 You are listening to Make Change Happen, the podcast from IAIED, the International Institute for Environment and Development. In today's episode, we'll be exploring how forests and farm producer cooperatives and organisations are rising to the challenges of climate change and food security and unpicking the barriers that they face. Hello, we're here again exploring how to make change happen. I'm your host, Liz Carlile, and I'm really delighted to welcome you to our discussion today on how forest and farmer producer cooperatives are rising to the challenge of climate change and food security. We will also look at some of the challenges and barriers they face. With me today are Duncan McQueen, Elizabeth Simardala and Claire Shakia. And they are people who are working closely with forest and farm producers and with the practical realities of getting climate finance into the hands of those dealing with day-to-day realities of climate change. So can I invite you all to introduce yourselves? Elizabeth, can you say a little bit about what you do? Thank you very much, Liz, and greetings to colleagues and listeners. It's a great honour and a pleasure for me to take part in today's podcast. My name is Elizabeth Simardala. I'm a Ugandan young smallholder farmer and also an agri-prenuer. I'm currently the president of the Pan-Africa Farmers Organization and also the Eastern Africa Farmers Federation. So PAFOA is a continental platform. We represent voices of over 80 million smallholder farmers that are members of over 80 national level farmers organizations from 50 countries of Africa that are members of our five regional farmers organizations. So I really look forward to sharing with you on how together we can make change happen. Thank you and over to you, Liz. Thank you, Elizabeth. Claire. Hi, good morning. My name is Claire Sakea. I'm the director of the Climate Change Group at IID. And one of the things that we're really interested in is understanding why finance isn't reaching the sorts of organizations that Elizabeth is working with and trying to understand actually how to begin to fix the system. That's great. Thank you. And you, Duncan. Yes, hello. I'm Duncan McQueen and I'm head of the Forest and Prosperity Work Program at IED. And as that name suggests, we're very much interested in treating forest ecosystems as a whole with both the forest and the people together and seeing how we can make things work better for both forests and people. Thank you, Duncan. I think that takes us very nicely into what we're talking about today. This is the super year of climate and nature and we're really thinking about how all these communities are facing the realities and what it means for us going forward. Antonio Guterres said of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent report that it was a code red for humanity. This is very serious times and we need to take serious action. But we know that many people are actually out there on the front line doing just that in various ways. So it'll be good to share some thinking on that. I think Duncan, could you kick us off by saying actually what is an forest farm producer organization or how can our listeners understand who they are and where they are? Yes, thanks Liz. What we have in the rural areas of the world are people living. They mostly make their living from forestry or farming. There are probably 1.5 billion people living on one to 10 hectare small holders. So it's a very big number. And they are in often remote areas and the only way to get help is to work together. And so they establish groups of different forms sometimes to protect their rights if they want to claim a territory like indigenous peoples. And sometimes to work together to generate income in farmers, cooperatives and so on. And the interesting thing about these organizations and I'm putting the emphasis on the organization is that it's really organization that helps them unlock their potential in places where nobody else is helping them. So local groups maybe work together to sell something in a bigger volume to get a better price from a buyer. But you can also form regional groups that maybe work together to establish a processing facility maybe for sawing timber or for storing aggregating and storing coffee or something like that. And those regional groups often provide services like finance or technical support to the local groups. And then at national level you can have these unions or federations that join up the voices of many farmers and forest workers to speak with government powerfully. And it's those levels of organization that really enable us to channel voices and needs upwards and also could act as a conduit, a flow through which the international community helps all of those people on the ground because all of the communication channels are in place. Thank you. And before we go to Elizabeth, who I think will tell us a lot more about how effective that organization of sort of the co-operatives is, I think one of the things you said to me the other day which really struck home to me was that this really significant body of people is actually the place where the poorer members of society get access to their food. This kind of group of people producing all the things they produce is a vital source for many people in the world who can't afford, I suppose, the more expensive food source. Yeah, absolutely right. I mean that's right. I mean there are 483 million