Agricultural Technologies for Enhanced Climate Resilience and Smallholder Farmer Livelihoods
As we navigate an era marked by climate change, resource scarcity, and economic uncertainties, smallholder farmers find themselves at the frontline of these challenges. They are the backbone of our agricultural systems, yet often the most vulnerable. Empowering them with the right tools and technologies is critical for building resilience and ensuring sustainable development.
In response, FAO, IFAD, and IsDB have collaborated to identify and promote affordable, climate-smart agricultural solutions tailored to the needs of smallholders. This joint effort addresses both productivity and resilience, ensuring that the technologies are adaptable across diverse farming contexts.
In response to the pressing need for innovative solutions to address food security challenges, a tripartite cooperation agreement between FAO’s Regional Office for the Near East North Africa, the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) initiated a comprehensive “Mapping exercise of affordable and transferrable food security-related technologies.”
This project targets ten countries where smallholder farmers face different challenges, including Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Morocco, Nigeria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey
The mapping effort focuses on six technology thematic areas critical to improving food security: 1) postharvest, reducing food loss and waste; 2) water management and saving technologies; 3) sustainable pest control and crop management; 4) e-commerce and market access, 5) fintech; and 6) green energy for farmers. By identifying, analysing and cataloguing affordable, reliable and environmentally friendly
technologies, the project aims to build a knowledge base, a technology assessment framework and a decision support tool to guide evidence-based investment in promising agricultural technologies within unique contexts. This collaborative effort seeks to accelerate the development and transfer of environmentally friendly technologies, ultimately promoting low-carbon development, environmental sustainability and increased productivity, while mitigating risks to food security and public health.
INTERVENTIONS
- Mapping Affordable and Transferrable Climate-Smart Technologies for Smallholder Farmers
The report “Mapping Affordable and Transferrable Climate-Smart Technologies for Smallholder Farmers” identifies key technologies that can be effectively adopted by smallholder farmers to improve their resilience and productivity. This includes innovations like drought-tolerant seeds, solar-powered irrigation systems, and digital precision farming tools.
The mapping effort focused on six critical technology areas: postharvest technologies to reduce food loss and waste, water management and saving technologies, sustainable pest control and crop management, e-commerce and market access, fintech, and green energy for farmers.
These six thematic areas are central to improving productivity, reducing environmental impact, and enhancing market access for smallholder farmers, who play a crucial role in feeding their communities.
The report focused on ten countries where smallholder farmers face diverse challenges: Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, Tajikistan, Tunisia, and Türkiye. By targeting these countries, we have addressed a broad spectrum of agricultural contexts and needs, enhancing the potential impact of our findings.
- Green and Climate Smart Technology Assessment Tool (GC-STAT)
What is GC-STAT?
GC-STAT is an Excel-based tool designed to streamline the assessment of agricultural technologies for smallholder farmers, enabling a systematic evaluation across various thematic areas with color coded sheets for easy navigation and automated analysis. This tool facilitates in-depth evaluations across the ten target countries and provides a template for extending similar analyses to new countries, recognizing the diverse perspectives of users in assessing and weighing criteria according to their preferences and priorities.
Why GC-STAT?
The tool has been developed to guide users through the methodology, ensuring consistency and ease of use. This tool incorporates the multilevel assessment process and allows for adaptable weighting of evaluation criteria, reflecting the diverse needs and priorities of different stakeholders. The evolution of the tool was in recognition of the context-specific nature for deployment of different technologies as well the unique set of preferences for different smallholder farmers within these different contexts. Therefore, the tool provides the flexibility of adapting weights for different criteria to reflect user preferences and allows for adjustment of ratings for different criteria based on user-experience.
At the core of our approach is a recognition that there is no single best technology under each of these thematic areas. Rather, there are trade-offs associated with adopting different technological solutions. Based on an understanding of these trade-offs, the tool offers quantitative evidence to support the choice of appropriate technologies based on the farmer’s needs, priorities and constraints.
Adopting a standardized methodology for assessments offers several advantages compared to independent, ad hoc evaluations. This approach ensures consistency, enabling meaningful comparisons across different assessments and streamlining future evaluations. It embraces an Agile methodology, facilitating continuous refinement and improvement with each new assessment based on prior experiences, reducing the likelihood of operational errors through automation and formula validation. Essentially, the tool serves as a dynamic methodology in action, solidifying the assessment process. Designed with Excel, it allows for easy updates and customizations, further enhancing its utility.
Facts & figures
- Approximately 69 million people in the NENA region faced food insecurity in 2020, a number that has been exacerbated by conflicts, economic instability, and climate change (FAO, 2021)
- 80% of the NENA region’s agricultural production comes from small-scale family farmers. (FAO)
- The Near East and North Africa fresh water resources are among the lowest in the world: eight countries feature in the world’s top 10 highest levels of water stress and water resources have decreased by 2/3 during the last 40 years and are expected to fall over 50 percent by 2050 (FAO)
- 11% of food is lost between farm and retail and up to 145 kg/capita of food waste at the consumer and hospitality level in the region. (FAO)
- The NENA region is among the most affected by climate change in the world, with temperature increases of 1.7-3 °C expected in most areas and up to 5 °C in some inland areas. (FAO)
FAO impact
- 349 climate smart technologies mapped across six thematic areas in 10 countries
- 228 technologies were screened and evaluated through the multilevel assessment, which
- resulted in the identification of a total of 120 highly viable technologies.
- 10 technology directories created
- 10 user-friendly technology assessment tools developed
