Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is once again a pleasure for our delegation to attend this thirty-fifth session of the Governing Council of IFAD. We all know that the two greatest challenges our world faces today remain to be food security and climate change. Both challenges require urgent, innovative and holistic responses. There is a true need for us all to cooperate and collaborate in a more coordinated manner, and to learn the lessons of past failures and challenges we all have faced, and are still facing in our quest to support the development of more viable production systems for small holders.

Investing in farmers means providing them with the needed policy and legal environment, assisting them with the means to build a viable and resilient economy, helping to connect them to markets, making sure they have secure land tenure, making sure they have fair contracts, making sure they have access to information, and improving the reach of services for health, education and extension. It also means making sure they have access to credit and that local businesses are supported so that they can buy their products or provide inputs and services.

For over 2 decades, the Lao Government has actively engaged itself in promoting strong small holders’ groups with the creation of different forms and levels of farmers’ organizations, which we believe would serve as key institutions to realize national policies to engage in a more viable and environmentally friendly agricultural systems’ practice. In the past few years, a growing number of farmers’ groups have already embarked in more sustainable farming systems such as organic rice, vegetables and coffee production of different scale; small-scale and intensive livestock farming linked with biogas production; use of non-tillage land-based conservation technology in rice, maize and pasture production in the uplands; small hydro-energy and solar energy use for village level production.

We are hopeful that with the new 9th Replenishment, future action programs of IFAD will continue to seek for new solutions for more sustainable agriculture development, and provide concrete support programs for assisting in the development of the small holders’ economies, especially in helping to achieve long-term food security, agriculture production, and resilience to climate change throughout the globe, while at the same time ensuring that small holders are also supported with the needed policies and means in their difficult transition from a subsistence to a more diversified market based economy.

Finally, our delegation would like to especially thank IFAD for its continued active role in the Lao PDR, in helping us to eradicate poverty. IFAD is a good model in assisting our country to forge stronger intra- and inter-sectoral, and also cross-border type of technical and economic cooperation. This has had an immediate positive impact in reducing poverty along the border areas-home-to most of the poor in the region. We also thank IFAD for its flexibility in continuing to support and provide assistance in whatever way that would help our country to accelerate in its quest to eradicate poverty by 2020. My best wishes to the Chair, co-chair and all delegates.

Thank you.

22 February 2012