences have been incorporated in our public policies, and we will continue doing that with all of the lessons that are learned.”

In middle-income countries like Peru, IFAD continues to grant loans, but it especially provides technical assistance because, as Stubbs said, “macroeconomic stability will not by itself bring development.

“For the first time, I have the privilege to see that all of the governments, of whatever political stripe, have really understood that closing the inequality gap is in everyone’s interest,” she said.

Juan Moreno, programme manager for IFAD’s Latin America and Caribbean Division, informed IPS that the agency only has an allotment of 25 million dollars for working with Peru through 2015.

“We don’t have one billion dollars, like the World Bank,” Stubbs said. “Latin America doesn’t need IFAD’s money – it needs IFAD’s knowledge.”

To illustrate, she mentioned the case of Argentina, which two years ago launched a 150 million dollar project, of which IFAD only supplied seven million dollars. Most of the funds came from the government itself.

In the midst of regional economic growth based in large part on the extractive industries, Stubbs said governments and civil society should exercise more oversight of the activities of mining and other industries, to preserve water sources and land, which poor rural populations depend on for subsistence.

She said every country should undertake its own kind of development, depending on its ecosystem.

Nwanze, meanwhile, said governments should invest in infrastructure like roads to generate new opportunities for local development. He added that in rural areas, “when particularly women have access to economic empowerment, the community starts to change.”

He said it is difficult to say, in a few words, how to fight poverty. But he added that access to basic services is key to working with the most disadvantaged communities from a human rights perspective.

“For me, human rights are basically in everything, it is not only a question of people having freedom of speech,” the Nigerian expert said before heading to his next destination.

Women in Nepal's remote village development communities do both housework and farm labour. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
JHIRUBAS, Nepal, Jul 4 2013 (IPS)

Over 40 percent of Nepal is covered in thick forest, but most of it has been degraded. Rural communities that have traditionally relied on the forests for survival now live in abject poverty, struggling to secure the food necessary for survival. Most men have migrated to the Gulf in search of employment.

A Leasehold Forestry and Livestock Programme (LFLP) launched by the government in 2005, with assistance from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), is achieving the twin goals of restoring wasted forest land and providing rural communities with enough income to purchase food during the nine months of the year when farming on the rocky mountain slopes of Nepal bears no fruits.

And slowly but surely, men are trickling back into their communities to help women with the backbreaking work of harvesting broom grass for sale, fodder and fuel.

Leasehold Forestry Brings a New Lease on Life from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

(END)

Rural Indonesian women selling jackfruit crackers. Photo: Abigail Lee/IPS

By Kanis Dursin
SUBANG, Indonesia, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

When 45-year-old Kaswati joined an income-generating project in her village in Indonesia’s West Java province in 1999, all she hoped to do was supplement her family’s income at a time of erratic harvests.

But today, 14 years later, her fertiliser and jackfruit cracker businesses have far exceeded those modest plans: they have become the main sources of income for her family of four and are helping to offset the expenses of maintaining their half-hectare rice field.

Water scarcity over the past few years has forced the farming family to “draw water from faraway irrigation canals”, meaning they spend more on pumping water, and on labour, Kaswati told IPS in Pogon, a village in the Subang district of West Java province, a two-hour drive from the capital, Jakarta.

The shortage has also “limited planting opportunities to two each year instead of three, as suggested by the government,” the farmer said, adding that her compost and cracker businesses have “come to (my family’s) rescue.”

“I’ve got an outstanding order to supply 348 tonnes of compost fertiliser this year and since I cannot meet the demand all by myself, I have asked my friends to make compost and sell it to me.”

She buys the compost at an average price of 51 dollars per tonne and sells it for 77 dollars per tonne, thus making a tidy profit while also supporting members of her community.

Kaswati is just one of the many women in Pogon to benefit from an income-generating project that was partially funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in order to help this Southeast Asian archipelago nation tackle the impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector.

Under the programme, which ran from 1999 to 2006, each woman was given a bank loan, worth about 40 dollars, as capital to start a business. The loan carried an interest rate of one percent and had to be repaid in 12-month installments.

When the programme ended in 2006, Kaswati and her fellow women villagers ventured into the compost business. Along the way, however, all but Kaswati abandoned the fertiliser trade. In 2008, Kaswati began a jackfruit cracker business, together with 24 other women in the village.

“The programme taught us how to start and manage a business in order to make a profit. We also learned about bookkeeping,” Kaswati recalled.

Climate change hits hard

Indonesia’s agricultural sector provides 87 percent of raw materials for small and medium-scale industries, contributes 14.72 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), and employs 33.32 percent of the total labour force.

Due to its geographical situation, Indonesia is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change including increased droughts and floods, changes in planting patterns, and increased pests, all of which threaten the country’s food security, according to Hari Priyono, secretary-general of Indonesia’s ministry of agriculture.

“Indonesia has been focusing on increasing rice production from 54.1 million tonnes in 2004 to 69.05 million tonnes in 2012,” Priyono said in his keynote remarks at an early June media workshop on climate change, which was part of an IFAD series for journalists.

“Agricultural development faces increasingly serious challenges due to climate change as well as conversion of fertile agricultural land for industrial estates and settlements,” he continued.

Prolonged drought and an extended rainy season have struck Indonesia more frequently in recent years, leaving farmers in a quandary over when to start planting crops and causing worries about the country’s food security.

In early June, for example, climate experts here predicted that Indonesia would experience rain throughout 2013, even during the dry season that usually runs from May to September or early October.

Given the changes in climate patterns, the ministry of agriculture introduced in 2012 a ‘cropping calendar’ that advises farmers on the best planting periods, seed variety, fertilisers and pesticides. It has launched new rice varieties that can withstand prolonged drought or flooding, or high salinity due to seawater intrusion.

One expert, however, says these innovations may prove insufficient to deal with the impacts of climate change.

“The problem is we don’t have the technology yet that can predict the exact beginning of each dry or wet season or the severity of floods and drought,” said Zulkifli Zaini, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) liaison scientist for Indonesia.

To make things worse, almost 100,000 hectares of fertile farmland on the island of Java are being converted into industrial estates and settlements every year.

“Rice fields on Java island yield twice the amount produced by rice fields outside Java and this means that the government has to create 200,000 hectares of rice fields outside Java just to cover the loss (of these converted lands),” Zaini said.

According to IFAD, around 70 percent of Indonesia’s 245 million people live in rural areas, where agriculture is the main source of income. A least 16.6 percent of the country’s rural people are poor.

“Millions of small farmers, farm workers and fishers are materially and financially unable to tap into the opportunities offered by years of economic growth,” IFAD’s country manager for Indonesia, Ronald Hartman, said.

But Kaswati’s experience seems to show that diversifying means of income can help rural villagers continue to make a decent living from agriculture.

Kaswati’s businesses have only grown bigger. Early this year, she took out a bank loan worth 4,100 dollars to finance her compost business, which has given her financial freedom and power.

“I no longer ask my husband for money to buy food and other household needs, and more importantly my first daughter now studies at a university,” said Kaswati, who until early 1999 had worked as a farm labourer.

Another woman participant who declined to give her name told IPS that her jackfruit cracker business has allowed her to send her children to school.

“My first child finished elementary school only, my second only finished junior high school, while the third only senior high school – but the fourth is now studying at a local university,” she said.

“Now my husband involves me in decision-making, particularly when it comes to my children’s studies.”