Dare to dream - Territorial development, inequality and new green initiatives
By Josefina Stubbs
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Only by investing in youth, capacity building and new non-farm opportunities can we expect the next generation to overcome poverty. |
On a recent mission to Mexico in which we launched a wonderfully detailed and incisive report by the RIMISP – Latin American Center for Rural Development on inequality and territorial gaps across the region, I was talking with a Senator from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, Heladio Ramírez López, about our dreams, responsibilities – and yes even our deficiencies – when it comes to rural empowerment, social inclusion, targeting and policy dialogue.
“IFAD allows us to dream,” the senator told me.
I couldn’t agree with him more. But, while we need to dare to dream, we also need to dare to innovate, target and drive territorial development approaches that reach the poorest sectors of Latin America, and drive new policies and initiatives that will ensure continued, responsible and sustainable rural poverty reduction across the region well into the 21st century.
While we’ve taken important steps in reducing poverty in Latin America, surprising – and at times astounding – territorial gaps remain. To begin with, Latin America still has the highest inequality in the world. And within large middle-income countries like Brazil and Mexico, you’ll see socio-economic gaps that are as pronounced as those that exist between the richest and poorest countries in the world.
In Mexico for instance, nearly 60 per cent of the nation’s extreme poverty is concentrated in rural areas, according to the new “Poverty and Inequality 2011: Latin America Report,” and the rural illiteracy rate is 15.6 per cent, while it’s only 4.3 per cent in urban areas. Latin America’s poorest rural territories also have limited access to healthcare.
The report – made possible through funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the International Development Research Centre - Canada (IDRC) – highlights the causes of extreme inequality, territorial achievement gaps and lack of opportunities in Latin America’s rural sector, analysing socio-economic indicators in health, education, economic dynamism and employment, income and poverty, citizen security, and gender equality from 10 Latin American countries, including Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru.
The dream for dialogue
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Guiding principles of IFAD's ENRM policy. |
One of the first steps in “dreaming this impossible dream” is to look toward policy dialogue as a catalyst for change. In Latin America, IFAD is actively funding policy dialogue platforms to ensure farmers, politicians, intellectuals and business leaders are given the forums and tools to engage, debate and advance smart policies that will benefit poor rural people.
Looking at the data from Mexico, I see that despite strenuous efforts poverty and inequality in rural Mexico have increased. Just look at Mexico’s ten richest municipalities, where the average per capita earnings are around US$32,000. Head to the poorest municipalities, and you will see earnings of just US$603 per year.
One of the first steps in counteracting this phenomenon is to support policy dialogue platforms. The ‘Knowledge for Change’ Rural Dialogue Groups are bringing key stakeholders together to discuss rural development issues and push them to the top of national agendas. The Rural Dialogue Groups program is working in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Mexico, and is starting to yield results. One need only look at the pro-active dialogue we had recently in the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where leading academics and thinkers converged to launch the new publication and discuss new ways forward.
The dream for social inclusion
The lessons we are taking from the data and analysis of the Latin America Report are helping us to form a new generation of projects that seek to remedy the variegated territorial gaps we are seeing in the region. In the case of Mexico, IFAD’s executive board recently approved the US$47.5 million Rural Development Project in the Mixteca Region and the Mazahua Zone. One of the project’s central goals is to improve the quality of life in the target area by strengthening the social inclusion mechanisms for local rural development institutions. An investment in building the capacity of these institutions is not just an investment in the rural people living in this oft-overlooked part of Mexico – projections point to a US$6.30 increase in daily earnings for project participants – it is also an investment in the very social fabric that inter-threads every aspect of rural life in Mexico, working to promote lasting systems, capacities and mechanisms for long-term peace and sustainability.
One thing my 20-plus years in rural development has taught me is that there’s no silver bullet for poverty reduction. And projects need to be scoped, designed and targeted to meet the local context. In Colombia, we are scaling up our work with a new national project recently approved by IFAD’s Executive Board that will invest directly in local capacity building for businesses. The US$70 million “Trust and Opportunity Project” will reach some 160,000 families. “The project looks to improve food security, facilitate access to financial and community services, improve the competitiveness and incomes of small-share producers in the zone, and create mechanisms to include these very producers in the systems of government,” says our Country Program Manager for Colombia, Roberto Haudry.
