Sustainable development inseparable from peace, FAO DG

NaijaAgroNet:

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director-General, Mr. José Graziano Da Silva has said at the ongoing United Nations Climate Conference (COP21) has lamented the increasingly hard meted by hunger and appealed to world leaders to show courage and resilience by opting for changes that promote a safer, fairer and more inclusive world, reports NaijaAgroNet.

He also said that there will be no peace without sustainable development and there will never be sustainable development while people continue to be left behind and while people are suffering from extreme poverty and hunger, stressing "we must demonstrate that we are not afraid" of promoting the changes needed to achieve this.  

Addressing participants in a COP21 High Level Meeting on climate resilience and adaptation, Graziano da Silva pointed out that the launch of  the UN Secretary-General's new “Initiative on Resilience: Anticipate, Absorb, Reshape  (A2R)” aimed at boosting countries' disaster risk reduction efforts.

According to him, climate change "affects all of us, but especially the poorest and hungry people," underscoring how smallholders and family farmers are in the front line.

The most vulnerable, he said, must be helped to adapt to climate change, pointing out that in relation to the agricultural sectors, this requires environmentally sound initiatives that must go hand-in-hand with mitigating climate change impacts.

 

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Climate change mars coffee production in Tanzania

 NaijaAgroNet

Farmers in Tanzania have abandoned the production of coffee and cotton due  mainly to changes in local climate and resorted to the planting of more lucrative vegetables and flowers as temperatures rise and rainfall becomes less predictable, reports NaijaAgroNet

Ludovick Meela, a farmer from Tanzania’s northern Kilimanjaro region told reporters that “Coffee beans are no longer as profitable, as my harvests keep on falling, I need fast-growing crops I can sell for a quick income,” he stated.

"When my children were growing up, coffee was everything to me," he told journalists "I got a lot of income from it, which enabled me to gain economically, but all that is history." 

Information reaching NaijaAgroNet showed that in Tanzania, scientists have attributed the drop in arabica coffee yields to a rise in nighttime temperatures in recent decades.

The strain to Tanzania’s cash crops is the latest sign that climate change is altering how and where food is produced around the world.

In Honduras, banana farmers are seeing yields decline amid fierce cold snaps and erratic rain patterns. India’s wheat and rice crops are suffering from hotter weather, and in the U.S. West, enduring drought has caused the beef-cattle herd to shrink to its lowest level in more than 60 years, NaijaAgroNet learnt.

Cyriacus Nnaj/GEE

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