In Brief

RESADE is improving food security, agricultural productivity and incomes of poor smallholder farmers in salinity-affected areas in seven countries. It does so by introducing salt-tolerant crops, using suitable agronomic management practices, developing value chains for new crops, building capacity, influencing national development policies, providing good quality seeds.

Increasing food demand is a key concern in Nigeria and Togo as price increases exacerbate poverty. The project improves food security and agricultural productivity within the rice and cassava value chains by introducing resilient crop varieties, improving crop management practices and implementing enabling policies.

This brief describes the Agroecological Transitions programme which empowers farmers in low- and middle-income countries to make climate-informed agroecological transitions.

This infographic outlines the main elements of IFAD13, including our ambitions, targets, approaches and tools.

This third edition of the GEF-IFAD Advantage highlights the partnership's advantages in various domains, including food systems, biodiversity, climate change adaptation and land degradation.

The policy brief focuses on the challenge of equitable and sustainable development for all and proposes a task list for multilateral development agencies and outlines potential for reform.

INSURED is a technical assistance programme working to strengthen agricultural insurance in IFAD’s portfolio.

Cette étude de cas montre comment l'adoption d'une approche holistique des systèmes alimentaires sensibles aux enjeux nutritionnels peut conduire à des résultats durables.

Since its inception in 2006, IFAD’s Financing Facility for Remittances (FFR), has produced a large number of publications and information material with global outreach. This pamphlet aims to provide the reader with a quick overview of each, with a link to the dedicated webpage.

This fourth edition of IFAD’s Climate Action Report does not restrict itself to reviewing the progress and results of the past year, but also situates these results within the larger context of IFAD's 11th Replenishment.

Remittances sent by migrant workers to and within Africa were over US$85 billion in 2018, of which US$25 billion were sent by migrants residing in Europe.

This policy note discusses how China could further advance its food and agricultural development model, making it greener, more sustainable, and more inclusive.

This policy note discusses the challenges and opportunities for China to update its development model to reflect the new context. It suggests three priority areas and nine policy actions which China should focus on.

This infographic presents highlights of IFAD’s work in 2021. 

This third edition of the IFAD Climate Action Report (CAR) describes the efforts that IFAD has made during the year to integrate climate change into every aspect of its plans and operations. 

This infographic outlines the main elements of IFAD12: our ambitions, targets, approaches and tools.

This GIS study shows that the development of rice paddies in Sierra Leone has led to fewer forest fires.

The FO4ACP programme aims to support small-scale and family farmers in African, Caribbean and Pacific countries by strengthening farmers’ organizations.

Indigenous peoples, who often live in rural areas of developing countries and face high levels of poverty and food insecurity, are an important constituency for IFAD.

The Agri-Business Capital Fund (ABC Fund) invests in smallholder farmers and rural small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries to support sustainable and inclusive agricultural value chains. 

The Climate Action Report 2019 provides an overview of IFAD’s work on climate change and reports on progress, challenges and achievements.

A new report from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) shows that by working with women, men, young people and indigenous peoples as change agents we are best placed to beat back the impact of climate change on rural communities in West and Central Africa (WCA).

This report presents selected achievements and lessons from the growing portfolio of fisheries and aquaculture investments supported by IFAD.

This paper is a contribution to the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Promoting and Implementing Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries (TCDC) (UN, 1978), which gave birth to what is known today, in the UN system and beyond, as “South-South and Triangular Cooperation" (SSTC). 

This report presents the highlights and key outcomes of the first country-led Global Forum on Remittances, Investment and Development, hosted by Bank Negara Malaysia in collaboration with IFAD and the World Bank Group.

Indigenous and tribal peoples and ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented among the rural poor. Many of the poorest communities of indigenous peoples are difficult to reach through mainstream development programmes.

In 2030, young people will make up around 15 per cent of the world’s population, and rural youth about 6 per cent. Some regions are even expected to see a “youth bulge” or a significantly higher proportion of young people.

