Family farming must make a radical transformation to face climate change, new technologies and changes in food demand
August 26, 2019, Dominican Republic - FAO's Regional Representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Julio Berdegué, made a keynote speech today during the regional launch of the Family Farming Decade 2019-2028, in the Dominican Republic.
"Our countries today face three powerful waves of change, which are already having effects: climate change, new demands that disrupt what we understand by food, and vertiginous technological change," said Berdegué.
"These are three omnipresent engines of change, operating simultaneously and affecting rural societies with a magnitude as we have not seen in the 12 thousand years since our ancestors invented agriculture."
During his keynote speech, Berdegué analyzed the impact of these three phenomena, and the ways in which countries can react to them within the framework of the Action Plan of the Family Farming Decade 2019-2028.
“The Decade must be used as a political, social and even cultural space, so that family farming makes its contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals through its own transformation, in the face of these great waves of change,” Berdegué explained.
Effects of 2 degrees more temperature in the region
According to Berdegué, 40% of the total area of Latin America and the Caribbean will have reached, or exceeded, the threshold of 2 degrees centigrade of warming in the next 11 years, and by 2050 the entire region will be under a new climate regime:
"Millions of family farmers will see their s livelihoods and productive systems affected, in some cases radically so," he said.
“In a world with more than two degrees warming, which is just around the corner, it will simply not be possible to practice agriculture as we do today. If we don't act now, family farming will face a situation that I can only describe as catastrophic,", Berdegué explained, making a fervent call to governments to have their national plans include climate transition strategies for family farming.
A new diet and an explosive increase in food demand
In the coming decades the world will see an explosive increase in the global demand for food. “Latin America and the Caribbean produces only 13% of the world's food, but provides 45% of global net food exports, well above any other region in the world, more than Europe, more than the United States,” Berdegué explained.
In order for family farming to participate prominently in the regional response to the significant expansion of global food demand, Berdegué said that countries must make investments, create programs and policies that allow - for example - to increase the share of family farming in those items and products in which they can have comparative advantages, such as fishing, quality coffees and cocoa, fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy products and certain types of meat.
Another change that family agriculture must face is the transformation of the region's food system, which - according to Berdegué - "has failed in its most elementary objective, which is to feed the population healthily." The FAO Representative explained that 294 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean, (47% of the population), suffer one or more forms of malnutrition, 151 million people are overweight and 105 million are obese.
"Family farming must take of the banner of healthy eating, until it is recognized as the main champion in the task of recovering our food systems for the general welfare of the population," Berdegué explained.
Agriculture 4.0
Microelectronics, data science, artificial intelligence, remote sensing and distributed registration technologies; Those are just some of the technologies that are dramatically altering agriculture, food systems and the life of rural societies.
According to the FAO Representative, new technologies have the potential to facilitate the sustainability and resilience of agriculture and food systems, but stressed the need to boost innovation in family farming, so that it is not left behind.
“What policies and programs do we need so that the final result of this radical technological transformation is not a new inequality gap, between those few farmers who have the means, and the vast majority that lag behind, remaining in the era of the hoe and plow?
Berdegué cited a study by the McKinsey Global Institute, which notes that 58% of jobs in Latin American agriculture have a high potential to be automated, and called on all countries to propose national plans for “that the millions of rural women who work in agribusiness, have a future when their jobs are threatened by automation. ”