On the 20th of October 2021, the Irish Forum for International Agricultural Development (IFIAD) hosted its annual conference. This year’s conference was themed “A year for Action: Food and Climate. Taking Agricultural food system to COP 26 and beyond”. It was my first time to attend such a conference, and l was super excited.
Key Issues Raised at the conference.
At the conference, Maximo Torero Cullen, the Chief Economist at the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) gave a brief highlight on the complex challenge of Sustainable Development Goal 2. What is clear is that agri-food systems are under stress because of loss of biodiversity, natural resource degradation and climate change. Importantly, five action areas that emerge at the Food System Summit are not separate nor do they sit in siloes. Each area is to convey possible trade-offs with other area, and to pin point solutions that can enhance wide-reaching benefits. To minimize the trade off, Maximo Torero Cullen indicates that countries need to deliver more on the environment and creates stronger sustainability dimension for innovation packages.
The IFIAD conference highlights the importance of the inclusion of smallholder farmers in COP 26. Donal Brown, the Associate Vice-President at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) articulates that the greatest challenge for smallholder farmers is adaptation. Also, financing is in the matrix of smallholder farmers challenges. Smallholder farmers produce half of the world’s calories (Ricciardi et al, 2018) and they should be capacitated to adapt to climate change. According to a blog post from Devex in September 2021, we have a lot of good ideas on how food systems can change in the context of climate change but, regrettably, farmers are not fully involved in them. A lot have been said in terms of involving smallholder farmers but, they are excluded in the conversations.
A lack of consensus
Recognizing the need for food system change, the IFIAD conference emphasizes on the importance of collective effort from all stakeholders involved in negotiations, including the civil society. However, many concerns have been raised with regards to “the civil society lack of engagement approach”. So many actors from the civil society group could not engage with the food system summit. As such, it is not possible to transform our food system without consensus from all stakeholders and the food system summit will perhaps fail to deliver on its promise to get the world on track, to genuinely transform the food system.
Key issues for Cop 26 that were not discussed at the conference.
The IFAD emphasizes on the need of innovation, a mind-set shift and the importance of building trust to enhance food system transformation. However, they are important issues of COP 26 that were left out. One specific key area is on loss and damage, which is an extension of climate change impact. According to a newspaper article by Straits Times posted on the 23th of October 2021, loss and damage of infrastructure is a critical issue for the poorest and most vulnerable nations such as small islands nations which are heavily threatened by rising sea levels and storms. A continuation of repeated loss and damage of infrastructure creates livelihoods challenges in developing countries. Currently, there is knowledge gap on the degree of loss and damage.
Further, carbon markets, a key issue on the COP 26 agenda was left out. At COP 24, the carbon market agenda was not resolved and again at COP 25, a consensus was not reached. Carbon markets plays an important role in enhancing cost-effective emission reductions but they should be clear sets of rules and policies for them to be effective.
Sources
Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B. (2018). How much of the world’s food do smallholders produce? Global Food Security, 17, 64–72. doi:10.1016/j.gfs.2018.05.002
https://www.devex.com/news/small-farmers-say-they-re-overlooked-in-climate-talks-101567