Efforts to expand and strengthen indigenous peoples’ rights over their lands, territories and natural resources have become crucial to achieving the objectives of poverty reduction, more secure livelihoods, environmental sustainability and the preservation of indigenous cultural value systems. With this aim, over the past decades IFAD has worked together with indigenous peoples and their representing institutions to create enabling environments to secure their access to collective rights over ancestral territories, improve the sustainable management of indigenous lands, regulate the community use of natural resources and reduce conflicts over lands and resources.

​In 2014, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) released a report celebrating achievements through its partnership with the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Since then, the world has been responding to critical environmental and climate challenges.

This report provides the findings of a stock-taking exercise started in 2015 on IFAD's investment in tenure security measures integrated in its larger agricultural development projects. This stock-take provides an overview of tenure investments and activities in the Latin America and the Caribbean region (LAC).

This report provides the findings of a stock-taking exercise started in 2015 on IFAD's investment in tenure security measures integrated in its larger agricultural development projects. This stock-take provides an overview of tenure investments and activities in the Near East, North Africa, Europe and Central Asia region (NEN).

This report provides the findings of a stock-taking exercise started in 2015 on IFAD's investment in tenure security measures integrated in its larger agricultural development projects. This stock-take provides an overview of tenure investments and activities in the West and Central Africa region (WCA).

​RemitSCOPE, a new website portal, is designed to provide data, analyses and remittancemarket1 profiles on individual countries or areas. In coordination with the Global Forum on Remittances, Investment and Development 2018, RemitSCOPE is being launched to provide market profiles for 50 countries or areas in the Asia and the Pacific region.

The additional four regions will be included gradually: Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, and Near East and the Caucasus. RemitSCOPE intends to address the fast-changing market realities in the remittance industry in order to help bring together the goals of remittance families, as clients, and the strategies of the private-sector service providers. RemitSCOPE is designed as a free, one-stop shop that is available to any organization or entity interested in accessing all relevant public information on remittances.  

Among ecosystems services, freshwater is one of the most fundamental for life. For smallholders, water means the difference between a decent life and poverty, hunger and malnutrition. 

This publication seeks to provide development practitioners, governmental and non-governmental organizations and agencies with insights into the case studies on overcoming the challenges that young people face in diverse contexts. 

L’accès des agriculteurs à l’eau est un facteur de développement agricole. Cet accès dépend de plusieurs facteurs, dont des facteurs économiques, politiques, ou encore environnementaux. En effet, les décisions et stratégies adoptées par le gouvernement et les autorités locales permettent à la population, et plus particulièrement aux agriculteurs, de gérer de façon durable et efficace leurs ressources hydriques.

À Madagascar, le cadre législatif du secteur de l’eau agricole a évolué à partir des années 1980. Tout d’abord, en 1990, la reconnaissance de l’importance de la préservation de l’environnement et des ressources naturelles a débouché sur une Charte de l’environnement.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) were both created in response to the food crises of the 1970s. We have worked together for more than 20 years to catalyze agricultural and rural development and improve food security in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

IFAD and IFPRI have strengthened the productivity and resilience of smallholder farmers and other rural people, with a particular focus on helping expand their access to innovative local farming methods, climate change mitigation and adaptation technologies and financing, and more profitable markets.

To further promote rural development and transformation, IFAD and IFPRI have built cutting-edge information systems and tools that deliver sound data and analyses to governments, donors, farmer organizations, and other stakeholders. As a result, the two organizations have fostered evidence-based policy making and investments that promote agricultural growth and rural development.

Gender equality and the empowerment of women are prerequisites for the eradication of poverty and hunger. First and foremost, gender inequalities and discrimination represent fundamental violations of the human rights of women. In addition, it is well recognized that gender inequality and discrimination undermine agricultural productivity globally,1 negatively impact children’s health and nutrition, and erode outcomes across social and economic development indicators.

