Tackling rural poverty, together

Lennart Båge

President, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

“All the smallholder farmers are needed, and can produce much more than now.”

How much of a budget increase is IFAD asking donors for in the current replenishment round?

Together with the co-financing we hope to attract, we're aiming for a $6 billion programme of investments for the three-year period, from 2010 through 2012. What we need to look at together with the international community immediately is, how we can adapt existing IFAD programmes and those just coming on stream in 2008 and 2009 to the unfolding crisis situation of today, and to support emergency measures to produce more food in the next planting season. For that, it's too early to give a figure, but we have been mapping the situation, and we can say the situation is grave. Many developing country farmers are not planting more, but less, due to higher input prices, and, if we don't persist in our efforts, we might actually undermine the potential for local smallholders to become part of the solution.

Are donors sufficiently aware of the need to do something coordinated and quickly?

There’s a new opportunity for the world community to invest in a productive, strong agricultural system in developing countries. Many of them have a comparative advantage that isn't being exploited, and we must start tapping that, not just for those countries’ sakes, but for the world’s. With the right interventions, support, policies and priorities, the opportunity before us is to have a tremendous boost to development. All the smallholder farmers are needed, and can produce much more than now.

What should the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development be doing?

We have to gear up our advocacy and our approaches to capture this moment of opportunity for the global village, and see that the supply response, the production agenda and the climate change agenda are not three separate things but very much parts of the same challenge. This is a new situation: farmers weren't perceived to be needed in the past, when there was overproduction of food in the world, but they are sorely needed now.

Now is the time to come together, for all us working in agriculture and development, to pool our resources, not only for advocacy but also to build up a profound base of knowledge and fresh approaches. We need a policy dialogue about how agriculture and rural development and those of us that work in it can come together and offer solutions, new approaches, be a partner to the rest of the development community in re-engaging in a key sector that's been neglected for the last 30 years.

How should donors deal with new actors in rural development and agriculture, like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa?

I very much welcome AGRA and the interest by the Gates Foundation and other foundations to be engaging in agricultural development, and their call for a much more ambitious funding of agricultural development in Africa. It's important to be open to new approaches and bring in new resources, building, of course, on the experiences that we have.

We have worked with both spectacular success and spectacular failure with agriculture in Africa over the last 30-40 years, so there's a wealth of experience of what works and what doesn't work. That's the hard-earned basis we stand on, but we should always be open to new ideas and work together in a coordinated fashion. I welcome and strongly endorse the recognition of the need for a step-change in the funding of agriculture in Africa and it will be up to Member States and donors to decide the modalities and mechanism for how this is to be done. IFAD stands ready to do much more. We are prepared to host any mechanism established to channel additional resources for agriculture in Africa.

From your position as leader of IFAD, what do you say to donor rivalry?

We've had an increase, in some areas, an explosion, a proliferation of institutions. That's why we have the call for harmonisation, for coordination and coherence. That's why the Global Donor Platform is so important because it's a way of bringing us together. We all have different mandates, roles and funding, but we all work for the same goal, which is to develop agriculture in developing countries.

The spirit and the practice has to be peer learning, working together, finding common approaches and solutions, and seeing to it that, though we are many, we avoid a fragmented approach where we trip each other up. Instead, through the Global Donor Platform and the Paris agenda and, of course, the CAADP framework in Africa, we must find an approach that adds value and in which the synergies can be teased out. That doesn't come easily but that's what I'm committed to.

Interview conducted and edited by Timothy Nater.
Photos: Timothy Nater

More on the IFAD Action Plan

More on the IFAD Strategic Framework 2007-2010

IFAD and the World Food Programme will take part in the High-Level Conference on World Food Security and the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy from June 3-5, 2008, in Rome, to be hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

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