To celebrate this year’s World Environment Day, the
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) brought together
international experts to look at sustainable land management (SLM).
The discussion on June 5 was part of IFAD’s Environment and Climate Divisions
Climate Lecture Series, which highlights environmental issues facing farmers in
developing countries and promotes some of the solutions that IFAD is supporting
to achieve a food secure future.
Among the panellists was IFAD Vice-President, Michel
Mordasini, IFAD’s Environment and Climate Division Director, Margarita
Astralaga and the Director of World Overview of Conservation Approaches and
Technologies (WOCAT), Hanspeter Liniger.
Representing the UN Convention to Combat Desertification
(UNCCD), Jeroen Van Dalen presented a global overview of the current state of SLM, and UNCCD’s approaches for scaling up SLM
globally. He tied UNCCD work closely to that of IFAD, stressing the importance
of food security.
''In the new definition by UNCCD of land degradation, food security
is part of it. It shows how important it is,'' Said Van Dalen.
WOCAT Hanspeter Liniger gave an overview of the recent IFAD grant to WOCAT.
This grant is being used to scale-up adoption of SLM in three
pilot countries.
''Our ultimate beneficiaries are the land users,” said
Liniger “We don’t make the change, they do.”
“There is so much experience available, it is criminal if we
don’t use it for the benefit of the people.''
A recording of the lecture can be seen here.
Recipes for Change
On World Environment Day, IFAD also launched its latest
episode of Recipes for Change, a web tv series where top chefs raise public
awareness by cooking foods that are threatened by climate change and show how
IFAD is helping farmers adapt,
The episode featured Italian celebrity chef, Carlo Cracco, who
recently visited an IFAD-supported project in Kandal province in southern
Cambodia. While there, he met Cambodian farmer Somreth Sophat and cooked a
traditional Cambodian recipe, Somlar Kako.
“Climate change is a
fact,” said Cracco. “Perhaps we can slow it down, but we cannot stop it. So we
must help those people who work the land so that there is a change in the way
we fight the battle of climate change.”
Rice, a staple food in Asia, counts for almost 80 per cent
of farmland in Kandal province, but frequent droughts and damaging floods mean
farmers here have seen harvests halved. See the full video here.
