Set against the global backdrop of poverty, hunger, climate change, debt and conflict, it can feel hard to be hopeful at present. But there is a real win-win opportunity – as well as a deep moral obligation – to heal geopolitical divisions, foster peace, alleviate poverty, ensure food and nutrition security, address the climate crisis, and deliver a better, fairer future for people and planet. It lies in the reforms of the global financial architecture necessary to deliver the additional sum of at least $3 trillion required to support countries to meet the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Last year’s international meetings in Paris and Nairobi – leading to the Paris Pact for People and Planet, and the Nairobi Declaration – have made the case for debt relief, enhanced international taxation and global financial architecture reform. These reforms will be centre-stage at next week’s Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington DC.

Here the world must urgently come together to articulate and deliver a clear plan for how to end hunger and build resilient food systems, backed by real leadership, enhanced coordination, accountability and finance. The task at hand is to connect the global imperative to act on food security, sustainable agriculture and malnutrition with the broader efforts underway to drive a reform agenda and to replenish the World Bank’s concessional lending arm, the International Development Association (IDA).

At UN climate talks in Dubai last year, 159 world leaders committed themselves to action on food security and climate change by signing the COP28 Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action – the first of its kind. The commitments in this declaration now need to be linked with the emerging global plan for increased finance.

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African potential

Africa is ground zero for the climate crisis, but is also the continent where solutions will have the most impact. Of the 9.8 billion people expected to live on the planet by 2050, a quarter will be African. Financial reforms must unlock climate-positive green industrialization and transform food systems across the continent in a way that is compatible with sustainable and inclusive economic growth. But the ultimate test will be whether the funds released reach the communities who need them most, when they need them, producing the desired results of ending poverty, building climate-resilient infrastructure, saving nature and biodiversity from extinction, and delivering prosperous lives for all.

This goal is within our reach – with evidence and farmers’ testimonials showing the success of innovative models such as the Arcos community-led scheme in Rwanda, which has empowered smallholder farmers to preserve and restore forests and agricultural landscapes. To date, 12,000 community members have grown 4.2 million trees, including fruit trees for boosting income and nutrition, nitrogen-fixing species to improve soil health, fodder species for livestock and indigenous species for biodiversity, on more than 20,000 hectares. The farmers have also built terraces across the hilly landscapes to reduce soil erosion and prevent pollution of lakes and rivers.

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Across much of the Global South, there are numerous such inspiring examples of where communities and societies have established social safety nets, fostered rural development, and promoted gender and social equity. These approaches have enhanced  communities’ capacity to plan for and respond to more extreme weather, to continue to deliver their crops to market despite climate change and other challenges, and to provide nutritious food for their families.

Smallholder farmers produce a third of the world’s food, yet receive only 1.7 percent of climate finance. Globally, there must be a major shift in financial flows to change that, including efforts by international development partners such as the World Bank and the philanthropic sector. National government leadership is a prerequisite to success, including revising agricultural subsidy programs to ensure they incentivize farming practices and behaviour that will help the world close the hunger gap while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting biodiversity and restoring degraded lands.

Global momentum growing

This year there is a golden opportunity to make progress on financing for food systems. As a result of consistent advocacy – including from Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Kenyan President William Ruto and World Bank President Ajay Banga – an additional $300–400 billion in low-cost concessional finance and lending has been promised over the next decade by the multilateral development banks (MDBs) to low- and lower-middle income countries.

This recalibration of the international finance institutions’ balance sheets is a welcome development to build on – and demonstrates that climate and development commitments can be honoured. The social, economic and environmental case for making these kinds of investments in food security is unequivocal. Well-designed investments deliver four-fold benefits: they strengthen food security and nutrition; reduce greenhouse gas emissions; support nations and communities to adapt to a changing climate; and protect and restore nature.

The Brazilian government has committed to put zero hunger, sustainable agriculture and food systems centre-stage at the G20 this year, through its Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, and has committed to work closely with Italy and the rest of the G7 on this agenda. President Lula has also rightly placed the ongoing deeper reboot and replenishment of the multilateral development bank system at the heart of his G20 agenda. His leadership – in partnership with African governments and the G7, and harnessing such key moments as the UN Summit for the Future – could drive major progress at this critical time, starting at the Spring Meetings this April.

