Solution Exchange Forum on Agribusiness, Renewable Energy and Food Security

Your Excellencies,
Esteemed Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

First, let me thank my colleagues at UNIDO and FAO for organising this important Forum. South-South cooperation is an invaluable complement to North-South cooperation.

Countries at similar levels of development, that share similar philosophies of development, are particularly well placed to help each other. And cooperative ventures have enormous benefits for emerging economies and developing economies alike.

By maximizing South-South cooperation, we will be better placed to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

The title of today’s forum is prescient – it recognises that we should not, indeed we must not, discuss development issues in isolation. Food security and agribusiness go hand-in-hand. And, as anyone who is following climate change discussions in Durban will know, growth must not come at the expense of the environment.

The task is enormous. Nearly one billion men, women and children go to bed hungry every night. Most live in the rural areas of developing countries.

At a time when the world’s population is growing, and the availability of new arable land is shrinking, ensuring food and nutrition security is our greatest development challenge, and one we must not fail.

This lack of food security takes on a special significance in the Southern Hemisphere. Around 95 per cent of the people considered food insecure or poor live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Of these, two-thirds live in Asia.

But this situation is not inevitable. This trend can be reversed. We have all witnessed remarkable progress in the villages, the provinces and the regions where we work.

And the experience of countries like Brazil, China, Ghana and Viet Nam shows what can be achieved on a larger scale, when there is the political will to give small farmers the means and incentives to increase production.

Over the course of the next two-and-a-half hours, we will hear evidence of practices that have worked and can be scaled up.  We will have a chance to share our experiences and learn from each other.

IFAD’s mission is to enable poor rural people to overcome poverty and hunger. The role of agribusiness in reducing rural poverty goes to the heart of our objectives.

Farming at any scale is a business. And businesses need clear linkages along the value chain, from production to processing, to marketing, and ultimately, to consumption.

There is a proven link between the development of local agribusiness sectors and the reduction of rural poverty.

Agribusinesses provide employment for poor rural people. For small-scale producers, they offer inputs, services, and links to markets. And by paying local taxes, agribusinesses contribute more widely to community development and rural economic growth. 

Most agribusiness companies in developing countries are small or medium-sized. All too often, they lack access to the finance, technology and business development services that would allow them to expand their outreach to small rural producers.

IFAD works in a number of ways to improve the linkages between small farmers and agribusinesses, such as processors or commodity buyers.

For example, the projects we support provide technical assistance for small farmers to increase their productivity and improve the quality of their produce so that they meet agribusiness market standards.

We also help farmers organize themselves into groups or associations to improve their interaction with the agribusiness sector. And we work with small farmers and private agribusiness companies to develop contract farming agreements.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let us take the focus of this Global South-South Development Expo to heart:  Solutions!  We all know about the problems and challenges of food security.  But talking about the problems of the world without also discussing solutions will only lead to paralysis.

As many of you know, I am a scientist by profession. As a scientist, I believe in evidence, but I also believe in experimentation. We must have knowledge; we must have evidence. But we must also be able to think outside the box if we are to make progress.

This applies to development as well as to science. The challenges of the 21st century demand new approaches.  We must use our knowledge to devise innovative solutions to the problems of the 21st century. We must be willing to encourage novelty, to pilot projects, and where there is evidence of success, to scale-up.

When I was in China this summer, I saw evidence of how existing renewable energy can be used creatively.

The South Gansu province suffers from frequent drought and limited resources.  Villagers in Zhang Cheng Pu showed me how they had made a solar dish from small pieces of mirror. I saw how they were able to use the energy to boil water. 

This simple technology is helping to save precious natural resources in South Gansu. And the beauty of it is that it can be transferred easily to Africa, and any part of the world where there is abundant sunlight.

More sophisticated technology is helping poor rural women and men transform animal waste into clean, renewable energy all year long.

From Eritrea to China, biogas digesters are generating energy from the methane produced by human and animal waste.

Poor people who were not on the power grid now have power for lighting, cooking, or even running generators. Women, who once had to spend valuable hours collecting firewood, now have more time.  They can generate income from the animals that produce milk, meat, wool and eggs, as well as the dung needed for the biogas digesters.

Children have light at night so they can study. Kitchens that were once filled with choking smoke now have clean air. And sanitation has been significantly improved.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Burning it produces fewer greenhouse gases than leaving it to emit to the atmosphere. And by having a reliable source of renewable energy, people burn less petrol and wood.

Eleven years ago, IFAD joined forces with the government of China to pioneer using this technology for poverty reduction. It has been so successful that today it is being scaled up in rural areas around the world.

Sometimes, being innovative involves looking at simple, existing technology in a new way. Let me tell you about the Pacific Island community of Lape in Tonga.

Villagers were cut off from markets because their only way of transporting goods to the harbour was to carry them. The villagers were able to solve this transportation problem by buying wheelbarrows.

A wheelbarrow may not sound as useful as a car, but it can get down steep paths that a car can’t drive down, it can go where there are no roads, it does not need fuel and it is easy to fix.

An investment in such simple technology as wheelbarrows may sound very low-tech to us here in Rome, but for these very remote villagers, it bought freedom and time. It reduced women’s drudgery, improved earnings and created employment, helping villagers transport goods to the harbour more quickly.

Sick people can also reach the harbour faster and more comfortably when they need to leave the island to get to a hospital.

It doesn’t always cost much, and it doesn’t always take revolutionary technology to change lives.

But it does take dedication, unswerving commitment and a willingness to work cooperatively with a variety of partners.

Partnerships are IFAD’s main mode of operation. We work with developing country governments, non-governmental organizations, research centres, other UN agencies, the private sector, and with poor rural people themselves.

Our community-driven model helps move people from subsistence to the marketplace. It is successful because it ensures that rural communities have a decisive role in influencing decisions that affect their livelihoods.

When people are invested in their own development, when they have helped to devise their own poverty reduction initiatives, they have a deeper commitment to success.

Partnership between the North and the South is a crucial factor in establishing food security for the future.

Governments, universities, NGOs, private foundations and the private sector in the North all have a role to play.

I hope that over the course of this Expo we will forge new alliances and strengthen existing ones. Meetings such as this play an important role in facilitating collaboration and laying the foundation for partnerships.

And I hope we will also take this opportunity to look at the synergies in what we do. This forum brings together agribusiness, renewable energy and food security under an overarching focus on South-South cooperation.

Superficially, these may all seem like separate strands, but as we have seen, they are all part of the same cloth. Poverty reduction is another related strand.

Eliminating poverty and hunger is a moral imperative. But let us never forget that agriculture and rural development is bigger than food security. It is a source of employment, a pathway to poverty reduction, and wealth creation.

Let us never forget that while we each have our areas of expertise, we are working together towards a bigger goal, a goal that encompasses ending hunger, eliminating poverty, protecting the environment, and inclusive economic growth. Our efforts will form the basis of peaceful societies and global security.

Thank you.

Rome, 7 December 2011