Further south, the Inclusive Paraguay Project works to create public-private alliances that will facilitate access to specialized technical assistance and markets, create new jobs, and close territorial gaps. Interestingly enough, Paraguay’s economy grew by 14.5 per cent in 2010. Nevertheless, 1.3 million rural Paraguayans are considered poor, of which around 60 per cent are considered extremely poor. As we saw in Mexico, these territorial gaps become more pronounced in indigenous communities, which have a mortality rate three times higher than the national average.
Latin America Report
The trend in Latin America looks good. But there's still much work to be done.
The dream for a greener future
Many of the new projects funded by IFAD in Latin America are looking toward community forestry, climate-change mitigation and adaptation, and sustainable natural resource management as a mechanism for poverty reduction and rural empowerment. In this edition of Rural Perspectives we examine these mechanisms in-depth.
No matter how you shape it, the future of IFAD funding for Latin America must move toward ever-greener pastures, improved discourse and dialogue, smarter market access and value-chain strengthening, and differentiated territorial approaches that take into account the nuanced differences between territories, societies, economic corridors and local economies.
Saludos,
Josefina
Upcoming events
- 21 May 2012. Tune in to the interactive webcast of our seminar on ‘Rural Development in Latin America: Questions, perspectives and challenges’
Latin America Report
- Interactive maps, graphs, datasets and more from the Latin America Report are available at www.informelatinoamericano.org
- Poverty and Inequality 2011: Latin America Report English summary | Spanish full version
New publications
- Proyecto Uruguay Rural – Closing report (Spanish only)
- Private-Sector Strategy - Deepening IFAD’s engagement with the private sector (2012)
Arabic | English | French | Spanish - Legal Preparedness Assessment Report in Mexico (Spanish only)
Videos
Check out our new video playlists, where you’ll see over 40 videos documenting rural empowerment projects in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
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Environmental governance and agro-ecological systems in Mexico
Carlos Edgar González Godoy is the Director of the IFAD-funded Sustainable Development Project for Rural and Indigenous Communities of the Semi-Arid North-West of Mexico (PRODESNOS) and the Coordinator of the National Forestry Commission of Mexico (CONAFOR). We met with Carlos to see how environmental governance systems are progressing, also discussing various other environmental topics and how they relate to rural poverty reduction.
IFAD. What is environmental governance and how are you supporting environmentally friendly governance in Mexico?
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Creating lasting mechanisms for farmers to manage their own natural resources is key to Mexico's climate and environment plans. |
Carlos. Environmental governance is the "set of rules, practices and institutional entities that encompass environmental management in its different modalities (conservation, protection, natural resource exploitation, etc.)". At a worldwide level, global environmental governance is "the sum of organisations, political tools, financial mechanisms, laws, procedures and standards regulating global environmental protection processes".
The three governmental authorities in Mexico (municipal, state and federal) are coordinated. Citizens participate in decision-making in an organized manner when matter affects them, and decisions are made as close as possible to the places generating the issues at hand. Environmental planning is done in an organized and systematic manner, with the participation of all stakeholders. Attention is given to [environmental] impacts and mitigating the effects of productive activities, while also considering the complicated relations between natural resources, their use and exploitation.
IFAD. How can we support and implement sustainable agricultural practices that benefit the rural poor?
Carlos. Within the context of community forestry we are able to assign natural resource management responsibilities with the social participation of the legal owners and/or users, this contributes to strengthening the overall development process. A fundamental characteristic of this model is the existence of a common territory in the hands of a collective body.
This is possible because 80 per cent of forests, jungle, arid- and semi-arid zones in Mexico belong to agrarian and indigenous communities. The social and environmental benefits (carbon sequestration, reduced emissions, conservation of biodiversity and rural development) created by community forestry in Mexico should serve as an example for the world, especially considering how we overcame technical, social and economic hindrances in achieving this.
