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Food systems must be made resilient to climate change, says FAO chief
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Wednesday, 15 February, 2017, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Dubai
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The failure to act now to make food systems more resilient to climate change will seriously compromise food production in many regions and could doom to failure international efforts to end hunger and extreme poverty by 2030. This was stated by José Graziano da Silva, director general, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), at a roundtable on climate change during the World Government Summit (WGS) in Dubai.
”Agriculture holds the key to solving two of the greatest problems now facing humanity: eradicating poverty and hunger, and contributing to maintaining the stable climatic conditions in which civilisation can thrive,” he added.
The FAO chief stressed, in particular, the need to support smallholder farmers in the developing world adapt to climate change.
”The vast majority of the extremely poor and hungry depend on agriculture for their livelihoods,” Graziano da Silva said.
He added, “They are the most vulnerable to the impacts of global warming and an unstable climate.”
Graziano da Silva stated that innovative approaches existed that could help them improve yields and build their resilience.
These include green manuring, greater use of nitrogen-fixing cover crops, improving sustainable soil management, agroforestry techniques and integrating animal production into cropping systems.
”But farmers face major barriers, such as the lack of access to credit and markets, lack of knowledge and information, insecurity about land tenure and high transaction costs of moving away from existing practices,” Graziano da Silva noted.
He pointed to the fact that 70 countries did not have established meteorological services as an example. FAO is working with the World Meteorological Organisation to develop low-cost, farmer-friendly services to address this need.
”To withstand the vagaries of a harsher, less predictable climate, small farmers will also need better access to other sorts of technologies and to markets, information and finance - as well as better land tenure and improved agriculture infrastructure,” added Graziano da Silva.
”Ultimately, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he argued.
”Adaptation to climate change makes economic sense. The benefits of adaptation are much bigger than the costs,” the FAO chief said, while underlining the importance of national efforts like the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) strategy on food diversification, security and climate change.
Coping with the water crunch
”One critical front for action is water management,” according to Graziano da Silva.
“Millions of the world’s small-scale farmers are already wrestling with water scarcity, which will likely intensify as a result of climate change,” he said.
This is why at the last UN climate change conference, FAO and its partners launched a global framework on water scarcity in agriculture that aims to support developing countries in bringing stronger policies and programmes for the sustainable use of water in agriculture online.
Participating in the panel discussion titled Climate in Action: Feeding the Future with Graziano da Silva were Tshering Tobgay (Bhutan’s prime minister), Thani Al Zeyoudi (the UAE’s minister of climate change and environment) and Patricia Espinosa, [executive secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)].
WGS is a platform that brings together leaders and policy makers to showcase future trends in government services, leadership, innovation and economic policies.
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