Rural Devt Focus’ll Help Break Chain of Desperation, Nigeria, Others, Urged
FAO: Bees can empower 2bn smallholder farmers worldwide
Senior government officials have recognised that rural development plays a fundamental role in stabilising communities and reducing global migration and conflict.
At a recent United Nations conference in Rome, the officials also renewed their commitment to invest in smallholder agriculture and reduce poverty in developing countries, according to a UN release.
Speaking on the final day of the agency’s Governing Council, President of the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) Kanayo F. Nwanze, said “By working together to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – starting with zero poverty and zero hunger – we can break the chain of desperation that leads to emergencies and humanitarian disaster.”
The two-day conference, which is held annually in Rome for officials representing IFAD’s 176 member states, heard urgent calls for action in support of increased investment in smallholder agriculture to ensure food security, climate change adaptation, equitable prosperity and, ultimately, to remove the root causes that lead to conflict and migration.
Delivering this year’s lecture, entrepreneur and founder of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, Mohamed Ibrahim, took African govern- ments to task for not living up to their commitments to invest in agriculture and rural development.
Ibrahim stressed that it was essential that African governments create opportunities for young people in agriculture so that they are able to resist the ‘dangerous call of extremism’ and noted that there are greater numbers of hungry, malnourished people in Africa than anywhere else in the world.
Among the outcomes from the Farmers’ Forum, a two-day meeting held in conjunction with IFAD’s Governing Council, organisers announced a plan to make the platform more inclusive, inviting pastoralists and livestock breeders to take part in creating stronger links to smallholders and family farmers on the ground.
IFAD, based in Rome, is both a UN agency and an international financial institution. Since 1978, it has invested about $17.6 billion in grants and low-interest loans to developing countries through projects that have reached about 459 million people. Meanwhile, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has highlighted the publication of a new study that quantifies, for the first time, how much crop yields depend on the work of bees that unknowingly fertilise plants as they move from flower to flower.
In doing so, the agency said bees may have a key role to play in improving the production of some two billion smallholder farmers worldwide and ensuring the food security and nutrition of the world’s growing population.
The agency noted that for centuries, this tiny striped helper has laboured the world’s fields without winning much recognition for its many contributions to food production. Wild bees, in particular, seemed doomed to slog in the shadow of their more popular cousin – the honeybee – whose day job of producing golden nectar has been far more visible and celebrated. But FAO said bees of all stripes are finally getting their moment in the sun. The paper, published in the magazine Science, asserted that ecological intensification – or boosting farm outputs by tapping the power of natural processes – is one of the sustainable pathways toward greater food supplies.
Food security strategies worldwide could therefore benefit from including pollination as integral component, experts said.
One of the FAO authors of the report, Barbara GemmillHerren, said “Our research shows that improving pollinator density and diversity – in other words, making sure that more and more different types of bees and insects are coming to your plants – has direct impact on crop yields.”
“And that’s good for the environment and for food security,” she stressed, adding that it is beneficial to actively preserve and build habitats in and around farms for bees, birds and insects to live year-round.
In the field study coordinated by FAO, scientists compared 344 plots across Africa, Asia and Latin America and concluded that crop yields were significantly lower in farming plots that attracted fewer bees during the main flowering season than in those plots that received more visits.
When comparing high-performing and low-performing farms of less than two hectares, the outcomes suggested that poorly performing farms could increase their yields by a median of 24 per cent by attracting more pollinators to their land.
The research also looked at larger plots and concluded that, while those fields also benefited from more pollinator visits, the impact on yields was less significant than in the smaller plots – probably because many bees have a harder time servicing large fields, far from their nesting habitat. But a diversity of bees, each with different flight capacities, can make the difference.