Representatives of Farmers’ and Rural Producers’ organizations,
Partners and colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen.

It is my great pleasure to welcome all of you to IFAD’s headquarters for the third Farmers Forum.

I would like to extend a special welcome to the women leaders represented here today, many of whom have already taken part in Saturday’s leadership workshop. I am delighted to know that this year, women represent 40% of the participants in the Farmers Forum. This is major progress since the first Farmers Forum in 2006 where women were only 9%. IFAD is strongly committed to strengthening women’s leadership and decision making in agriculture. Indeed, the second commitment I made for IFAD under the MDG3 Torch Initiative says exactly that!

Before I say a few words about the Forum, let me say that IFAD joins the international community in honouring those who have lost their lives and suffered from the disaster that occurred on Tuesday, 12 January, in Port au Prince, Haiti. Just on this Friday – one month after the disaster occurred, the Rome-based Agencies announced a task force that will deliver coordinated assistance to Haiti. IFAD is at the forefront of helping Haiti to ensure that the next planting season is as productive as possible.

More broadly and globally, to better support farmers, particularly the poor smallholders that are highly vulnerable to disaster impacts, IFAD is exploring opportunities to develop a Rapid Response Framework for Rehabilitation and Reconstruction to enhance its own operational capacity to assist in such extreme circumstances anywhere in the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I now turn to smallholders and the Farmer’s Forum.

Since the Farmers’ Forum last convened two years ago, the world has experienced multiple crises, exacerbated by the global recession and climate change.

These crises not only revealed decades of neglect of the agricultural sector, but also alerted the world to the importance of developing agriculture as a source of  economic growth and political stability. It also generated a commitment to long-term sustainable food security.

If the Millennium Development Goals are to be achieved by 2015, assuming we will achieve them, investment in rural development and serious attention on the role of poor rural women and men in agricultural growth, and particularly the role that smallholders play across the world, must be central to government policies and their development agendas.

Over decades, IFAD has been a loud advocate for the agriculture sector and particularly of the role of smallholders: farmers, fishers, and pastoralists.

In the past year, we have been able to highlight to the global business leaders and governments, and most recently at the Davos World Economic Forum, where I represented the voices of the smallholders, that the five hunderd million smallholders worldwide support about one third of the worlds’ population and produce 80 per cent of the food consumed in the developing world.

Farming, irrespective of size or scale, is a business. Every farmer would like to feed his/her family and would like to produce a surplus so as to generate an income from  trade and cash. This is the basis for the  commercialization of farming, the transformation from subsistence to small agro-business entrepreneurs.

Ladies and Gentlemen, if we know that 85% of all farmland worldwide is less than 2 ha in size (in the developing world it is as low as ¼ ha); if we know that 500 million smallholders produce 80% of the food we consume in the developing world; that they live in rural areas and make up the majority of the rural poor; and if we know that over 60% of the rural population is made of youths with over 50% being young women and girls. If we know all this, I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, who will feed the world in 2020, in 2030 or in 2050 by which time we would have added another 3 billion people, 50%, to our population?

WE MUST INVEST IN THE RURAL YOUTH OF TODAY, THE FARMERS OF TOMORROW. National governments, development partners and the private sector must join hands in building their capacities, in providing them the technologies they need, the rural infrastructures, the financial institutions, the market information and linkages that are essential ingredients for this transformation.

IFAD is committed to being part of this transformation. This is about agriculture and rural development. But it also means capacity development and employment opportunities; it means reversing the rural to urban migration; it means new business partnerships – a change in mindset; a paradigm shift in development, for investing in rural youth is the foundation for building viable economies; it is the link between agricultural productivity and food security, between political stability and national security, the precursors of global peace. This is what IFAD stands for.

So how is IFAD positioned in this new paradigm?

Last year, IFAD’s Governing Council agreed to a 67 per cent increase in the Funds’ resources for the next three years, which means that IFAD will be delivering an annual programme of work of around $1 billion a year with the aim of reaching 60 million rural poor – many of them members of your organizations.  

Let me outline what we are already doing and planning to do.

Through our projects and programs, we will finance innovative investments that improve access and tenure rights to land and water, better access to financial services, farm inputs and equipment, infrastructures and to markets.

Within the country-led development strategies, and in close consultation with the rural producers, we will continue to carefully target these investments on the very poor and particularly on women farmers.

We are working hand in hand with your organizations to gain ground for the rural women, who are increasingly the farmers of the developing world. They perform the majority of the agricultural work and produce over 60 per cent of food crops. IFAD’s projects target women smallholders, who often have weaker rights to land ownership, finance, and other production inputs than their male counterparts around the world. 

