Intervention by Arnold Padilla, Program Coordinator at PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP) on behalf of the Asia Pacific Regional CSO Mechanism (APRCEM) at the 11th Asia Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development (APFSD), Agenda Item 2: Reinforcing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and eradicating poverty in times of multiple crises: The effective delivery of sustainable, resilient, and innovative solutions in Asia and the Pacific, 20-23 February 2024
The climate crisis is aggravating the global poverty and hunger crises. But these multiple crises are presenting us with an opportunity. It is the opportunity to rethink our development model. It is the opportunity to give prominence to people-centered and people-led solutions. It is the opportunity to embrace development justice as a way out of these multiple crises. Local communities already practice many of these solutions. Many communities are already asserting development justice. Sadly, they are often ignored or marginalized at the national level, where programs and policies tend to have a bias toward the unsustainable and flawed development model dominated by big business and commercial interests.
Five minutes is too short to present all these people-centered and people-led solutions. But let me cite one example – agroecology. When fully supported by governments, agroecology is a real climate solution that reduces poverty and addresses hunger.
For one, agroecology eliminates the need for expensive and environmentally hazardous synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. These inputs typically make up 30% to 50% of a farmer’s production cost, based on various estimates by the FAO, World Bank, and others. In some cases, it is even higher, especially when global prices soar, such as in recent years when fertilizer prices skyrocketed at one point by 80% amid global conflicts.[1]
Such exorbitant production costs drive small and landless farmers in the Asia Pacific, particularly underdeveloped countries, to vicious cycles of indebtedness, bankruptcy, poverty, and hunger. High production costs, meanwhile, translate to high food prices, which further deepen and expand the region’s hunger and food insecurity, especially among low-income households.
Then, there are the environmental and climate dimensions. Studies show that applying agrochemicals generally has adverse effects on beneficial bacteria and fungi in the soil that regulate carbon and nitrogen cycles responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. People’s agroecology, instead of corporate control and technology, is vital to a sustainable reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and to address the climate crisis. Rural communities already have various agroecological practices that demonstrate this.
Science confirms this, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that agroecological farming could cut emissions by an equivalent of as much as 10% of global energy-related emissions. In their groundbreaking 2022 special report on climate change and land, the IPCC expressed high confidence in agroecological and ecosystem-based adaptation practices as solutions to adapt to and mitigate climate change.[2]
The 2023 SDG Summit listed food systems as one of the key transitions with multiplier effects across the Goals, including poverty, hunger, and climate. We must radically transform our food systems to shift away from the big corporate, fossil-fuel-heavy, and agrochemical-dependent model and towards a people-centered and people-led agricultural and food production model. Agroecology is a crucial pillar of such radical transformation of our food systems.
Agroecology will benefit agri-food producers, especially small and poor farmers of the underdeveloped countries in the region. Such direct benefits include socioeconomic gains from lower production costs without the unnecessary and expensive agrochemical inputs. Full government support through production subsidies, capacity building to facilitate the transition towards agroecology, access to markets, and others will ensure that farmers benefit from a comprehensive agroecology program.
This approach will significantly contribute to our collective aspiration to end global poverty and hunger because we must speak of the rural people when discussing poverty and hunger. They produce most of the world’s food but endure the most severe poverty and hunger. Almost 8 out of 10 poor people live in rural areas, where the incidence of poverty is three times higher than in urban areas, based on the latest available data.[3] The FAO and other UN agencies noted in their 2023 food security and nutrition report that rural people and women comprise most of the 2.4 billion people who do not have access to nutritious, safe, and sufficient food all year round.[4]
Finally, we emphasize that agroecology will not thrive without asserting food sovereignty. It refers to the right of peoples, communities, and countries to determine their production systems, which are ecologically, socially, economically, and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances. Food sovereignty is the power of the people and their communities and countries to assert and realize the right to food and produce food and fight the forces that destroy the people’s food production systems and deny them food and life.
Agroecology will not thrive without the small farmers and other direct food producers’ access to and effective control over agricultural lands, seeds, and other productive resources. It will not prosper if land and resource grabs are rampant and allowed by governments in the name of neoliberal foreign trade and investments. Therefore, genuine agrarian reform and rural development must be at the center of food and agriculture programs – not monoculture plantations or other development or investment projects that concentrate land and resources in the hands of corporations and displace, starve, and impoverish communities. Recently, some of these projects have been justified or presented as climate solutions when they are land and resource-grabbing in nature’s name.
The crises we face are presenting us with an opportunity. Embrace agroecology. Embrace development justice. It’s the way out of hunger and climate catastrophes. The people and communities have been taking the lead and grabbing this opportunity. We challenge our policymakers to follow the people’s lead. ###
[1] Fertilizer prices expected to remain higher for longer. World Bank Blogs. May 11, 2022
[2] Climate change and land. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2022
[3] End poverty in all its form everywhere, SDG Report 2019
[4] The state of food security and nutrition in the world. FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO. 2023
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