IFAD President in Australia: Underscores hope for further gains in the region

Rome and Canberra, 4 April 2011 — The recent dramatic progress in reducing rural poverty in East Asia can be replicated in other areas of Asia and throughout the world if the right investments are made in agriculture, according to the head of the United Nations’ leading rural development agency.

Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), will be discussing this and related issues with aid officials and academics in Canberra this week (4 and 5 April). His comments are based on findings from IFAD’s recently published Rural Poverty Report.

Nwanze will address the Crawford Fund food security conference in Brisbane, ’A Food Secure World: Challenging Choices for our North’. The conference, on 6 April, will consider the extent of food security challenges in the tropics in the next 30 years, as well as future food price scenarios and the key issues for farmers, researchers and policy makers across agriculture, the environment and education.

The report found that:

• Improvements over the past 10 years have lifted more than 350 million rural people out of extreme poverty, mostly in China and South East Asia. Rural areas are home to 70 per cent of the developing world’s 1.4 billion extremely poor people.
• Rural poverty rates have dropped only slightly in the last decade in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. South Asia now has more poor rural people – about 500 million – than any region or sub-region in the world.
• Profound changes in agricultural markets are opening new opportunities for the developing world’s smallholder farmers to raise their productivity. Such gains, IFAD says, will be necessary to ensure enough food for an increasingly urbanized global population, estimated to reach at least 9 billion by 2050.
• Yet food prices are increasingly volatile, and further efforts to reduce rural poverty will be complicated by the uncertainties and effects of climate change and a range of natural resource constraints.

“The recent food price shocks were a wake-up call,” said Nwanze. “We now understand that higher and more uncertain food prices could become a fact of life, given global population growth and the movement of more people into cities.”

IFAD also calls for more support to advance the capabilities of poor rural people – both women and men. They need upgraded educational and training opportunities relevant in the rural context.

“We should also focus on young people,” Nwanze said. “They will have to deal with the impact of today’s transformations. And they are the ones who most need to see rural areas as places where they can fulfil their aspirations. I expect Australian farmers would wish for the same vision for their own children.”

A number of IFAD-supported projects in the Asia-Pacific region are designed to help people address these challenges and boost their productivity. In Kiribati, for example, an IFAD grant helped create the Centre of Excellence for Atoll Agricultural Research and Development, which helps farmers increase crop production, improve marketing opportunities and raise incomes, taking into account the challenges of climate change and rising sea levels.

IFAD is also assisting a public-private partnership initiative that links groups of farmers from 22 Pacific islands to markets for their organic and fair-trade products. It has also established organic standards and built farmers’ capacity to meet organic and fair-trade standards.

According to Nwanze, smallholder agriculture can offer the developing world’s rural people a route out of poverty if it is productive, commercially oriented and well linked to modern markets. He added, “It is time to look at poor smallholder farmers and rural entrepreneurs not as charity cases, but as people whose innovation, dynamism and hard work will bring prosperity to their communities and greater food security to the world in the decades ahead.”

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Note to Editors:
IFAD is an international financial institution and a United Nations specialized agency. Along with sister agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), IFAD is headquartered in Rome, Italy. Since 1978, it has invested over US$12 billion in grants and low-interest loans to developing countries, empowering more than 360 million people to break out of poverty.

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Press release No.: IFAD/24/2011
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$12.5 billion in grants and low-interest loans to developing countries, empowering more than 370 million people to break out of poverty. IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized UN agency based in Rome – the United Nation's food and agricultural hub. It is a unique partnership of 166 members from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), other developing countries and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).