Much work on rural women’s empowerment has focused on the need to expand women’s access to productive resources, which can allow them to increase their productivity. However, much more attention needs to be directed at underlying gender inequalities such as gender-biased institutions, social norms, and customs that negatively impact women’s work (paid and unpaid), livelihoods and well-being. Within food systems, these biases manifest themselves in limiting women’s access to productive resources, to services (such as finance and training), to commercial opportunities and social protection (including maternity protection). These manifestations may be regarded as symptoms, therefore, rather than drivers, of gender inequality.

Climate change and malnutrition are among the greatest problems in the twentyfirst century; they are “wicked problems”, difficult to describe, with multiple causes, and no single solution.

Investing in inclusive and sustainable rural transformation is strategically important for the 2030 Agenda. This has been broadly recognized in debates about the SDGs, particularly the roles of sustainable agriculture, food security and nutrition in relation to SDG2, the eradication of hunger. It is important to recognize that the eradication of hunger is inseparable from the eradication of poverty in all its forms (SDG1). 

While poverty is often the main driver of food insecurity and malnutrition, hunger and malnutrition also result in the inability to escape poverty. Investments targeted at rural people are needed not only to ensure no one is left behind, but also to unlock the catalytic role that inclusive rural transformation has been shown to play in reducing and eradicating poverty and hunger, as well as promoting wider prosperity. 

Despite much progress – extreme poverty has been halved since the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted in 1990 – there are still 767 million extremely poor people in the world, and more than 75 per cent of them live in the rural areas of developing countries. Population increases and rising incomes are creating a growing demand for food, which creates both opportunities and challenges for people working in rural areas, including in smallholder agriculture and in the non-farm economy. Rising agricultural productivity, more jobs off the farm and migration are reshaping rural lives, but so too are climate change, environmental degradation, conflict and forced displacement.

IFAD’s experience in developing countries over the past 40 years clearly shows that investing in rural people leads to poverty reduction and economic growth that go beyond agriculture and rural areas. IFAD’s 2016 Rural Development Report presented evidence that inclusive and sustainable rural transformation is fundamental to economic and social growth, and to poverty reduction at the national level.

It is well recognized that with higher incomes and urbanization, patterns of demand for food change and expand – potentially creating new opportunities for food producers in many of today’s developing countries. It is not always equally well recognized that much of the urban expansion involves the growth of (often previously rural) towns, with these settlements retaining many of their rural characteristics. 

The continued prevalence of small-scale farming in local livelihoods – albeit increasingly buttressed by increasingly dynamic non-farm sectors – remains a feature of many of these so-called “urban” settlements. Notably, small towns and cities of less than 500,000 inhabitants now represent the largest share of the global urban population, with the majority of the projected urban growth in the decades ahead to be absorbed by these centres.

Famine, conflict, forced migration, poverty, hunger, inequality, drought, climate change.

To solve the greatest problems facing humanity, we must start at the bottom: with the underlying causes that are most difficult to alter, and with the most disadvantaged people who are most at risk and hardest to reach. These are the women and men who grow food, yet go hungry themselves: the small family farmers, traders, labourers, fishers, hunters and gatherers who are too often on the sidelines of modern value chains.

For four decades, only one organization has specialized in reaching these people. IFAD is that organization. A UN agency and an international financial institution – and the only such organization dedicated exclusively to rural areas. A people-centred organization that fights poverty and hunger hand-in-hand with families and communities. A fund that comes not just with advice and recommendations,

In 2015, Member States of the United Nations issued a call to action to eradicate global poverty, reduce economic inequality and place the world on a more sustainable pathway: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

The International Day of Family Remittances recognizes the efforts of millions of migrants to improve the lives of their families and to create a future of hope for their children. Remittances – the money that is sent home by migrants – help to sustain 800 million people and are a major contributor to development. Some 40 per cent of remittances go to rural areas, where poverty and hunger are concentrated. 

