Tackling rural poverty, together

Lennart Båge

President, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

Smallholders are “a key factor” in food production, growth and climate change.

So the neglect could continue?

It’s absolutely vital to ensure medium- and long-term investment in a sustainable, climate-proofed agricultural sector in developing countries, focussing on smallholders. At IFAD, while our immediate job is to ensure that the next growing seasons yield more production, we will keep up our fight to strengthen whole smallholder-based agricultural systems, especially in Africa and parts of Asia.

There's an opportunity here: smallholder farmers number 80 million in Africa and about 400 million globally. Together with their families, that’s some 2 billion people, about one-third of humanity, most of them living on less than $2 a day. Until recently, they were seen as a poverty problem. In fact, smallholder farmers are a vital global asset, a key factor for increased food production, economic growth and development, and mitigating climate change. The 2 billion people in rural areas in the developing world can be tremendously more productive. They can be part of the supply response, feeding the world, and also very much a part of the climate change agenda, both in terms of adaptation and mitigation.

How so?

Much of the earth’s land mass is inhabited by these 2 billion smallholders and their families. Agriculture and the forestry industry account for almost half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. How smallholders manage natural resources, vegetation, forests and farming practices will either worsen climate change, or, as we're rapidly learning through conservation farming, will actually store greenhouse gases. The way smallholders manage our common resources, which are very often their private resources, concerns every one of us.

Several countries have grown rapidly partly because of success in the smallholder agricultural sector. This is not a utopian vision. You can build strong economic growth on the agricultural sector and thereby greatly reduce poverty. Vietnam, for example, has gone from being a very strongly food-deficit country to a major food exporter, mainly thanks to development of the smallholder farming sector.

Vietnam has sufficient rainfall and fertile soils. Africa is not as well-favoured, of course.

A lot of the increased agricultural production we've seen in Africa has come about through the expansion of food-growing areas. At the same time, productivity in African smallholding is lower than in most parts of the world. We also know that, in the farming community, the gap between the highest and lowest productivity is huge. So there is strong potential there. The evidence is there, like the cassava revolution in West Africa, for example, and many other enclaves of success, both in productivity and in market access.