Actions leading up to and during COP 15
Agriculture has appeared on the agenda of the UN climate change negotiations due to the important role of agriculture and farmers in managing the world’s eco-systems and providing food and food security for a growing population.
Farm organisations lobby the climate change negotiations in order to explain that the world needs to recognise the potential of agriculture in both mitigating and adapting to climate change – while at the same time providing food security.
The best way for agriculture and farmers to adapt to climate change and ensure food security is to increase resilience through sustainable improvements in agricultural productivity – thus increasing and improving production per unit of land and water. In order for this to happen, it is critical that significant investments in the modernisation of the agricultural sector are made.
Both adaptation and mitigation have a cost. In order to encourage farmers to change their practices so as to be sustainable, it is important to encourage a positive incentive-based approach instead of a “tax-based approach” – if we want farmers to be sustainable and continue to produce while generating decent income from their livelihoods. For this to happen, governments need to put incentive schemes in place to reward farmers for the production of ecosystem services – the services that farmers render to nature.
The role of farmer organisations is critical in increasing investments in agriculture, and ensuring food security. Farmer organisations should be recognised as key partners and as the link between farming communities and the international community/national governments. In other words, farmer organisations can act as agencies to aggregate individual farmer interests in accessing financial mechanisms to support adaptation, putting extension services in place, rewarding individual farmers for ecosystem services, and the suchlike.
Finally, making technology affordable, more efficient and accessible to farmers makes it even more important for farmers to increase agricultural productivity in a sustainable way. There is a need for international technology transfer and capacity building programs as well as partnerships between farmers and scientists in order to ensure adequate and fit-for-use technology development and more pro-poor farming research, to develop adaptation solutions.
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