During your official mission to Paraguay next week, you will be attending a meeting on small-scale agriculture in MERCOSUR. What do you expect from this meeting?

Listen to President Båge

I look very much forward to participate in the MERCOSUR REAF meeting, bringing together family farmers, small holder farmers, the interests of the groups that very often have a difficult situation and sometimes are even forgotten in the development process. It’s important to listen to their concerns. It’s important to listen to their proposals and solutions. It’s important to have a dialogue, especially in the region where there is actually overall very strong economic growth and development. How to make that inclusive of all the people and not least the very often forgotten rural poor. They have a role to play. They have a contribution to make and they can be part of a very strong economic growth, but we have to design policies and interventions in such a way that this becomes a reality and that is what I hope will get some good ideas and good answers from this conference.

What will IFAD be bringing to the meeting?

Listen to President Båge

We bring 30 years of experience. We bring experience from the MERCOSUR region but also other parts of Latin America where we have worked for decades now with specifically the purpose of making small holder family farming more productive, so that it contributes to poverty reduction and it’s more included in the national economic framework. We have worked with not only small holder farmers, we’ve worked with indigenous populations. We’ve worked with all these groups that are very often, if not special measures are taken, they’re very often neglected, they’re outside not included in the development process and they become areas of lack of investment and lack of development and remain very, very poor and marginalised. And what we can bring, hopefully, are some good ideas, some good experience, so that there is learning, so there’s inspiration from successes, so we can see methods that have been used. It’s about giving security to the land that you use. It’s about giving financial resources very often through microfinance. It’s about giving institution building, how can you organise around your economic interest, but also, to give a voice in the debate on national development priorities. So there are a number of very concrete experiences that we can hopefully bring to the table.

Does this meeting reflect an increasing concern about rural poverty in the region?

Listen to President Båge

I also come with very great expectations because I see a greater interest from many of the governments in the region to much more proactively go out, reach out to the populations, the groups, the communities outside of the mainstream development. So I think it’s a very important point in time where the overall economic growth gives opportunities, gives resources to focus on making societies more equitable, including everyone in the development process and so it’s a moment of opportunity that we, together, must seize.