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Women play a key role in natural resource management and cultural preservation. |
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IFAD. Speaking about forestry, has there been progress on forest protection and on ensuring human and economic development for project users?
Carlos. With the creation of community forestry companies (EFC in Spanish) — which utilize and sustainably exploit these natural resources. These EFCs contribute to economic and community development for natural resource holders.
IFAD. How can we facilitate the protection of the environment through land access and land tenure?
Carlos. As we discussed before, this is not a problem in Mexico, since the inhabitants of areas with natural resources own the land, with land titles issued by the federal government. This is strengthened with programmes and projects such as PRODESNOS, the Community Forestry Development Project (PROCYMAF), and the Community Biodiversity Conservation Programme (COINBIO).
IFAD. What are the roles women and indigenous peoples should play in environmental protection and natural resource management?
Carlos. The country has significant forestry resources — more than 73 per cent of its territory is covered by some kind of vegetation. That’s close to 140,000,000 hectares. These resources are vitally important to the subsistence of close to 12 million people living in the forest regions of the country, as they obtain food, construction materials, biodiversity and other services from said resources. Close to 5 million people belong to indigenous groups; thus, it is vitally important to include women and indigenous peoples in natural resource management.
IFAD. How can small farmers participate in environmental payment programs, such as REDD+?
Carlos. In Mexico, payment for environmental services is done directly to forest land owners (ejidos and communities). I believe the REDD+ strategy has a great advantage in the country due to land ownership conditions, which we discussed earlier.
Read more
- New loan for rural development in Mexico
- Tackling sustainable rural development and climate change in Mexico
- Mexico Going Green
- IFAD operations in Mexico
- Rural poverty in Mexico
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Per capita greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture
Protecting Mother Earth in Bolivia
In Bolivia’s high valleys and Chaco region – a remote corner of the world where reverence and respect for Pachamama (Mother Earth) is an integral part of everyday life – climate change and land degradation are making family farming a very risky business.
In order to help poor farmers adapt to these changing conditions (and show their respect to Pachamama as they have done for centuries) the Natural Resource Management Project of the Chaco and High Valleys (better known by its Spanish acronym PROMARENA) is looking toward age-old practices of terrace farming and good old-fashioned competition as a mechanism for eco-friendly development and sustainable poverty reduction.
The eight-year US$ 15 million PROMARENA Project closed this year after improving the lives and livelihoods of nearly 20,000 poor rural families.
“The environmental achievements of the project are quite impressive. Through the competitive resource allocation model, where project participants compete for project funding in public contests, the PROMARENA project helped to plant over 8 million trees and construct 803,012 ha of new terraces that reduce erosion and contribute to minimize the effects of desertification,” says Francisco Pichón, Bolivia Country Programme Manager for the International Fund for Agricultural Organization (IFAD). IFAD contributed US$12 million to the PROMARENA project.
How does the contest model work?
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Resuscitating age-old terrace farming practices has helped to conserve soils and prevent desertification in the region. |
The contest model is being used across Latin America to ensure sustainability and build community-based, demand-driven support for rural poverty projects.
“The public contests (concursos) work by identifying a problem within a family. The family identifies a problem. They tell us that they want to improve their house, the ceiling is about to fall down, there aren’t enough rooms, they need a bathroom. The project looks at these needs through the contests and transfers the money to the families,” says the National Coordinator of the PROMARENA Program, Omar Tejerina. “Motivated by the economic resources, the families begin to work with local resources and with everybody in the family.”
Efraín Condori Quispe is a peach farmer that benefited from PROMARENA’s public contests. With a group of other farmers he competed for a grant to build a small dam and irrigation canals for his orchards. Quispe and crew won first prize with their three-dimensional “Talking Map” that mapped out how the community managed their natural resources in the past and how they planned to improve their management in the future. With technical assistance from PROMARENA, Quispe also added terraces to his farm to reduce erosion and improved the quality of his production by using organic fertilizer.
“Everything we had laid out with our talking map we’ve accomplished. We drew with our hands the past, present and future, and we’ve achieved these goals,” Quispe says.
