Will Paris climate deal protect poor farmers?

Purity Gachanga is one small-scale farmer who is beating climate change. On several acres of land in Embu North in central Kenya, she keeps cows and goats that produce milk, grows trees for fodder, and collects water to irrigate her food crops from a pond filled with tilapia.

Since she started out in the 1970s, she has overcome increasingly erratic rainfall by using new technologies and trying out different crops and trees.

And she doesn’t stay quiet about it. She hosts groups of other farmers and international researchers to show them the effectiveness of a mixed crop, livestock and tree farming system.

“We try to help ourselves so that climate change will not affect us,” she told a discussion about supporting farmers on the sidelines of the recent climate change talks in Paris.

But millions of other farmers are struggling to maintain their yields amid crop damage from severe droughts or flash floods, with no assets in reserve to help them bounce back from a crisis.

Global goal

The International Food Policy Research Institute released a study in Paris showing that climate change is a threat to agricultural growth, affecting productivity, prices and a new global goal to end hunger by 2030.

Given that, it is surprising the world ‘agriculture’ does not appear once in the text of the new global agreement to tackle climate change adopted in Paris on Saturday.

A key reason for this is that developing nations long resisted including agriculture in the climate negotiations, fearing efforts to feed their people would be compromised by pressure to reduce planet-warming emissions from farms.

A 2015 study from the Food and Agriculture Organisation found that emissions from agriculture are growing, accounting for around 11 per cent of the global total in 2010.

The Paris climate agreement refers only indirectly to agriculture, in terms of making sure people have enough to eat.

In a report released in Paris, the International Fund for Agricultural Development said technical interventions — like hardier seeds and accurate weather forecasts — are not enough to help small farmers cope, and must be backed by national strategies, laws and budgets.

One major barrier to helping small-scale farmers adapt to extreme weather and reduce emissions from their activities is insufficient money for research and action on the ground, experts noted.

A recent study of national climate plans found the 48 least developed countries alone will need funding of $5 billion (Sh510.5 billion) per year. This sum is much higher than current commitments to climate funds for agriculture, and at least 10 per cent more per year than multilateral climate funds spent on agricultural projects in the last decade.

Climate finance needs to include agriculture as a key sector, and support countries to implement the plans they have laid out.