farms there and thereabouts in the world and 98% of them are family farms and for poorer people they're not getting their money from fancy supermarkets and retail outlets and ordering online, they're getting their food from farmers markets that are supplied by these small holder farms. So if we're interested in food security for the poor then we have to be working with these sort of small holder farmer organizations, not your big multinationals. And this is an important point too for the first UN food summit that will be coming up in September of course. This whole angle is another side to this argument. Well that's right and they're often dismissed because individual small holders are very small scale. We put out a report that's called Small But Many Is Big and essentially if you tot up the annual value from all these small holder farmers, an estimate from IUCN said it was 1.3 trillion US dollars and that's much, much bigger than any of the large scale corporates. So Elizabeth, perhaps we can move to you and can you tell us a little bit more about the FPBOs in Africa? You gave us some lovely figures at the beginning about the organization and the structure. Can you tell us how those organizations are affected by climate change or the challenges of today? Yeah, thank you so much, Leith, if I can even speak about the FPOs, I think just picking it up from where Duncan stopped is just to emphasize that speaking about the food systems, especially the summit that is coming up in September, we really need to put small holder farmers at the center of the food systems because you cannot talk about food minus talking about small holder farmers who are the producers of this food. So as Duncan mentioned, I think for us we believe in a saying that united we stand and divided we fall. So the stronger we are together, the more chances and opportunities to be listened to to form a stronger constituency and the more we are able to reach our membership because as we've mentioned, most of our African population and funding systems are small holding. So if you are to reach out to every individual farmer, it is very much challenging. And that's why we join forces together. We aggregate ourselves so that we can have one common voice. We can even maximize in terms of offering of services that are in a well coordinated manner. So we use the farmer associations and the cooperative concept where we aggregate at different levels as has already been mentioned by Duncan from national level, I've mentioned over 80 national farmers organizations that are our neighbors. At regional level, we have the regional farmers associations now who deal with the regional economic communities. And also at continental level, now we have the powerful platform which connects well with the African Union, you know, to bring up all the issues that are coming up from the grassroots up to that level. So back to the issue of climate change as forest and farm producers, cooperatives and farmers. Of course, before we even talk about climate change, we first of all need to appreciate the importance of the forests because they are really very key for life. Most of us depend on them for life in many ways for food, the source of employment and incomes, of course, it's across the value chain. And also we all know that there is a source of rainfall for nation, they are home for so many animals and birds and also a source of oxygen, as we all know. But again, as we speak, these have all been threatened by climate change. Of late, we've seen the predominancy of extreme shocks that is in terms of both the wet shocks and also the dry shocks. In terms of the wet shocks, you know, the recent cyclones in the southern of Africa, most of the African parts, West African, so on, have been badly hit by the dry spell. We've seen the recent increase in the occurrence of pests and diseases like the fall anewam, the desert locusts and also all this has led to a change in the cropping cycle. Of course, which makes it again very difficult for farmers to use their traditional knowledge in terms of planning for the cropping cycles. So again, when it comes to, because of these changes, there is always a lack of information in terms of weather information, which can be offered to farmers. So the kind of work that we are doing as of course, as farmers' organizations, like I mentioned, we need to, we are always a voice of farmers' organizations at different levels. And we are leading in a climate change, farmer-led, I think, at a global level, dubbed the climate makers where, as farmers' organizations, we are taking lead in terms of profiling the success stories on the ground. That's great to hear, Elizabeth. And I guess it would be wonderful for our listeners. I mean, as a smallholder yourself or sort of the number of smallholders you must know, do you have a very brief example of how climate resilience by a smallholder organization has really sort of a specific example, can show people what the difference can be? So we cannot keep lamenting because of climate change as farmers we believe in finding solutions for ourselves because we believe we are the solutions to most of the challenges that we face. And part of our resilience strategy has been on how we can share information on what is happening across, but also how we can adopt to some of these changes that are happening. Of course, first we would want to see an enabling policy environment, especially you cannot