This report provides data and analysis of remittances and migration trends for developing countries over the past decade, as well as the potential contributions of remittance families to reaching the SDGs by 2030.

On 15 and 16 June 2017, on the occasion of the International Day of Family Remittances, over 350 practitioners from the public and private sectors gathered at the United Nations headquarters in New York for the fifth Global Forum on Remittances, Investment and Development (GFRID). The participants had the opportunity to discuss challenges and opportunities in the remittance market, and present innovative approaches and successful business models, framing the discussions around the role of migrants’ remittances and investment towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) by 2030.

The Technical Assistance Facility (TAF) has a mandate to increase economic and physical access to food for low-income Africans by providing technical assistance to the portfolio companies of the African Agriculture Fund (AAF). 

The AAF is a private equity fund created in response to the food security challenge across the continent, financed by African, European and US development finance institutions, and private investors. It is comprised of two funds; the AAF and a subsidiary Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Fund. As TAF enters its fifth year, this report reflects on the progress of 42 projects implemented to date through technical assistance to ten AAF portfolio companies. 

Gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls is a pre-condition for the eradication of poverty and essential to achieve progress across all goals and targets set by the Sustainable Development Agenda. The JP RWEE facilitates transformation through rural women’s leadership, making gender equality and women’s empowerment a reality. Support to women's economic empowerment allows for increased influence, education and information for women to decide the use of their income, savings and loans, and the ability to make decisions about their life. 

South-South and triangular cooperation has an enormous potential role in agriculture and rural development in developing countries, both in unlocking diverse experiences and lessons and in providing solutions to pressing development challenges.

From the cases that follow, a number of common lessons emerge. First, it is important to create a space for interaction and cross-country learning. In the Scaling up Micro-Irrigation Systems project or with the household mentoring approach, for instance, workshops and ‘writeshops’ gathered people from diverse countries who could then share their own knowledge and experiences. In such spaces, participants could compare how a similar approach or technology required certain adaptations to better fit with local cultural, social and environmental contexts, offering important lessons for future scaling up.

Sometimes individual champions can make a difference. In Madagascar, the project design for a public/private partnership improved drastically when an IFAD consultant with similar experience in another country became involved. In this case, it was also an ‘unexpected outcome’, as the innovation came from a replacement for the regular consultant, who had broken his foot …. So even through small staff changes, knowledge of a complementary innovation from another country can have a big impact.

​Biodiversity is about more than plants, animals, and micro-organisms and their ecosystems – the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 1992) recognizes that it is also very much about people and our need for food security, medicines, fresh air, shelter, and a clean and healthy environment. Biodiversity is also essential for the maintenance of ecosystem-based services, such as the provision of water and food for human, animal and plant life. When we make an effort to conserve biodiversity, we are helping to maintain critical global biological resources to meet our needs today as well as those of future generations. Biodiversity conservation is therefore central to achieving recent global commitments for sustainable development under “Agenda 2030”, adopted by the United Nations in 2015. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) recognizes that losing biodiversity means losing opportunities for coping with future challenges, such as those posed by climate change and food insecurity. 

This report focuses on African National Postal Operators (NPOs) as one of the several distribution channels for remittances and financial services.

The Second African Conference on Remittances and Postal Networks was organized in the framework of the African Postal Financial Services Initiative (APFSI), and took place on 15-16 November 2016 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.

Present in each continent and covering over 40 per cent of the earth, drylands generally refer to arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, and are home to more than 2 billion people.

IFAD has a well-established history of supporting gender equality and women’s empowerment. This commitment spans 25 years, from the 1992 paper, Strategies for the Economic Advancement of Poor Rural Women, to the 2003-2006 Plan of Action for Mainstreaming a Gender Perspective in IFAD’s Operations, the 2010 Corporate-level Evaluation of IFAD’s Performance with regard to Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment by the Independent Office of Evaluation, and finally the 2012 gender policy.

