Mr. Chairperson,

Governors,

Distinguished Delegates.

It is my pleasure to deliver a short statement on behalf of the Nepalese delegation. I take this opportunity to congratulate you Mr. President on your election and also extend my sincere thanks to IFAD for the timely preparation of all relevant documents and for the excellent preparation of this session in general.

As agriculture still remains the mainstay of livelihood and sources of income for the majority of people in the world, forging alliances for its sustainability is a need of the time.  More importantly, smallholder farmers are the key actors and have a crucial role to play in feeding the ever growing population of the world. However, they are facing huge challenges from unprecedented events like climate change, financial crisis, incidences of new disease and pests, low access to technology and markets which makes smallholder farmers more vulnerable and less competitive in the global market.

IFAD’s working strategy is more focused on small and poor farmers though the smallholder farmers are still largely left out by policy design and implementation. Therefore, it is high time that we developed a new initiative to create a  supportive policy environment which would increase public and private investment on smallholder sustainable agriculture with new forms of partnerships for the development of new investment modalities.
The Government of Nepal has a three decade long partnership with IFAD in agriculture and rural development. Leasehold forestry and a livestock programme that links smallholder farmers with value chains of high value commodities, as well as improved seeds and breeds for farmers programmes, are the ongoing operations in Nepal.Our experiences on leasehold forestry and the livestock programme could be successful models for small and marginalized farmers in the improvement of their livelihood and income generation. 

Nepal believes that there is an urgent need to have a strong partnership between public and private sectors in order to increase investment substantially and scale up smallholder production to address the emerging challenges like food insecurity and climate change. This is how we can link smallholder farmers to high value export markets and enhance competitiveness thereby building resilience of smallholder farmers.

Finally Mr. Chair, I would like to extend our sincere thanks to IFAD for its support in agriculture and rural development in Nepal. Nepal wishes to have a strong IFAD country office in order to deepen our development cooperation.

Thank You