Extreme heat ruined the pineapples on Esther Penunia’s small farm in the Philippines this year, more disappointment than catastrophe since Penunia doesn’t depend on the farm for a living. But Penunia worries about the millions of small farmers in her part of the world who depend on rice paddies, coconut groves and vegetable patches that are all threatened by climate change.
That’s why she’s hoping that countries at this year’s United Nations climate summit will dedicate some of the money for fighting climate change to agriculture — and the family farmers who feed most of the people in many parts of the world, reports AP.
“You don’t help small farmers, where will you get your food?” wondered Penunia, secretary general of the Asian Farmers Association. “Who will farm for you? Who will catch the fish, who will get the honey, who will plant your vegetables?”
Many countries, especially in the Global South, need money to help pay for the months of recovery when typhoons wreck fields, to insure farmers against more extreme droughts and to prepare for a hotter world with better seeds, better fertilizers and better water infrastructure. But there’s a massive gap between the $1 trillion in climate finance that poorer countries need, according to experts from the World Resources Institute, and what richer countries are prepared to pay.
Small farmers get less than 1% of climate finance, according to a report last year from the Climate Policy Initiative. At the same time, food systems — all the processes involved in making, shipping and disposing of food — account for about a third of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
Farmers’ efforts to adapt to a warming climate get harder the hotter it gets, Ismahane Elouafi, executive managing director of CGIAR, a global partnership for agricultural research, said in a statement. At a COP29 panel on climate-smart solutions for smallholder farmers, she added: “If we want to solve the issue, how could we not invest in a sector that is having a third of the problem?”
Bd-pratidin English/ Fariha Nowshin Chinika