But, financial resources alone are not enough. Our investments will not be effective if the right policy frameworks are not in place. For this, we are also working closely with your organizations to urge governments to implement supportive agricultural and rural development policies.

IFAD’s projects emphasize that increasing smallholder agricultural production requires full harnessing of technological innovation and research. These are drivers of change, and require sustained investment both at the regional and national levels to enhance farmers’ production. One outstanding example of this process is the Green Revolution in Asia.

With these instruments in place, I am convinced that rural poverty and food insecurity can be overcome. And, as China in the eighties and Viet Nam more recently have demonstrated, this can be done rapidly.

Viet Nam transformed itself from a food-deficit country to the world’s second-largest rice exporter by developing its smallholder farming sector. As a result, poverty fell from 58 per cent in 1979 to below 15 per cent today.

I am also absolutely convinced that Africa can feed itself, just as Viet Nam and China have done.  Africa has the human and natural resources it needs to achieve agricultural growth and food self-sufficiency. What is needed is  committed local leadership. And this is what you called for on Friday night last week. And this is what I have been calling to African leaders. This is what they signed to in Maputo in 2003. Yet less than 10 countries today allocate 10% of their national budgets to agriculture. We need commitment and leadership at the highest level of government just as we need it at the lowest level of the community. And I will repeat my call: No nation, no people achieved economic development unless it comes from within and agriculture is the foundation for it; after all, development is an intrinsic and endogenous process. Yes, it can be helped from outside but a palm tree can not make use of the energy from the sunlight unless it is firmly rooted in its own soil!!

And this leadership starts with your organizations. It also starts with the youth! Stronger organizations of smallholder farmers, fishers and pastoralists are essential if we are to seize the opportunities that arise from today’s challenges.

Equally important is to strengthen your ability to connect with the private sector to expand these partnerships to link the demand and the markets with smallholders’ production.

We would like to see the Forum foster opportunities for you to network and enhance your leadership to achieve these goals.

Since IFAD’s Farmers’ Forum began to meet in 2005, we have already witnessed important results. Cooperation among agricultural producers, fishers and the private sector improves access to markets and knowledge; boosts  farmers bargaining power throughout the value chain, from production to marketing; produces employment and income generating opportunities in the rural areas; and strengthens the voice of rural producers to influence policy and development programs.

We at IFAD engage with the farmers’ organizations in many ways. Particularly important is that IFAD consults farmers when we prepare our Country Strategic and Opportunities Programmes (COSOPs) and when we design projects. We also give large grants to the farmers’ umbrella organizations to support them and their networks at the regional or sub-regional levels.

IFAD’s partnerships with the farmers’ organizations have improved IFAD’s own understanding of rural poverty. It has abled us to ensure a greater focus on the smaller and poorer farmers  and we have benefited from the local and indigenous knowledge and experience, which – in turn –resulted in better projects and more sustainable benefits to smallholders.

I welcome the progress we have been able to achieve. But we need to build on our experience and expand our partnerships.

Before I close, I would like to outline four areas where we can do better:

First: There are still a number of countries were IFAD’s cooperation with farmers organizations is limited. We need to reach out further and deeper and develop these connections.    

Second: We must work together to strengthen the linkages of your organizations with the grassroots levels and invest in the village-level advocacy to have an impact at the ground level and to improve the inclusive basis of our partnerships.

Third: We need to develop the advocacy role of the farmers’ organizations in the national policy debate. For instance, while climate change presents a huge challenge to farmers, only few policy-makers recognise the role that smallholders can play in mitigating its impact. Working together we can sensitize the national authorities to determine how best to reward the smallholders for the environmental services that they can provide to reduce carbon emissions.

Fourth: We need to engage rural youth in agricultuture; help them organise themselves into young farmers associations, provide opportunities for capacity building and training; institutional linkages and market informations. They are the food producers of tomorrow.

In conclusion, Ladies and gentlemen,

With agriculture in the world spotlight as a result of the food security crisis we experienced in 2007 and 2008, this third Farmers’ Forum is a timely event for us to determine how we can work together with governments to increase smallholders’ productivity and incomes.

It is my hope that, at the conclusion of the third Farmers’ Forum, we will have generated innovative ideas on how to use our partnerships to expand market opportunities for smallholders, developed programmes for rural youth engagement in agriculture, creating incentives for smallholders to make the transition from subsistence farming to profitable agro-businesses and wealth creation, investing in their livelihoods and contributing to food security, social empowerment and economic growth.

Thank you.

Rome, 15 February 2010