In the new IFAD Strategic Framework 2016-2025, gender equality is identified as one of the five principles of engagement at the core of IFAD’s identity and values. IFAD complies with the United Nations commitments on gender mainstreaming, including the United Nations System-wide Action Plan (UN-SWAP) on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

IFAD and the Government of Tajikistan have been investing in building the capacities of village organizations and pasture users unions to participate in and influence processes that are important for the livelihoods of their members. The results have been very positive, as the stories contained here show. Local communities have been empowered in managing local natural resources on which they depend. The community-driven development approach is a very effective way to identify priorities (such as roads, irrigation, drinking water, electricity supply, and low-cost storage and marketing facilities) in rural communities, and has been able to provide the needed investments to improve rural livelihoods. Activities also targeted the needs of female beneficiaries, not only producing significant economic benefits but also strengthening the position of women in communities.

The participation of beneficiaries in all phases of the projects was a key ingredient in ensuring that there would be ownership, commitment and long-term impact. Members of village organizations were involved in setting priorities and decision-making from the outset. Linking community development to training and strengthening local project partners helped to ensure sustainability, so that these communities will continue to thrive in the future.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), now known also as Global Goals, give an inspiring vision of what the world could look like in 2030. This is a vision of a world without poverty and hunger, a world of inclusive growth, environmental sustainability and social justice. IFAD’s own vision of inclusive and sustainable rural transformation fits closely with the ambitions of Agenda 2030. Indeed, the Agenda recognizes the importance of IFAD’s mandate and the validity of its approach.

Going forward, IFAD will be expected by its donors and partners to give a clear, demonstrable contribution to realizing the Global Goals. Moreover, the implementation of the goals will bring new opportunities for IFAD to expand the impact of its activities. IFAD’s new Strategic Framework (2016-2025) affirms Agenda 2030 as the basis for its work for the next decade. The purpose of this note is to unpack Agenda 2030 and to show how IFAD will be a part of making its vision a reality

The 2030 Agenda is a global commitment, made at the highest level, to “leave no one behind” in realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Arguably, this is one of the most challenging features of the agenda, and an apt theme for the 2016 session of the High Level Political Forum (HLPF), as the foremost global forum for follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda.

Nowhere is the challenge of leaving no one behind more salient than in rural areas. Since the vast majority of people living in poverty are in rural areas, “leaving no one behind” clearly demands a special focus on rural women and men. Rural-urban gaps exist for virtually all development indicators. The 2016 session of the HLPF is an opportunity to consider how to put poor rural people at the centre of national, regional, and global efforts to implement the agenda and to measure progress. 

Endorsements by the United Nations and international organizations.

It is now beyond a reasonable doubt that the earth’s changing climate is a result of human actions.

The expanding total volume of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere is precipitating higher global surface temperatures and sea level rise.

The effects of human-induced climate change threaten the very existence of numerous species across the planet, including our own.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is an international financial institution and a specialized United Nations agency dedicated to eradicating poverty and hunger in rural areas of developing countries. IFAD provides low-interest loans and grants to developing countries to finance innovative agricultural and rural development programmes and projects.

IFAD was established in 1977 as one of the major outcomes of the 1974 World Food Conference. World leaders agreed that “an International Fund for Agricultural Development should be established immediately to finance agricultural development projects…”. The conference was organized in the wake of the great droughts and famines that struck many parts of Africa in the early 1970s. IFAD is now among the top multilateral institutions working in agriculture in Africa.

Higher temperatures, wildlife extinction, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, heat-related diseases and economic losses are among the consequences of climate change. Climate change disproportionally affects the poorest and most marginalized communities living in vulnerable regions, among them indigenous peoples, whose livelihoods depend on natural resources. 

When the seasonal rains came to some regions of south-eastern Senegal, the flooding used to cut off the inhabitants from the rest of the country. But that has changed with the IFAD-supported project known as PADAER – Projet d’Appui au Développement Agricole et à l’Entreprenariat Rural. Thanks to the projects’ work on rebuilding roads, rural people have new possibilities to make a living, they can access health services and education, and bring their products to markets.

