Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has urged
more support for small farmers to enable them adapt to climate change, reports NaijaAgroNet.
Failure to act now, FOA said will affect food systems being
more resilient to climate change, thus "seriously compromise" food
production in many regions and could doom to failure international efforts to
end hunger and extreme poverty by 2030.
Director-General, FAO, Mr. José Graziano da Silva gave this
caution on Monday, at a roundtable on climate change during the World
Government Summit in Dubai, saying that agriculture holds the key to solving
two of the greatest problems now facing humanity: eradicating poverty and
hunger, and contributing to maintaining the stable climatic conditions in which
civilization can thrive.
He stressed in particular the need to support smallholder
farmers in the developing world adapt to climate change.
"The vast majority of the extremely poor and hungry
depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. They are the most vulnerable to
the impacts of global warming and an unstable climate," he said.
Innovative approaches, he said, exist that could help them improve
yields and build their resilience, he said, such as green manuring, greater use
of nitrogen-fixing cover crops, improving sustainable soil management,
agroforestry techniques, and integrating animal production into cropping
systems.
"But farmers face major barriers, such as the lack of
access to credit and markets, lack of knowledge and information, insecurity
about land tenure, and high transaction costs of moving away from existing
practices," the Director-General noted.
Isaac Oyimah/GEE
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