State Secretary Bleker,
Distinguished Guests,
Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure to be here with you today.  The Netherlands is to be congratulated for hosting an event that highlights the premise that three of the most important issues of our time – Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change – are interlinked.

So often, international discussions treat these three issues separately. Yet we know that poor rural people are dealing with these interlinked challenges in their everyday lives.

Communities grapple with all of these issues at the same time.  A mother of four with a baby on her back in The Gambia is typically managing her crop, her household, weather predictions, her land and livestock, and preparing her family’s dinner all at once.  For her, changing weather and rainfall patterns and decreasing surface and groundwater availability caused by climate change and land degradation are not IPCC statistics.  They are an everyday reality.  She is not immune from an increasingly volatile global economy facing growing scarcity of natural resources.

But my central message to you today is one of opportunity.  I believe that collectively we have many of the tools and the techniques to launch a new integrated agricultural revolution.  We need what professor Swaminathan calls an “Evergreen revolution.”  This must redefine the relationship we have between agriculture and the environment.  Climate change now provides the imperative for us to do this and deliver a new green agro-ecological revolution.

So let me suggest three ways in which a new “evergreen revolution” can be good for food security and help us tackle climate change.

First, it must include smallholder farmers – and not as victims but as viable businesspeople.

Our evergreen revolution must be inclusive, with the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers at its heart.  They manage vast areas of land -   farming 80 per cent of the farmland in Africa and Asia.  They use and manage forests and watersheds, and rely directly on these weather-dependent natural resources for their livelihoods. This also makes them natural partners.

Worldwide, they are struggling to earn a living in some of the most remote, marginalized and inhospitable locations on our planet, where land that was marginally productive to begin with is now becoming increasingly degraded. So our respective mandates to alleviate poverty compel us to partner with them.

Farming – at whatever scale – is a business, and it is time for us to acknowledge smallholder farmers as entrepreneurs. Now, even the most astute entrepreneur needs access to markets, financing and incentives to invest in their business. So addressing land tenure is clearly a first order of business.

At the same time, the map of international trade in agriculture is evolving, with some global value chains now offering important opportunities for smallholder suppliers – and for other rural people working in agro-processing or related industries.

More agricultural markets now value “balanced” or low-input production methods, such as organic crops, where smallholders can have a comparative advantage. We are also starting to see some consumer brands compete based on their environmental footprint. Smallholders stand to benefit from the premiums that “green” or “eco-friendly” value chains can offer, if we can help them overcome costly barriers such as certification.

When cocoa farmers in Sao Tome and Principe lost their traditional buyers, IFAD linked them with KAOKA, a French organic chocolate maker.  KAOKA now buys all of the cocoa they can produce and these farmers have not only retained their livelihoods but also increased their incomes above the poverty line.

We know the private sector has an appetite to work with smallholders if they are sufficiently organized, and if their product is right, so let’s prioritise the business demands of the smallholder community.

Second, for our revolution to be evergreen, it must promote sustainable agriculture.

Land, water and other natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce, and climate change is multiplying risks for poor people.  So we need to see agricultural production in the context of local and global ecosystems and landscapes. 

There is now a toolkit of approaches at our disposal.  This includes sustainable land management, conservation agriculture, agroforestry and payment for environmental services – such as carbon sequestration, watershed conservation and biodiversity conservation.  There is no magic bullet and all approaches need to be adapted to local circumstances – but these are well known and ready for scaling up.

The wonderful thing about these approaches is that through a more balanced use of inputs, and agroecological approaches, they can halt or reverse degradation of land, improve water management and increase yields, and incomes. 

The benefits to communities must begin with poverty reduction and include greater climate resilience, food security and valuing long term health of their natural resource asset base and the goods and services they provide. 

Sustainable agriculture approaches can also have the added benefit of reducing the impact of weather-related disasters, reducing CO2 emissions and conserving biodiversity.

In Viet Nam, IFAD is working with poor upland smallholders farming on steep hillsides where erosion is a big problem for them and for the watershed. Preparations are underway for their next planting cycle to blend their traditional maize with ground cover legumes.  When the maize is harvested the ground cover remains, holding the soil to reduce erosion, and also provides additional fodder for livestock. The high quality fodder makes up for the small initial yield decrease, and the system is zero or minimal-till. The long term pay off for the farmer is substantial.