A new lifeline; a new way of life.

For poor rural people, lack of infrastructure often translates into lack of options and alternatives. The project is changing that.

In 2016, around 200 million migrants worldwide sent home an estimated US$ 445 billion to their families in developing countries. These remittances provide for basic necessities such as food, clothing and shelter that are essential to lifting millions of people out of poverty. The truly transformative potential of these funds, however, lies in their investment in education, healthcare and asset building. To meet these needs, the us$36 million multi-donor Financing Facility for Remittances (FFR) has been working since 2006 with the goal of increasing the development impact of remittances and enabling poor households to advance on the road to financial independence and rural transformation. The FFR is administered by IFAD, a specialized agency of the United Nations with the mandate to invest in rural people to eradicate poverty in developing countries.

The origins of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) stretch back to the food crisis of the early 1970s, which sparked the World Food Conference of 1974. Three years later, with support from donors, including Japan, IFAD was created as both a specialized agency of the United Nations and an international financial institution. 

Since 1978, IFAD has empowered about 453 million people to grow more food, manage their land and other natural resources more productively, learn new skills, start businesses, build strong organizations and gain a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. 

Farmers’ Africa is a capacity-building programme that aims to improve the livelihoods and food security of rural producers in Africa. It works with farmers’ organizations (FOs) to help them evolve into more stable, performing and accountable organizations that effectively represent their members and advise them on farming enterprises.

The programme supports the main functions of FOs, promotes their engagement in policy processes and contributes to their professionalization. It also supports the efforts of FOs to provide economic services to their members. 

The African Postal Financial Services initiative is a joint regional programme launched by IFAD and the European Commission in collaboration with the World Bank, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) – a specialized United Nations agency for the postal sector, the World Savings Banks Institute/European Savings Banks Group (WSBI/ESBG) and the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF).

This uniquely broad-based partnership seeks to enhance competition in the African remittance market by promoting and enabling post offices in Africa to offer remittances and financial services. Post offices are ideally placed to deliver remittances in rural areas, but they often lack the business model, technology and expertise to process real-time payments such as remittances in an efficient and safe manner. The goal of this initiative is to promote, support and scale up key postal networks in Africa in the integration of remittance services.

Climate change is the most compelling challenge facing the world today. It affects rural smallholders across the developing world, with effects that pose a grave threat to their own, and to the world’s food security.

The Latin America and the Caribbean region is a different place than it was 25 years ago. Today, every nation except Haiti is categorized as middle income. The region has reduced poverty by half, and the prevalence of hunger has declined by almost two thirds. More than half the adult population has attended secondary school.

Rural areas are changing too. They are no longer narrowly defined by their food production role, and key issues encompass many non-agricultural topics – including non-farm employment opportunities, especially for young people and women; migration and remittances; social protection; and the role of secondary cities. 

Like many development partners, IFAD has found that innovative free- standing development projects alone are not an effective vehicle for eradicating poverty at scale: they must be part of a longer-term process that can sustain learning and scaling up. 

The Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP) was launched by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in 2012 to make climate and environmental finance work for smallholder farmers. A multi-year and multi-donor financing window, ASAP provides a new source of cofinancing to scale up and integrate climate change adaptation across IFAD’s approximately US$1billion per year of new investments. The programme is joined up with IFAD’s regular investment processes and benefits from rigorous quality control and supervision systems.

ASAP is driving a major scaling up of successful ‘multiple-benefit’ approaches to smallholder agriculture, which improve production while reducing and diversifying climate-related risks. In doing so, ASAP is blending tried-and tested approaches to rural development with relevant adaptation know-how and technologies. This will increase the capacity of at least 8 million smallholder farmers to expand their livelihood options in an uncertain and rapidly changing environment.