The post Spring Meetings can jump-start financial reform for food and climate  appeared first on Climate Home News.

ActionAid’s emergency teams report that many villages are almost entirely flooded, with homes destroyed and crops lost.

Some farmers have benefited from adaptation efforts to improve soils and crop diversity that protect their harvests from floods and winds, and early warning systems that enabled them to harvest and get to safety before the disaster hit.

But the Covid-19 pandemic is bringing to light many more vulnerabilities and inequalities in the food system. As lockdown measures hamper farmers’ ability to sell produce, even farmers whose crops have survived the cyclone may still lose their livelihoods.

Globally, cyclones, droughts and locust swarms continue to devastate food security and farmers’ livelihoods, and the combination of climate change and the pandemic threaten to seed a global hunger crisis in the year to come. We must therefore seize this moment to fix our broken food system.

For the past decades, the industrialisation of crop and livestock production has devastated the world’s ecosystems, soils and agricultural biodiversity, produced excess greenhouse gases that heat the planet, and left farming vulnerable to the weather extremes caused by climate change.

At the same time, agribusiness penalises smallholder farmers, leaves them more exposed to climate impacts, and concentrates land and wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

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For these reasons, last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on land and climate clearly set out that we must shift from dependence on big, industrialised agribusiness, towards ‘agroecological’ practices that work with nature instead of against it, that are sustainable and climate resilient, and that safeguard the livelihoods of the people who grow our food.

However, the coronavirus pandemic and the necessary measures taken to stop its spread are having a devastating knock-on effect that is causing widespread hunger and pushing farmers into debt around the world. Unless the rising hunger caused by the Covid-19 crisis is addressed, we will see food insecurity deepen next year while also setting back the climate agenda.

ActionAid works with rural communities around the world, many of whom report that sickness and lockdowns are preventing farmers and workers from accessing farms and harvesting crops.

Lockdowns have meant the closures of local and street markets, on which smallholder farmers – particularly women farmers – usually rely on to sell their produce. Food is being wasted, as vegetables and grains are rotting unharvested in fields, livestock are being killed and buried, and milk is being thrown away.

Meanwhile, many people in lockdown have been left unable to earn an income or access the street markets and informal systems on which poorer communities often rely to buy their food. Even supermarkets, with their long and vulnerable supply chains, have had empty shelves.

From Brazil to Bangladesh and India to America, farmers around the world are facing losses, spiralling debt and bankruptcy. Many may be unable to afford the costs of planting for next season. This threatens food supplies in the longer term, and may extend the duration of the food crisis. The UN has warned that in combination with climate change, Covid-19 may trigger famines of “biblical proportions”.

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There is a risk that if smallholder farmers and small businesses go under, bigger polluting agribusiness operations are likely to capture more of the market, concentrating yet more wealth and land in fewer hands, and increasing the food system’s contribution and vulnerability to climate change.

Social protection safety nets are therefore urgently needed to prevent the pandemic from pushing farmers, particularly women, out of the food system, and ensuring that people have enough to eat. Farmer income support, cash and food transfers, replacement school meals for hungry children, and public procurement policies that support smallholder farmers are key.

But to strengthen the resilience of food systems to future climate and pandemic emergencies, longer-term systemic changes are needed.

Covid-19 has witnessed a growing trend of smallholders selling directly to local customers, as people realise that short supply chains are less likely to be interrupted.

This approach can help food systems be more resilient to pandemics and better for the climate, while enabling farmers and local economies to thrive.

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Policy makers must support this momentum, and complement it with a shift towards agroecological farming practices, as well as less and better meat. As Covid-19 has shown the importance of social protection measures for farmers, workers and the food system, this lesson should also be applied to protect farmers from climate disasters.

Governments must maximise the synergies between food, climate and Covid-19. As relief, bailout and recovery packages roll out, they can benefit from Just Transition in Agriculture principles and Green New Deal thinking.

These approaches can strengthen national plans to improve pandemic-and-climate resilience, and transition to greener economies, particularly in the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) policy processes that are so key to the implementation of the Paris Agreement. This is a key moment to build back better.

Teresa Anderson is ActionAid International’s climate policy coordinator and Climate Action Network’s agriculture working group coordinator.

The post Now is the time to climate-and-pandemic-proof our food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.