Building Smallholder Farmer Resilience through Climate Adaptation

2 November 2021, Washington, D.C. - The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in partnership with both the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Alliance to End Hunger held a high-level briefing analyzing the importance of advancing climate adaptation for smallholder farmers with expert panelists. 

The session, moderated by Asma Lateef, the Policy and Advocacy Lead (Agriculture) at SDG2 Advocacy Hub, explored how investments for and by smallholder farmers can lead to transformations in agri-food systems, diets, and environmental sustainability.  

“For too long, the critical role, and also the extreme vulnerabilities of small-scale producers in building resilient food systems has been undervalued and obscured,” explained Eric Mitchell, Executive Director for the Alliance to End Hunger, during the session’s welcoming remarks. “Now more than ever, they need the world's attention and the appropriate investments in policy commitments from countries.”  

Jo Puri, Associate Vice-President of the Strategy and Knowledge Department of IFAD, acknowledged the benefits of innovative financing measures, such as blockchain, and the need for insurance acquisition for rural, low-income producers. “Investing in tier two institutions, microfinance institutions, is really important, because they know their consumers best and if we can work through them after creating the enabling environment,” said Puri. Puri also addressed the gaps between funding for climate mitigation and climate adaptation, stating “for every dollar that is spent on adaptation there's USD 18 on mitigation.” She attributed to the difficulty in measuring the relative ease in measuring mitigation, expanding that ”the greenhouse gas emissions that you want to verify, as well as validate it is far easier to do, rather than to count a unit of resilience.”  

Elisa DiStefano, an Environmental and Natural Resource Management and adaptation specialist in FAO’s CBIT-AFOLU and SCALA sectors, shared FAO’s current efforts on climate mitigation and adaptation while acknowledging challenges to these efforts. “Despite so many technical solutions, there is no one single response - this assessment limitation requires a policy enabling environment that's why we are so committed to support countries integrating agricultural land use priorities in mapping NBC [nature-based solutions],” said DiStefano.  

Patrick Smith, an Agriculture Development Officer and Climate Lead at the Center for Agriculture-Led Growth in the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security at USAID, discussed USAID’s revised Global Food Security Strategy. Smith stated the strategy places an emphasis on equity and inclusion, as well as technological advancement, acknowledging “women and girls are disproportionately impacted by climate change and receive less information” according to USAID. He shared that USAID is “excited to scale up our efforts to reduce food loss and waste - a challenge which threatens both food security and poverty, but also, is a leading global source of greenhouse gas emissions and equity and inclusion is at the heart of our global food security strategy.”  

Jennifer Billings, the Global Agriculture Development Leader at Corteva Agri-Science discussed how private sector innovation can both help farmers and how farmers themselves can assist in broader climate adaptation. Billings shared that “smallholder farmers face some of the greatest risks when it comes to the changing climate,” and stressed the importance of “creating solutions for farmers so that they can adapt and then also looking at farmers as part of the mitigation solution.” 

The session provided an overview of the need for increased investments to help smallholder farmers, especially vulnerable and marginalized groups, adapt to the increased impacts of climate change to build resilient agri-food systems. Through a variety of approaches not limited to microfinancing, blockchains, innovation, nature-based solutions, inclusive policies and enabling environments, supporting smallholder farmers to adapt to climate change is crucial to building resilient agri-food systems.   

Useful links 

Recording of webinar: https://bit.ly/112Recording  
Speaker bios: https://bit.ly/SpeakerBios112  
Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/FAONorthAmerica/status/1455520814153887744  

FAO Small family farmers produce a third of the world’s food https://bit.ly/2ZJc5SN 
FAO Climate Knowledge Hub: https://www.fao.org/climate-change/knowledge-hub/en/  
FAO Training guide: Gender in adaptation planning for the agriculture sectors https://bit.ly/31kWg5s  
FAO Gender transformative approaches for food security, improved nutrition and sustainable agriculture – A compendium of fifteen good practices https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/cb1331en  
IFAD Viewpoint: Smallholders can feed the world https://bit.ly/3CHatHI  
IFAD's ASAP+ program, visit: https://www.ifad.org/en/asap-enhanced 
IFAD’s work on gender https://bit.ly/3CL7HBx  
USAID Climate Strategy https://www.usaid.gov/climate/strategy  
USAID President Biden’s Prepare Climate Initiative https://bit.ly/3nQrAAO  
State Dept project with Pri in Indonesia and Tanzania: https://winrock.org/project/pier/