During the project’s cycle, nearly 2.5 million ha of land were converted to organic, family-based vegetable gardens, new rainwater tanks (with the capacity to store over 1,150,000 m3 of water) were constructed, and around 1 million llamas and alpacas benefitted from better zoologically-based sanitary measures and care.
One of the most notable push-on effects from PROMARENA’s environmental work has been the raise in land prices across the region and improved earnings for area farmers. Land prices for project participants have increased ten-fold over the past eight years. “They started with nothing,” says Tejerina. “At the beginning of the project, a family with one hectare of peaches made US$100 to US$150 a year, now these families are making US$15,000 per year per hectare.”
With his improved income and asset base – at the beginning of the project Quispe’s land was valued at around US$200, now it’s worth around US$11,000 – Quispe is hoping to create a micro-business with his children that are currently attending university to become agricultural and industrial engineers.
“I won’t sell our land. It’s ours, and it’s not something that’s for sale because each day we learn more about how to management it, how to conserve,” says Quispe.
Addressing food security
Throughout the region the changing climate patterns, desertification and divers environmental risks are putting productivity levels at risk and affecting food security. In order to address this challenge, the project worked with various other international and national programmes to improve food security and increase productive yields in a sustainable manner.
“PROMARENA helped renovate over 4000 kitchens in the project area, improving substantially the living and working conditions of women, youth and children. And through the concurso (public competition) methodology, the project carried out 4800 concursos with almost 40,000 participants, transferring over US$4.5 million to project participants,” says IFAD’s Pichón. “The project also financed around 950 livestock, agriculture, handicraft and rural services business proposals with around US$2.4 million in investments, which generated around US$10 million in income for small producers.”
But the job is far from done. There are still high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition across the region and the natural ecosystems remain at risk. With this in mind, the Bolivian government recently signed a new loan agreement with IFAD for the US$15.2 million Plan Vida-Peep Pilot Project to Strengthen the Capacity of Communities and Families Living in Extreme Poverty, a three-year program that will be implemented by the same agency behind PROMARENA.
More than 53 per cent of project funding will work to improve natural resource management and production systems, 16 per cent will go to community initiatives and 11 per cent is dedicated for strengthening productive infrastructure.
PROMARENA’s Tejerina sees these types of environmentally oriented rural development projects as a mechanism for peace.
“I understand that many of our problems come principally from lack of basic necessities and the lack of food. With this in mind, as a project, I believe that we contribute to peace,” says Tejerina. “And the best way to contribute to peace is to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to have enough to eat and to have access to citizens’ rights.”
Originally published in The New Agriculturalist.
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Integrated farms, green value chains, environmental governance – The Honduran experience with Victoria Flores Aguilar
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By including cash crops in the overall integrated farming model, Honduras hopes to ensure sustainable poverty reduction and environmental stewardship. |
How can we create and implement sustainable agricultural systems that benefit the rural poor? How can we strengthen value chains in a sustainable and green manner? How do we define environmental governance, and how can we insert small farmers in environmental payment programs, such as REDD+? In this revealing interview, Victoria Flores Aguilar, Honduran expert on community forestry, REDD+ and agro-ecology, highlights the road ahead, where we are at today, and the challenges and threats facing us along the way.
Victoria Flores Aguilar is the Chairwoman for Board of Directors of the Agroforestry Producer Federation in Honduras (FEPROAH). She has also been a partner in the San Jose Agroforestry Cooperative for 17 years and is a member of the REDD+ Subcommittee in the National Climate Change Directorate (SERNA). She is the Deputy Coordinator of the National Forestry and Land-Use Planning Group in Region 2 of the Comayagua Valley (Plan de Nación), and Vice-president of the Coordinating Association of Indigenous and Community Agroforestry in Central America (ACICAFOC).
IFAD. How can we support and implement sustainable agricultural practices that benefit the rural poor? How are you doing it in your country?
