Climate-resilient smallholders hold key to food security

©FAO/AndryRakotoHarivony 9 June 2021, Rome – Grassroots support for the world’s 1.5 billion smallholder farmers – who are highly vulnerable to climate threats – to help them diversify their crops, products and practices is increasing food security while conserving forests, storing carbon and creating resilient landscapes.

This was the message arising from a virtual “independent dialogue” held today by the Forest and Farm Facility and the Vietnamese National Farmers Union under the UN Food Systems Summit.

“The reality of climate change is hitting forest and farm smallholders, communities and indigenous peoples hard,” said Forest and Farm Facility manager, David Kaimowitz. “Increasingly they don’t know what best to plant, or when to plant it – threatening their food security.”

But these smallholders also hold the key to the world’s food security. For example, smallholder farms in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa operate on only 12 percent of the world’s agricultural land but produce more than 70 percent of the food calories consumed by the people living in those regions. Building the resilience of smallholder producers in the face of climate change is imperative.

One secret lies in helping smallholders diversify, and the best way to do this is through their own grassroots organizations. Case studies of some of the organizations supported by the Forest and Farm Facility, presented at today’s dialogue showed the role that forest and farm producer organizations are already playing in building the climate resilience of their members through practices such as crop diversification, agroforestry, soil and water conservation and value adding.

In northern Ghana, for example, changing rainfall patterns are causing crop yields to dwindle, threatening livelihoods. In response, a cooperative union called KANBAOCU is assisting its members put in place new practices featuring agroforestry, organic composting and clever water harvesting and fallowing. They are introducing drought-resistant crop varieties and helping smallholders add value to their products through local processing.

In Viet Nam, farmers face climate-change-related threats such as landslides, drought, floods, hailstorms and unseasonable cold spells. A cooperative of cinnamon farmers, who, combined, originally farmed fewer than 100 hectares, is building resilience by diversifying cinnamon products and adding other crops. Today, the cooperative is farming 1 000 hectares of organic cinnamon and processing it on-site. It is generating USD 2 million annually, and farmer incomes have grown by up to 30 percent.

A Madagascan company, Manarivo, buys crude peanut oil from four peanut-farmer cooperatives. The company is working with these cooperatives through a national women’s platform to diversify their crops. Manarivo is also helping producers use organic fertilizers, buy improved seeds, establish on-farm seed reserves, install erosion-control terraces, and grow indigenous fruit trees – all measures that will build resilience, boost incomes and increase food security.

The dialogue, which also featured a case study from Nepal, showed that grassroots forest and farm organizations are spearheading the diversification of their members and thereby helping increase climate resilience. Such organizations are themselves diverse, and they inherently strive for socially equitable outcomes through innovative and environmentally friendly approaches.

“The best thing we can do as an international community to increase climate resilience and food security is to support these grassroots organizations,” said Duncan Macqueen, principal researcher and leader on forests at the International Institute for Environment and Development. “They are already finding brilliant nature-based solutions to climate change at a local scale that, collectively, will ultimately generate globally crucial benefits.”



The Forest and Farm Facility, which is a partnership between FAO, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and AgriCord, provides direct financial support and technical assistance to strengthen forest and farm producer organizations representing smallholders, rural women’s groups, local communities and indigenous peoples’ institutions. The Facility also supports a knowledge partnership with IIED to co-produce learning that local organizations can apply to become more climate-resilient. The Forest and Farm Facility is funded by the European Union (EU) through the FAO-EU FLEGT programme, IKEA, Finland, Germany, Norway through the Flexible Multi-Partner Mechanism of FAO, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States of America.


 

last updated:  Wednesday, June 9, 2021