Call for action and awards ceremony

Excellencies,
Colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,

First, let me thank Bioversity International, in particular Director General Emile Frison, for organizing this exciting and dynamic week of awareness-raising events.

I should like to say how delighted I am to stand alongside my Rome-based colleagues here and to add IFAD’s voice – the voice of poor rural people around the world – to this important call for action.

I was once described, by a Japanese journalist who was interviewing me at the time, as being the “loudest shouter for the poor”. You might think that I was offended by the remark. But not at all – I firmly believe that it’s my job to shout for the poor. And it’s something I try to practice every day.

Why? Because too often, the voices of those who most need to be heard go unnoticed. This is the case for more than one billion people who daily have to suffer the effects of abject poverty and desperate hunger. Three-quarters of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas of developing countries and despite mass urbanization, the majority of youth live in rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa, south-eastern and south-central Asia and Oceania. It’s on their behalf that I am here today. It’s on their behalf that I am issuing IFAD’s call for action. It’s on their behalf that I’m shouting for a better future for them and their children.

The context of our collective calls for action today is biodiversity. At IFAD, we recognize agricultural biodiversity as fundamental to maintaining and improving food security:

• Agricultural biodiversity can improve the nutritional value of our harvests.
• It can help those who live off the land earn more for what they produce.
• And it can help the world respond better to the environmental challenges that we face – so that the crops we grow are capable of surviving the droughts and floods and other effects of our changing climate.

In other words, agricultural biodiversity is fundamental in helping poor rural people to overcome poverty and hunger – which is IFAD’s mandate.

Conserving biodiversity is essential for life itself. We share this planet with as many as 13 million different living species, including plants, animals and bacteria.

We can help conserve and enhance biodiversity if we draw on the generations of knowledge accumulated by farming communities and indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples in particular, living in marginal rural areas – hills, mountains, forests, dry-lands, deserts, small islands and the Arctic – have a uniquely rich knowledge and understanding of ecosystem management.

These people maintain within their lands and territories 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity.  They are in fact the managers and custodians of our natural resources.  They are proven experts at adapting to new environmental challenges.  Their ancestral memory is a storehouse full of thousands of different species capable of responding to new climatic conditions. 

That is why my call for action today is for global recognition of the critical role played by poor rural communities and indigenous peoples in conserving biodiversity. I call on the world to invest in these people, so that they can continue to perform this critical role –for their own survival as well as for the wider well-being of all of society.

That is IFAD’s call for action. And I am happy to have been able to shout out loudly, once again, for the poor rural people whom IFAD is mandated to serve.

Thank you.

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22 May 2010 , Rome, Italy