Making the most of each moment - Carpe Diem

Álvaro Ramos

Versión en español

From the 7th through the 11th of October, a new meeting of the Global Committee for Food Security (CFS) will be hosted in Rome in the FAO framework. The event will also include a round table on investment for small holders.

Let us leave it clear that as it stems from our regular practice and current situation in our region, we consider the term small holder as equivalent to family farming. Having said this, it is far from our intention to engage in a semantics issue, arguing about the scope of each term and their meaning in each language, because our real concern is to move consistently forward on the concept that refers to the role played by small holders or family farming in contributing to the food security of people, communities and countries. At any rate, in our region (Mercosur) the issue has been decided both technically and politically through Mercosur Resolution 25/07, which defines family farming.

In particular, this reflection on the need to make progress in the understanding of the role played by family farming in the food security and nutritional strategies is even timelier as we approach the eve of the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF), to be celebrated in 2014 as set forth in a UN General Assembly decision.

Vis à vis the IYFF, our strategy and mandate should be that it is not to be seen just as a tribute year, for commemoration, or a simple “proclamation to honor our flag”. International workshops, seminars, speeches, presentations... When screening results in 2015, we should hold ourselves accountable for the progress made in the matter of family farming and the role it plays in our societies, in terms of their development, and in food security. We should ask ourselves how many more public policies we should have; new PPs need to be better and specifically adjusted to fit a range of scenarios, to meet the local demands in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, Central or South America. Because if there is an issue that everybody agrees upon today — leaving all academic debates on the family farmer category aside — is that there are people that fit that notion in each and all our sub-continents.

If we do not want IYFF to be limited to a tribute year (however deserved that tribute may be) and if we do not want it to be left as a mere recognition, I believe that all of us should try hard to take family farming to the agenda of decision makers, presenting all its potentials, constraints and qualities, as well as FF’s productive, economic, social, and environmental raison d’être. Law-makers, government officials, business people, the academia… We need to address those opinion leaders that are not necessarily aware of, or believe in, or confident in family farming as a socio-economic category that drives rural development, and the development of the countries themselves. It will be our job to promote encounters with those that are not very familiar (or not familiar at all) with the matter in each country, each site, each region or sub-continent, or at every international event. We need to relate them to their daily problems of over use of resources, crowded cities, access to enough good food, access to drinking water, people’s security and migration from rural areas to towns.

We should push the visibility and the knowledge of family farming into society.

This meeting of the International Committee for Food Security at FAO in October promises to be an excellent opportunity that should not be wasted. The reason why I say that is because it will be held three months before the start of the IYFF, because of the visibility it has among governments and international agencies, and because the CSF’s meeting could be used to attract the attention (as a call for action) to other tiers of political, economic and social decision makers, depicting the actual linkages of family farming as the solution to multiple problems that thwart rural development and fuel poverty.

The post 2014 goal might be to produce a new generation of differential policies to benefit family farming, with new services, availability of new essential public goods, new trade partnerships between small holders and agri-industry or agri-business, levelling the field so as to integrate family farmers. However, that requires making the most of each moment (carpe diem).

We should seek more and better public policies, enhance the public institutions framework, to enable family farmers and the organizations that associate them and represent them to face the challenges posed by food and nutrition security, ranging from the family’s self consumption, the placement of their surplus in the local markets and communities, their access to governmental or institutional markets (public procurement) and to private markets and value chains, in partnership with private commercial operators.

We also need to push for investment that may enhance FF competitiveness, both on- or off-farm; we need investment in commercial and distribution processes; we have to train small holders so they can meet all due phytosanitary standards, as well as those regulatory requirements related to human and animal health and food security.

We need public policies aimed at promoting the availability of appropriate technologies, seeds and pedigree animals (breeding sources), husbandry and management technologies, organization of production, and naturally, management of natural resources.

Two of the United Nations agencies in Rome: the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and FAO, have a lot to do about it together. IFAD presents instruments that have been developed, made available, implemented and proven in each of the above-mentioned public policy categories. When applied by rural poor communities, family farmers and government institutions, these instruments have proven to be successful, or at least, they have certainly given evidence of being innovative and working as action drivers. Moreover, they can be easily scaled up with budgetary funds from governments or other international lending or cooperation agencies. Opening the conditions for a public policy dialog would suffice… FAO and IFAD would then take over, contributing with their knowledge, and leading the debate on the vast toolkit of instruments with proven success in various settings.

FAO’s CFS Rome meeting is scheduled from the 7th to the 11th of October; it foresees a round table on investment in small holders for the purpose of food and nutritional security. IFAD may “fill” the table’s agenda with examples, instruments and strategies, working jointly with governments and organizations beneficiaries of those policies and instruments.

José Graziano da Silva and Kanayo Félix Nwanze may have already identified this remarkable opportunity and there is a chance that their teams may already be working on the show cases to be presented at this round table; they can give an account of the investment that made it possible to develop more and better policies and more and better public goods and services for family farming. It is to be noted that in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in the Southern Cone of South America, IFAD has worked from ten to twelve years, gaining experience with governments and organizations that represent family farming; those lessons learned could be brought to the consideration of the policy makers that — as Alain de Yanvry puts it — handle public budgets, so they may finally realize that it is indeed good business to invest in rural development. And I personally add... in family farming.