Farmers' Day at COP22
Marrakech saw IFAD and CGIAR's research programme on Climate Change, Agriculture
and Food Security (CCAFS) host a side
event on the “Economic advantage of agriculture in Intended Nationally Determined
Contributions (INDCs)” to complement the release of a new IFAD funded
publication “The
Economic Advantage”.
Laurie Goering from the Thomson-Reuters Foundation asked how
do you show donors, who have a lot of people knocking on their doors for
funding, that what you are doing is actually going to work and is it worthwhile?
We are seeing lots of new research which says putting money
into agriculture is worth it and IFAD commissioned The Economic Advantage
report to prove just that. It found that farmers could earn a return of between
US$1.40 and $2.60 for each dollar invested over a 20-year period by applying
climate change adaptation practices.
Sonja Vermeulen from CCAFS explained that agriculture has
taken ages to get on the
negotiating table.
"Almost every country now includes agriculture in their
NDCs,” Vermeulen said. “This gives us a whole new platform for action.”
"So far the information is patchy and this report is not
the definitive answer," according to Vermeulen. "But it does contain
a lot of guiding information which will help development agencies and
governments if they implement it into their own work."
Linking agriculture and climate change to a monetary value
is extremely difficult. For example, El Niño hit the wine industry in South
America, but in New Zealand it actually benefitted it.
“Agriculture is the life of the Ugandan people, hence its
prioritisation,” said Chebet Maikut, Commissioner of the Climate Change Department
of the Ugandan ministry of Water and Environment. He explained that in Uganda in
the next five years US$476 million will be spent on climate smart agriculture.
From a climate change perspective, agriculture has a number
of co-benefits in contributing to emission reductions. The Ugandan government found
that the cost of not addressing climate change impacts would be in the region
of US$406 million by 2025, and if still no action was taken that number would
rise exponentially into the billions over the coming years.
“As such 30 per cent of our budget in the next 15 years will
be mobilised to fight this,” concluded Maikut.
Alongside farm-level actions are a further set of
non-technical mitigation and adaptation interventions, which are just as
important but more difficult to quantify and value, says the report. These
include capacity building, institutional strengthening, access to value chains
and research. These climate resilient practices also have a demonstrated effect
on food security both locally and globally.
IFAD's Ilaria Firmian discussed IFAD’s Adaptation for
Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP) which
currently has over 40 projects. She talked about how IFAD embeds indicators
into the project monitoring and evaluation system. Depending on the type of
interve
ntion, they can track certain outcomes more specifically. For instance, they may monitor outcomes of farm income.
“We can identify real opportunities with real payback, which
a few years ago couldn’t have happened!” continued Firmian.
“It is very tricky to put a value on certain adaptation
techniques, such as investing in a women’s groups or cooperatives. However, this
study shows that these investments are still very important though," added
Firmian.
IFAD is committed to working with farmer’s organisations - when
cooperatives become successful, a whole country can be transformed.
At the farm level, positive economic returns can be
demonstrated for several practices that build adaptive capacity and reduce
emissions intensity such as innovative rice cropping in Vietnam, or switching
from growing coffee to cocoa in Nicaragua.
Laurie Goring closed the session saying, “I think we have to
keep in mind when discussing this, the cost of not investing. The numbers are so much higher; it has to contribute
to the case for making this happen.”