December 2010

The new CGIAR research program - Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security launched on 4 December amid a flurry of activities related to agriculture at the Cancun climate conference. The keystone event, Agriculture and Rural Development Day 2010, was jointly organised by a wide range of CCAFS partners and allies (see the full list at the bottom of the event's page), demonstrating that partnerships are crucial for overcoming the challenges that climate change poses to agriculture and food security.

The day-long event, which drew hundreds of participants including policy makers, farmers, scientists and journalists, aimed to put agriculture on this year's climate change agenda. The ARDD website has extensive related resources including session summaries, photos, videos and press materials. The event's organisers produced A Call for Action on Agriculture and Climate Change, summarising the day's key messages, and emphasising the mutual dependence of climate security and food security. This statement was shared along with key messages for forestry and climate change, at a joint Agriculture Day and Forest Day side event on 6 December. The unified message was clear: land use matters for climate change, rural development and food security. Read more about this event at the CGIAR in Action blog.

As COP16 ended, the collective push for including agriculture in a climate change deal has achieved small but important successes.

Agriculture and food security are recognised as areas deserving priority consideration in projects and programmes for enhancing action on adaptation, in a footnote to the Outcome of the work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (PDF). Unfortunately there was no decision on a work programme on agriculture on the Subsidiary Body for Technological Advice (SBSTA), proving correct fears that it would be held hostage by the uncertain state of broader negotiations and by a number of small technicalities at the 11th hour.

The Cancun Agreements did, however, call for a SBSTA work programme on REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) that addresses drivers and methodologies, as well as exploration of REDD+ financing options under the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action. As agriculture expansion is a key driver of deforestation in developing countries, this decision ensures some support for continued work on agriculture in the climate change context.

The Cancun climate talks may have ended but the work has just begun. From January 2011, CCAFS embarks on a 10-year work program hosted by the CIAT - the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. Please watch this blog and follow us on twitter (@cgiarclimate) for updates as they unfold, stories from ongoing research, and farm-level perspectives.

 After his first two sentences, I knew Joel Yiri from Jirapa was the man I was looking for. I had asked Peter Kuupenne, an extension officer from Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture, to meet “a creative farmer”. And that is what I found: Joel was a man with a vision.

As we shook hands, and sat down in front of Joel’s house, he introduced himself in perfect English. I asked him how come, and if maybe he had been a teacher. But he shook his head: “You know, over here, you are born as a farmer’s son, so that’s what you do for your life: you farm. Just as your father and your father’s father. But that also includes the core challenge: with the current climate change, we can’t farm anymore like they did. We need to adapt our methods. Our fathers had fertile grounds. The rains were plentiful, and for generations they used the same tools, the same seeds and the same technologies. Our generation needs to change.”

From that moment on, I just knew it was going to be an interesting testimonial as part of the series we were recording for the CCAFS program.

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“You have no idea”, says Ganame Ousseni, a cattle farmer in Ninigui in the North of Burkina Faso, “You can not imagine. When I was a small boy, the grass was this high”, and he holds his arm above his head. “We used to hunt wild animals here. We had loads of cattle too.”

But now it is gone. The forest and the grazing grounds. The whole area is barren with a compacted crust as top soil. “What were we to do?”, Ousseni shakes his head, “We had to stay here to mind the crops, so we gave our cattle to nomads passing through. They herded them for us, taking the cows to the grazing grounds hundreds of miles away, all the way up to Mali. At the end of the dry season, when the cattle came back from the migration, we saw we lost more cattle each year. Some were stolen along the way, or were eaten by wild animals. Our herd disseminated. ”

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