At the request of the Adaptation Committee of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the International Trade Center (ITC), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) participated in the workshop on “Fostering engagement of the agri-food sector in resilience to climate change, 29-31 October, Geneva, Switzerland. FAO organized two sessions entitled “risk-informed agricultural development and enterprises” – on 29 October and “Trade and Climate Change Policies - Stimulating Efficient, Inclusive and Sustainable Agricultural Value Chains” on 31 October.

Speaking at the workshop opening ceremony, Ms Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Director of FAO Geneva underscored that “agriculture is highly exposed and vulnerable to natural disasters. The increasing frequency and intensity of climate-induced extreme events cause severe damages and losses to agricultural production.  Recent FAO studies showed that agriculture absorbs 26 percent of economic damage and loss caused by climate-induced hazards/disasters in developing countries”.  She added, “However, agriculture is also part of the solution to addressing climate variability and extremes”. For example, field evidence shows that specific agricultural technologies aimed at disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation do perform, on average, 2.5 times better than usual practices under hazard conditions.  It is therefore crucial to enhance access and upscale those technologies, especially at the local level.

Ms Rodrigues-Birkett shared some thoughts with the participants on how to address climate change, hunger and malnutrition issues and how to make the agri-food sector more resilient to climate change and disasters.   This includes providing support to countries to implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – translate the concepts into concrete inventions in sustainable agriculture and scale up the adoption and promotion of climate-smart agriculture practices including disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation measures.

Ms Rodirgues-Birkett informed that hunger is on the rise and it is significantly worse in countries where agriculture systems are highly sensitive to rainfall, temperature and severe drought, and where the livelihood of a high proportion of the population depends on agriculture. She pointed out that beside conflicts, climate variability and extremes are a key force behind the recent rise in global hunger. 

As eighty (80) percent of the poor live in rural areas and are mainly engaged in agriculture, we need to target our support to address their needs and end hunger and malnutrition for inclusive, sustainable and resilient agriculture development. Such efforts have been seen in FAO’s 2017 flagship publication entitled “the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA)”, in which FAO analyzed the significance of the food systems development as an enabler of more inclusive rural transformation.  The analysis is based on the premise that the surge in domestic demand for fresh produced and processed foods provide small and medium agri-food companies/enterprises with the possibility to contribute more inclusive rural transformations at a number of levels.

Ms Rodrigues-Birkett added that agricultural trade plays an important role in supporting climate change adaptation; hence, we need to seize and leverage these opportunities.  In the short term, trade can help to address production shortfalls due to extreme weather events. It can support adaptation efforts by stabilizing markets and reallocating food from surplus to deficit regions. In the long term, it can help to adjust agricultural production in an efficient manner across countries. This will not only enhance the resilience of the private sector, but of the international food system as a whole. Trade can also play an important role in incentivizing climate change mitigation, which reduces the need for further adaptation down the line. She emphasized that there is no fundamental conflict between climate change polices and multilateral trade rules. The challenge would be to strengthen the mutually supportive role of the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework and the WTO Agreements.

Finally, Ms Rodrigues highlighted the importance of partnerships in order to achieve the overarching Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To do so, it calls for partnerships with everyone – governments, private sectors including smallholder producers, civil society and academia for the effective solutions to the very complex issues of our time including building resilience in the agri-food sector.