This Progress Review evaluates the status of IFAD’s Adaptation to Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP) at programme mid-term, 2.5 years after the first ASAP-investment has been approved by the IFAD Executive Board.

IFAD uses highly concessional loans in an innovative way in the Republic of Macedonia, the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Moldova. Low-cost refinancing capital makes rural investments attractive and profitable for formal financial institutions and reduces rural poverty by stimulating economic growth.

In the past seven years, IFAD has successfully used refinancing facilities in economies in transition to stimulate investments on farms and in rural processing companies. The facilities have refinanced projects for a total value of over US$50 million in the Republic of Moldova, the Republic of Macedonia and the Republic of Armenia, with an excellent recovery performance. Refinancing operations have proved to be a viable alternative to established modes of financing rural investments through lines of credit and microfinance. And they have encouraged financial institutions to expand their rural networks and start investing in agro-projects from their own funds. 

Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General

IFAD is unique in the very clear focus of its mandate, and this sharp focus that also gives IFAD great strength, your specialist knowledge of agriculture and rural development will be even more valuable in the years ahead. Speech to IFAD staff, Chief Executives Board for Coordination meeting, May 2014

Marisa Lago, Assistant Secretary for International Markets and Development, United States Department of Treasury

By taking an innovative, community-based approach to investing in smallholder farmers - the most vulnerable members in rural societies – IFAD is an important partner in the global fight against poverty and hunger. I’ve witnessed first-hand the positive impact of IFAD’s work in providing technical training, facilitating access to microfinance, and strengthening farmers’ organizations in countries ranging from Uruguay to Tanzania to Morocco. The United States was a founding member of IFAD and proudly remains a strong supporter.

Despite strong and sustained economic growth over the past two decades, and a considerable reduction in national poverty rates, poverty in rural LaoPeople’s Democratic Republic (PDR) affects 30 per cent of the population. IFAD’s engagement in Lao PDR is guided by a country strategy that focuses on three primary goals: improved community-based access to, and management of, land and natural resources; improved access to advisory services and inputs for sustainable, adaptive and integrated farming systems; and improved access to markets for selected products.

Tajikistan is the poorest of the former Soviet republics, and 77 per cent of its population lives in rural areas. Rural livelihoods typically depend on subsistence farming, livestock and remittances, with livestock ownership being a key component in income generation and diversification. In poor and remote agroecological regions the production of angora (which is processed into mohair) and cashgora goats often represents the only source of livelihood, particularly for poorer households. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the sector has been constrained by the absence of goat breeding programmes, the limited harvesting and processing skills of small producers, and the lack of access to high-value markets. These factors have had direct impacts on the incomes of poor rural households, and particularly women, in Tajikistan.

This is a summary of the Ghana Country Report,  based on research carried out in 2014 in association with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) as part of an IFAD-funded programme on the role of PPPs in agriculture.
It is one of the four IFAD project-supported Public-Private-Producer Partnerships analysed for the research report ‘Brokering Development: Enabling Factors for Public-Private-Producer Partnerships in Agricultural Value Chains’.

The report syntheses the four case studies and discuss the findings on how PPPPs in agricultural value chains can be designed and implemented to achieve more sustained increases in income for smallholder farmers and broader rural development.

A case study of the Oil Palm PPP in Kalangala, Uganda. The PPP aimed to establish oil palm production (a new cash crop in Uganda) through private sector-led agro-industrial  evelopment on Bugala Island, Lake Victoria. 

The study is mainly based on qualitative data collection through semi-structured key informant interviews and focus group discussions, and a document review. Researchers interviewed representatives of the main partners involved.

When we look at the world today, we see impressive gains as well as daunting challenges. The Millennium Development Goal target of halving extreme poverty rates was met at the global level five years ahead of the 2015 deadline. There are now more than 100 middle-income countries, as diverse as Brazil, Lesotho and Vanuatu. It is estimated that developing countries’ share of the global middle-class population will rise from 55 per cent today to 78 per cent by 2025. 

