We welcome the G20 focus on food and nutrition security and, in particular, on price volatility. We also value the opportunity you have given us to contribute, alongside other International Organizations.

I would like to assure you that IFAD will continue to actively take part in the work of the G20 in particular in setting up AMIS and serving as one of the four participation institutions in the Joint Risk Management Platform.

We are committed to helping to make these initiatives a reality, showing to the world that concerted action by all concerned can make a difference in the effort to achieve food and nutrition security.

We also welcome the comprehensive focus of the Development Working Group on both setting the foundations for robust growth and making it sustainable and widely shared.

One lesson of the recent crises is that building resilience in people's livelihoods, in their economic activities, and the markets in which they operate, is paramount for growth to be robust as well as sustainable. As the G20 work on risk management has clearly shown, working towards greater resilience, particularly for the millions of smallholder farmers, should increasingly guide our common efforts, and we commend the G20 recognition of this important dimension of development.

When it comes to food and nutrition security, as well as development, growth and resilience must mean first and foremost supporting the 500 million smallholder and family farmers in the world to become more productive, manage the many risks they face, and have the opportunity to be integrated into better functioning markets for agricultural inputs and outputs.

These are the producers who  feed up to 80 per cent of the population in many countries in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere. They are the custodians of a large part of our natural environment. How they operate and manage the challenges they face will undoubtedly make a huge difference for our common future.

Empowering poor rural people, smallholder farmers, is what IFAD does, and we have seen the enormous difference it makes in the livelihoods of the rural poort. In this regard, I would like to acknowledge paragraph 10 of the Draft Communique of the G20 Ministerial Meeting on Development, which calls for support in making the ongoing consultations on the Ninth Replenishment of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) a success, so that we can scale up our work and help realize the enormous potential of smallholders not only to improve their own livelihoods but also their potential to contribute to their countries food and nutrition security.

Washington – Friday, 23 September 2011