Invest in small farmers or world will face regular food crises, says UN agency chief

theguardian.com:

In his first week in the job, the new head of the UN’s agricultural finance fund admits he has no small task ahead. Alvaro Lario takes up the role as head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development amid a global food crisis, which he warned could become a regular occurrence.

Lario wants the IFAD to focus on investing in the resilience of small-scale farmers so they can produce food for themselves and are not left at the mercy of external shocks.

“Resilient means that when you have a shock to your income – like currently, with inflation – when you have a shock coming from extreme climate, you’re not going to fall from the brink of poverty into poverty or food insecurity,” said Lario.

The current food crisis, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, would happen again – and soon – unless world leaders addressed decades of underinvestment in how food was grown and delivered, he warned.

He said hundreds of billions of dollars needed to be directed towards small farms by investing in water and soil conservation, offering low-interest loans, access to markets, and boosting productivity.

“What we’re seeing is that they are currently not even able to actually produce their [own] food, many of them have to sell their assets … because they don’t have enough to feed themselves.”

Lario said the impact of war in Ukraine had disrupted shipping of key crops for months and caused fertiliser prices to jump, exacerbating existing problems as 150 million people had fallen into hunger before the war.

“If we do not invest right now, in terms of tens or hundreds of billions, even if we resolve the Ukraine war soon, in two to five years we will be in the same situation,” he said.

“In the short term, we’ve had a lot of climate shocks, droughts