Food security, research and scaling up of projects on discussion agenda

Rome, 19 November - Kanayo F. Nwanze, the President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) will next week undertake his first visit to India since being elected head of the UN’s rural poverty agency. 

Nwanze, who will arrive in India on 22 November, will meet with ministers and government officials in New Delhi to discuss ongoing rural development projects supported by IFAD in India, which is the agency’s biggest country programme.

Talks will also cover the impact of the 2008 food price spikes and the economic crisis on poor rural people and on the importance of investment in smallholder agriculture to reduce poverty and hunger Nwanze will travel to Uttarakhand on 25 November, to visit an IFAD-funded project to help vulnerable groups in the rugged remote highlands of the Himalayas improve their livelihoods and develop alternative incomes. 

IFAD’s work in India is concentrated on people who are both geographically and culturally marginalised.

IFAD-funded programmes in Tribal Areas (Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and the North-East) have shown positive linkages between development, food security, and broader security issues.

“Food security is an integral part of national and global security. Achieving food security in developing countries means putting poor rural people and smallholder farmers at the heart of all development efforts” said Nwanze, on the eve of his visit.

IFAD’s most recent programme in India followed a request from the state and national government to intervene in Maharashtra, which accounts for over a fifth of all farmer suicides in India. 

“We need to help small farmers minimize risk, diversify their income sources, adopt multiple cropping, to protect them from unsustainable production costs or over borrowing” said IFAD Country Programme Manager for India, Mattia Prayer Galetti.

The $40.1 million IFAD-funded programme in Maharashtra will boost productivity through in situ water conservation, organic farming practices and low external input sustainable agriculture. Diversification into fruit, vegetable and livestock products will have a positive impact on nutrition. 

Nwanze will visit the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) on 28 November to call on Professor M S Swaminathan.

The last leg of the India trip will be, in some ways, a return home for Dr Nwanze, who worked in India for more than a decade, as an agricultural biologist, at ICRISAT in Hyderabad. He will be keynote speaker at ICRISAT’s annual conference on 30 November-1 December.

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Notes to Editors

Over 30 years, with a total lending of $636 million for a total of 23 projects India has been IFAD’s largest country programme.  Tribal people and women have been major focuses of IFAD’s work. Micro-finance, grassroots institution development and livelihoods have been prominent vehicles for pursuing rural poverty reduction efforts.

A number of IFAD’s initiatives, particularly in the areas of microfinance and women’s empowerment, have been adopted by the government and implemented on a larger scale. The most recent is the successful IFAD-funded North Eastern Region Community Resources Management Project for Upland Areas, in Assam, Meghalaya and Manipur, which is now being extended by the Indian government to cover the entire northeast region with assistance from IFAD and the World Bank.

Press release No.: IFAD/57/09

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The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) works with poor rural people to enable them to grow and sell more food, increase their incomes and determine the direction of their own lives. Since 1978, IFAD has invested over US$11 billion in grants and low-interest loans to developing countries, empowering some 350 million people to break out of poverty. IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized UN agency based in Rome – the UN’s food and agricultural hub. It is a unique partnership of 165 members from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), other developing countries and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).