G20 Agriculture Ministers Meeting IICA-led Panel Overcoming Challenges: Pathways to Sustainable and Resilient Agriculture

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Excellencies, Ministers, Distinguished Guests,

First, let me thank the Brazilian Ministries of Agriculture and Livestock; Agrarian Development and Family Farming; and Fisheries and Aquaculture. Your leadership, under His Excellency President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is providing very welcome energy and momentum as we tackle the world’s most pressing crises.

Thank you also to Manuel Otero, Director General of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, for this invitation and for our organisations’ strong history of collaboration.

We are proud to take IFAD and IICA’s partnership to the next stage today with today’s signing of a Memorandum of Understanding.

Distinguished friends,

We cannot meet our shared goals on poverty without resilient rural communities. We cannot meet our global hunger goals without resilient rural communities. That we cannot meet equality goals without resilient rural communities.

Family farmers are the backbone of rural economies. They produce almost half the world’s food on only 17 per cent of farmland. Fisheries and aquaculture support the livelihoods of nearly half a billion people across the world – and, when done sustainably, nurture the environment at the same time.

Yet small-scale agri-food systems receive less than one percent of global climate finance. This must change.

IFAD has worked for five decades to support rural communities in developing countries. I would like to share three insights from our experience in the hope that they are valuable to our discussions today.

The first is that sustainable agriculture and food systems need smallholders: they are not just a throwback to an ancient way of growing food. In fact, small family farms are an essential part of modern, globalized and efficient food systems.

We see over and over again that smallholders are highly efficient farmers when they have access to finance, information and inputs – and research shows that small farms have average higher yields and greater biodiversity than larger farms.

The second insight is that farms – big or small – are businesses. And if we help food producers grow their business through increased access to trade and markets, they will have a direct positive benefit on food security and resilience in their communities.

We all know small-scale food producers work hard and earn too little. Their viability depends on receiving fair prices, requiring inclusion in the market chain, including, where needed, all the way to export.

And through our co-leadership with FAO of the UN Decade for Family Farming, we invest in helping farmers’ organisations increase their bargaining power, improve legislation and diversify leadership.

I am proud that in just four countries – Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru – we have encouraged over 4,000 women and youth into leadership roles of farmers’ organisations.

THE FINAL LESSON is that productive smallholders bring peace. Over the course of almost 50 years, we have invested in rural people to withstand crises and shocks, even in the most fragile conditions and remote locations.

In regions such as Africa’s Sahel, providing access to credit, empowering women and youth, and enabling local institutions can transform entire communities – and even bring stability to fragile areas.

Our own data shows that conflict decreases when food production grows. In Ethiopia, we measured a 3 per cent decrease in conflict for every 1% increase in land productivity. And in Mali we found an 8% reduction in conflict where IFAD invested.

Excellencies,

The stakes are high. This year’s report on The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World reminds us that up to 757 million people faced hunger in 2023 – one out of 11 people in the world, and one out of every five in Africa.

But there is hope. Coming together like we are this week, and the collaborations and partnerships we are building alongside these conversations, will enable us to assemble new finance, innovate at scale, and reach deep into rural areas where investments are needed most.

This includes partnerships like the one IFAD has with IICA, and public development banks like Brazil’s BNDES.

Through our upcoming IFAD13 replenishment, we aim to work with 100 million rural people to ensure they have the tools to improve their productivity in sustainable ways – including resilience building and new market development.

Our vision is ambitious, because it has to be.

But we cannot do it alone. Let me reaffirm that IFAD stands ready to work with all of you. Together, we can build rural resilience in anticipation of a more challenging future, but always in hope of a better one. This is our core business.

Thank you.