ROME, Italy, 30 May 2012 – The United Nations has marked World Environment Day every year since 1972, but the celebration of environmental action takes on new urgency this year.

That’s because World Environment Day, 5 June, comes just weeks before the UN Summit on Sustainable Development. Better known as Rio+20, the meeting will be held 20-22 June in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20 years after the first global environmental summit took place there.

Not surprisingly, the themes of Rio+20 and World Environment Day overlap. Both reflect heightened concern about the world’s ability to sustain a growing population with finite natural resources. Both focus on the need to manage those resources in a way that simultaneously protects the planet and improves the lives of the world’s poorest households.

For IFAD and its partners, this means supporting environmentally sustainable agricultural development to benefit small-scale farmers. Smallholders comprise 70 per cent of the households living in extreme poverty worldwide, and they produce much of the food consumed in developing countries. For them, one of the most urgent natural-resource challenges on the horizon is land degradation.

Living with the land
In the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte, about 2,000 km north of the site where Rio+20 will unfold, an IFAD-supported initiative – the Dom Helder Camara project – has helped farmers rise to that challenge.

Although Brazil is the world’s sixth largest economy, its north-eastern region has the highest concentration of rural poverty in Latin America. With 22 million people, it is also the most densely populated semi-arid region in the world. Water shortages and droughts are chronic problems, along with land erosion and poor soil resulting from traditional slash-and-burn farming methods.

But over the past decade, through the Dom Helder project, people in the area have learned how to profit from the land through simple bush rehabilitation techniques. Today, they are living with the land, earning a living while conserving the environment. 

“We got together in the community,” recalls Irupuan Angelo Gurgel Gomes, a farmer in the project’s target area. “We were all concerned about the health of our families. There was a lot of malnutrition and a lot of pollution, and we knew we couldn’t survive here.”

Productive and profitable
Irupuan’s small rural community turned to the Dom Helder project for support. The project works with 15,000 families, promoting agro-ecology as an alternative to slash-and-burn agriculture.
Working with the project advisors, smallholders in Irupuan’s community agreed to try out bush management techniques in order to rehabilitate the local ecosystem. They created ground cover, removed invasive species and replanted native trees. In turn, their farms became more productive and profitable.

“Here we are dealing with customs that go from father to son over generations,” says local project supervisor Rosane Fernandes de Sousa Gurgel, referring to the old farming techniques. Yet when farmers see that agro-ecology enables them to provide for their families while preserving the environment, she adds, “it becomes much easier” for them to embrace the new approach.

A high stake
With population growth concentrated in the developing world for the foreseeable future, small-scale farmers like Irupuan and his neighbours have a high stake in protecting the natural resources that their livelihoods depend upon. World Environment Day and Rio+20 are reminders that living with the land is the only way to ensure there will be enough food to feed the population of the future.

“We need the land and the land needs us,” says Irupuan. “For us to live well, we need to give the land its comfort.”

For World Environment Day, watch the IFAD video, ‘Brazil: Living with the land,’ about a project that enables farmers to rehabilitate the natural ecosystem while improving their livelihoods.