Victoria. To date, the practice that has produced the best results — at least with our organisations — is the concept of an integrated farm. This model seeks to establish the farmer and his family in their plot within the forest, and incorporate a mix of trees that improve soil quality, fruit trees, at least one high-profit crop such as coffee or cocoa, annual crops to ensure a minimum of 80 per cent of the farmer’s food, also looking to cultivate a variety of species in the plot and avoid the indiscriminate use of pesticides.
IFAD. How can we recognise the added value — in social, cultural and economic terms — of natural assets?
Victoria. In Gualaco and San Esteban (where there are seven FEPROAH partner associations) the ‘Eco-systemic Service Valuation’ assessment was undertaken in mid-2011. Results show social, cultural, economic and environmental value in no less than 14 of these services, which are now part of the Strategic Management Plan of the Olancho Northeast Model Forest Initiative.
IFAD. How can we balance the need to empower poor rural people, all the while protecting the environment?
Victoria. Community forestry (comprehensive forest development, comprehensive human development and comprehensive management of the agricultural unit within this framework) is the best way for communities living in the forests to overcome extreme poverty, generate resources for their own development, and — as the forest is the basis for this development — manage it in an optimized way so it can be improved and maintained progressively. There are several examples in communities such as Protección, Gualaco, Guata, several communities in El Paraíso, Atlántida and Dulce Nombre de Culmí.
IFAD. How can we reduce the risk associated with climate change and other natural factors such as desertification, soil deterioration, etc.?
Victoria. Through approaches such as community forestry, which includes integrated farms, but also proper forest management — protection, silviculture, sustainable usage, diversification and value-added production —in order to avoid pushing resources to the point of extinction.
IFAD. How can we strengthen value chains in a sustainable and green manner?
Victoria. An interesting value-chain model is seen in areas where community forestry is already underway, such as in Gualaco. It includes the forester (communities who protect and manage the forest), the community grassroots organisation responsible for utilising forest products (wood and resin), small and medium value-add industries in the nearby area, and transportation service companies (also organised in cooperatives). The model requires the participation of a large number of stakeholders along the value chain to reduce costs and gaps in the access to employment and income.
IFAD. What is environmental governance, and how are you creating environmentally friendly systems of governance in Honduras?
Victoria. Environmental governance can be seen from different angles –from the national level with clear laws, regulations and standards that apply to all; from the organised civil society level, which monitors the process on behalf of its members, and from the level of organised communities, which encourage responsible forest management and the use of forest assets to catalyse development. This model is working in some parts of the country, but much needs to be done for it to be standardised.
IFAD. How can we facilitate environmental protection through access to land and land tenure?
Victoria. National forests, according to Honduran law, must be registered under long-term management contracts and the State must ensure the legal certainty of said properties on behalf of the State. In lands inhabited by indigenous peoples there is an on-going battle, as the State needs to acknowledge their property rights.
IFAD. What roles should women and indigenous peoples play in the protection of the environment and natural resource management?
Victoria. A broad focus such as that of community forestry should encourage the equitable participation of all community sectors. However, women and indigenous peoples, due to their vulnerable conditions, must be considered under a differentiated approach that first allows them to increase their self esteem and improve their capabilities, and then helps them participate actively in the processes, resorting to affirmative action to ensure this participation.
IFAD. How can smallholder farmers participate in environmental payment programs, such as REDD+?
Victoria. In community forestry, the State signs long-term forestry management contracts to regulate community access to all environmental goods and services produced in the assigned area. If service compensation mechanisms exist, such as climate regulation, these resources must be directly channelled to those managing the forests, the very people who generate these eco-systemic services. This will serve to empower their management activities, generate employment in the communities, improve incomes, and in the end, improve the quality of life.
Read more
- 23 September 2011: Honduran Government and IFAD sign new loan for rural development English | Español
- IFAD in Honduras
- Rural Poverty in Honduras
- Programa de Desarrollo Rural Sostenible para la Región Sur (Emprende Sur)
- Proyecto de Competitividad de la Economía Rural del Departamento de Yoro (PROMECOM)
- Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE)
- Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería
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Forest area vs. agricultural irrigated land
Total worldwide greenhouse gas emissions