House Standing Committees on Agriculture and Agri-Food, and Foreign Affairs and International Development

Distinguished Parliamentarians,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Canada was a founding member and is a top donor to IFAD. I am honoured to have this opportunity to address you, and I am grateful to the government and citizens of Canada.

Canada and IFAD share a commitment to ending the burden of poverty and hunger that so terribly affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

We do that by investing in the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, who live in rural areas of developing countries and who mainly depend on agriculture.

IFAD was created 45 years ago as a direct response to drought and famine, to address the root causes of poverty and food insecurity.

Despite enormous gains, the crises of today threaten to roll back progress.

IFAD is both a specialized UN agency—and the only IFI dedicated to investing in smallholder farmers and rural people.

That makes IFAD the international community’s most direct conduit for channelling investment into resilient and sustainable agriculture and food systems. This was recently recognised in the G7’s Hiroshima Action Statement.

IFAD’s work also contributes to improving climate resilience, safeguarding biodiversity, conserving and sustainably managing inputs, and supporting local, regional and international food production.

It is not just what we do but how we do it that gets results.

We work with governments, donors, and the private sector -- and with poor rural people and their organizations -- to build coalitions and empower rural communities to lead their own development.

And we make sure no one is left behind, including women, youth, people with disabilities, and indigenous peoples in particular. Our work ensures marginalized groups have the skills and tools to help themselves and participate more fulling in local economies.

IFAD-supported projects look at every aspect of the food system - from planting times to what people eat for breakfast - and figure out what is needed in a specific country, an ecosystem, a village -- even a field

We build links between small-scale farmers and their suppliers and customers, and we help ensure the availability of climate-proofed infrastructure, and of finance.

The projects we support are locally-led and adapted. Sometimes they take a high-tech approach, with biogas digesters, or solar-powered water-pumps for irrigation, or drones that reveal which plants are not healthy.

Other times we provide low-cost equipment - like wheelbarrows - which can be life-changing for people in remote corners of the world, cut off from roads and infrastructure.

 

Dear Friends,

Thanks to Canada and our other Member States, since 1978, IFAD has invested more than US$24 billion in low-interest loans and grants to support programmes and projects that have enabled hundreds of millions poor rural people to grow and sell more food, increase their incomes, improve their food security and determine the direction of their own lives.

But we are also all about partnership, bringing in others to invest -- and acting as both a champion of rural people and an assembler of finance.

This allows us to provide our member states with value for money. By mobilizing co-financing, IFAD has turned every dollar of core contributions into six dollars of investment on the ground.

As we all know, today the world faces a food crisis. More than 800 million people are chronically undernourished. More than 3 billion people cannot afford t a healthy diet. One out of every five children in the world under the age of 5 is stunted because of under-nutrition during the early years.

Today’s food crisis is not only the result of the war in Ukraine, or of the COVID pandemic, or of climate change. It is primarily the result of long-standing weaknesses and under-investment in the overall structure of food systems. And it is a result of glaring inequalities that have left too many small-scale producers in dire poverty.

As long as agriculture remains at the subsistence level, as long as the roads are unpaved, and the villages are without electricity, health clinics or clean water, rural people will continue to migrate – first to the city – and then, if they cannot find decent employment – across borders to neighbouring countries and beyond.

Canada’s support of IFAD is critical in reaching the last mile. IFAD works in some of the most remote and marginalized areas where others don’t go.

Everyone benefits when rural livelihoods are resilient. We all depend on agriculture for our food.

A better, fairer and more sustainable world offers landscapes of opportunity, both rural and urban, today and tomorrow.

Thank you.