Africa: Farmers Need to Grow Climate Smart

Bulawayo ? Farmers cannot wait much longer for negotiators to reach an agreement on including a work programme on agriculture in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And until one is approved, "it will continue to be difficult for farmers to produce the food needed, and at the same time reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

This is according to Anette Friis from the Danish Food and Agriculture Council and spokesperson for Farming First, a global coalition calling on world leaders to increase agricultural output in a sustainable and socially responsible manner.

"Countries failed to get an agreement on agriculture at this year's (Conference of the Parties) COP18 in Doha, which means that discussions will not move to the next level and a work programme on agriculture is not foreseen for the near future," Friis told IPS. A work programme is a blueprint for action.

Friis said that agricultural organisations needed to pressure leaders to ensure that a future COP deal would include agriculture.

She said that discussions on including an agricultural work programme would continue at the next COP in Bonn in June 2013. But this, Friis said, would be without further submissions from parties, which could have informed and moved the process forward.

Farming First is one of 18 leading agricultural organisations that have called for a work programme on agriculture under the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), an advisory body established under the UNFCCC.

"Progress on negotiations on agriculture in the UNFCCC has been slow and this is why Farming First, together with 18 of the world's leading agriculture organisations, has issued this call to action," Friis said.

Such a programme would mandate the SBSTA to research, document and share knowledge of improved agricultural practices to inform decision making around agriculture and climate change.

Food security and climate smart-agriculture have underlined the push for an agriculture-specific work programme in the climate change deal, a provision that failed at the COP17 in Durban, South Africa in 2011. However, a decision on including agriculture in the outcome of the COP was adopted for the first time.

"Progress has been excruciatingly slow," Bruce Campbell, programme director at the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres (CGIAR) Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), told IPS.

Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201212181213.html

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