In ‘development-speak’ we call these ‘multiple-win’ investments. On the ground they are often just common sense approaches that require some investment and capacity-building support to take shape.

Third, our evergreen revolution must be knowledge-intensive and community-led.

We must use local knowledge and new technologies.  These are not mutually exclusive.  The first Green Revolution bypassed many smallholders for different reasons. It overlooked the value of the seed varieties held by them, and often discarded their traditional crop and ecosystem management practices in a “mechanization or nothing” approach.

A large scale mechanized approach won’t provide the long-run solution for a vast number of smallholders and pastoralists, and may in any case leave them vulnerable to global energy price changes and weaken their resilience and adaptive capacity.  We cannot just hope that the benefits of industrial scale interventions will trickle down to smallholders. So let’s make the two meet – let’s bring together the best of both worlds and develop integrated approaches based on smallholder priorities.

A “we know best” and top down mentality does not work.  Local and traditional knowledge can be very effective.  Grass-roots organizations, women and youth – must be involved as thinkers and decision makers in planning and managing climate and market risks.  For example, IFAD and the Asian Development Bank worked with the Philippine government and indigenous peoples on the island of Luzon to bring their traditional resource management system back into use.  Secure land tenure was offered to give them the incentive to implement their community-based system throughout a major watershed area.

Now over 50,000 households are practicing the resource management system over a land area of over 70,000 hectares.  The success is such that the local dam operator has begun contracting community groups to maintain the forests and reduce silting to protect the hydroelectric dams – paying communities for providing this environmental service. 

Their physical environment has improved and their incomes and ability to cope with shocks have increased.  Communities downstream also benefit from improved water quality.

In the face of the long term climate challenges, we know that today’s knowledge and technologies won’t be enough. We must also remain on the lookout for ways to test, adapt and promote new technologies. 

For instance, IFAD is working with the Government of Jordan and the multinational corporation DuPont to pilot the use of a cutting-edge irrigation pipe that filters out contaminants, allowing salt water and brackish water to be used for crops. It is early days, so our optimism is cautious, but the potential to increase yields for farmers in water-stressed areas is considerable.

Climate change is also challenging us to generate more knowledge, and data about weather and natural resource availability and quality, and make it user-friendly and accessible for smallholder farmers.  Smallholder farmers are also the guardians of natural resources and ecosystems’ health, which on the one hand are impacted by climate change and on the other, if not well managed can contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

This means we need greater investment in weather stations, and in systems to monitor ecosystem well-being such as river flow and water quality, and predictable and accessible information systems that communities, the private sector and governments can all use. 

In Sierra Leone, with the support of the Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund, we are rehabilitating meteorological stations that fell into disrepair during the war there, and equipping new ones.  Weather measurement and observation equipment in 15 locations, together with staff training, will provide data to inform farmers of weather events ahead of time, to reduce crop losses and increase their resilience to our changing climate.  We are working with community radio stations to design formats for providing the information and engaging agricultural programmes for their rural audiences.

Improved data and information also strengthens the foundation for implementing payments for environmental services that benefit smallholder communities and also national and global communities. And it will allow more of the innovative work on weather index and disaster-risk insurance that we have begun in China and Ethiopia.

It will also help to better value and monitor the state of our biodiversity and natural resource base, the importance of which was highlighted at the recent Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of Parties in Nagoya.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In conclusion, let me reemphasize my main point, which is that we have many of the tools, approaches and now an even stronger imperative to launch a new and “evergreen” agricultural revolution.  This revolution must include support to smallholder farmers, rapidly scale up successful sustainable agriculture approaches to reduce risks from climate change and volatile markets, and empower local communities to blend traditional knowledge with new cutting edge technologies.

The agriculture sector is uniquely endowed with many investment opportunities that can reduce poverty, increase food security and respond to climate change.  Delays in the international climate negotiations need not hold us back from mobilizing finance from all sources to get on with these investments.  With so much at stake we cannot afford to think only in boxes.

We need to remember the Gambian smallholder farmer and mother, and make certain that our complex discussions translate into straightforward solutions for her daily challenges.

I thank you for your attention.

The Hague, The Netherlands, 1 November 2010