However, amid rising affluence in some countries and regions, there is also growing inequality. In 2015, there will still be 970 million people living in poverty – the vast majority of them in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. And there remain 842 million chronically undernourished people in the world. Volatile commodity prices bring hunger to the poorest, and instability to markets and societies. Climate change and environmental degradation throw long shadows over all of humanity’s gains. Against this background, we must confront the question of how humankind is going to continue to feed and sustain itself in the future.

This coming year could determine not only whether the world rises to the considerable challenges now facing it—climate change, persistent hunger, increasing inequality, stubborn poverty—but also affecting the fate of generations to come. With a growing population that will exceed 9 billion by 2050, the increasing effects of climate change, a widening gap between rich and poor, and growing competition for resources, the major issues facing humanity cannot wait. Deliberation must give way to deliberate action.

But the global political will to eradicate extreme poverty, hunger and malnutrition within a generation, and the conviction that this is achievable, are growing. An ambitious agenda is emerging in the process of identifying post-2015 development goals. It aims to end poverty everywhere in all its forms, and to end hunger and achieve food security. And it plans to do so sustainably. This would perhaps be one of the greatest steps ever taken to secure the future of humanity and the life of the planet.

Land is fundamental to the lives of poor rural people. It is a source of food, shelter, income and social identity.

Secure access to land reduces vulnerability to hunger and poverty. But for many of the world’s poor rural people in developing countries, access is becoming more tenuous than ever. 

To address food security problems and soaring prices for basic commodities, in December 2008 the European Union launched a Food Facility totalling €1 billion spread over three years, from 2009 to 2011. Under this initiative, the regional programme IFAD-EU-ECOWAS Food Facility was established with a budget of €20 million. The regional programme covers a number of countries in West Africa.

To assure food security and protect the population from recurrent crises, countries dependent on foreign aid for much of their food supply, such as Benin, Mali, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, have designed strategies and programmes to support food security that are intended to increase food production through the intensification of strategic crops such as rice, cassava, yams and ground nuts, and widespread use of selected seeds and mineral fertilizers.

The Belgian Fund for Food Security (BFFS) was created by the Belgian Parliament in 1983 in response to the more than one million drought- and faminerelated deaths in East Africa. BFFS provides grants to pay for rural development projects, with a focus on food security and nutrition, in some of the poorest countries in Africa, helping extremely poor people to become healthier and more productive and lowering the risk that they will face starvation. 

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized United Nations agency, was established as an international financial institution in 1977 as one of the major outcomes of the 1974 World Food Conference. It is dedicated to eradicating poverty and hunger in rural areas of developing countries. Through low-interest loans and grants, it develops and finances programmes and projects that enable poor rural people to overcome poverty themselves.

What is the International Year of Family Farming? Small family farms are the key to reducing poverty and improving global food security. The United Nations declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF) to recognize the importance of family farming in reducing poverty and improving global food security. The IYFF aims to promote new development policies, particularly at the national but also regional levels, that will help smallholder and family farmers eradicate hunger, reduce rural poverty and continue to play a major role in global food security through small-scale, sustainable agricultural production. 

The IYFF provides a unique opportunity to pave the way towards more inclusive and sustainable approaches to agricultural and rural development that: Recognize the importance of smallholder and family farmers for sustainable development; Place small-scale farming at the centre of national, regional and global agricultural, environmental and social policies; Elevate the role of smallholder farmers as agents for alleviating rural poverty and ensuring food security for all; as stewards who manage and protect natural resources; and as drivers of sustainable development.

IFAD sees smallholder farmers as more than just victims of climate change: they are a vital part of the solution to the ‘wicked’ climate change problem.

The post-2015 development agenda can be structured to encourage governments and other actors to focus on strengthening the resilience of poor rural people and their livelihoods.

A number of targets that provide the basis to achieve this have already been proposed, particularly focusing on the promotion of more sustainable practices in agriculture.