discuss about climate change without discussing land. So usually we love before an enabling policy environment in terms of the land rights, we have different land tenure systems. Also the pressure on land is becoming so high due to a number of investors, but also the rural urban migration, which really creates a lot of pressure on land. But also there are a number of activities that we've been able to train our farmers to put in place, especially on on farm activities in terms of the good agronomic practices to be able to be more climate resilient. We've also tried to make sure that you know they are able to adapt to and be able to access some of the disease and drought tolerant varieties. And also again, other activities across the valley chain on the market side, making sure that we bring on board different innovations and also technologies and trying to lobby for infrastructure to share relevant information. As a smallholder yourself, you must be dealing with climate change all the time. Can you tell a few of the things you have to think about or do? Maybe if I can start by sharing with our listeners one experience that I had to deal with last year, the second season of last year, because here in Uganda we have two seasons and the second season initially starts around 15th of August. That's when we usually do the planting. And my field is on a slope. So because we expect to plant around 15th and then of course for the first and second weeks. But being on a slope then you have to dig contours across the fields to be able to top the running waters. So it's all happened that we received heavy rains that very first week and all my crops were washed away. So of course which was a very big loss for me as a smallholder farm and again, not only me, but also other smallholder farmers who are coming from the same region, the western region of the counter, not only that but the entire eastern Africa regions because usually we have almost the same climate. And you know such kind of rains also usually cut off some areas where you have one farm in one place and another farm in another place. And you know the infrastructure in rural areas, we usually have poor feeder roads. So usually when we receive such kind of heavy rainfalls, then some parts are usually cut off and makes it inaccessible for farmers. So having said that of course now that calls for again putting in place resilient mechanisms like I said, making sure that you have contours dug around the fields, making sure that you have you know, prants cover crops, pranted inter-pranted and also making sure that you have other plants you know, like animal feeds, pranted along outside the fields, we usually use like carriander pranting it you know, at the boundaries of the fields and we can as well use that as animal feeds. That's really helpful. I think you've really helped to give us a very graphic description of how you have to be thinking and practically on it all the time to keep climate change at bay. So Duncan, I know that you've been doing recent research and it sort of talked or I guess shown you or evidenced a lot about the kind of organised responses that Elizabeth has just been describing. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah certainly. What we are doing at the Forest Farm Facility which is this multi donor facility that directly supports small farmer organisation and forest organisations. We try and co-produce knowledge that helps them and so we start with surveys of these groups to see what their knowledge needs are. When we did a survey of 41 different forest and farm organisations in six countries, the number one request for information and new knowledge was in the area of climate resilience options for climate resilience, how to diversify their farming so as not to get hit by pests and diseases and so on. And that really made us think we had to give this climate resilience area a bit more priority than we were doing. So we've been looking at the international literature and we also commissioned 10 forest and farm groups to write case studies of what they were doing to become more climate resilient. And through all of that work it's become clear that there are about 30 different things you can practically do to make yourselves more resilient in the face of climate change. And these are things, some things to do with social organisation. So you can expand your membership to work together. You can represent your views with government to get fairer tenure and so on. So some of those are sort of social organisation things. Some of the options are ecological things like what would you plant on your farm. You can plant more climate hardy crops or you can use trees to fix nitrogen. You can control erosion, those sorts of things to do with ecology. And then there are things you can do to become more resilient to climate change economically through your businesses. You can become less dependent on a single value chain and diversify what you sell to make you more resilient. And finally there are things you can do in the area of technology and physical infrastructure like putting in place irrigation or terracing or boundaries to protect your property from fire, those sorts of things. So there are very practical things that forest and farm producers are doing. And when we looked at the 10 case studies from around the world we found that the farmer organisations were doing at least half of the 30 possible options. And I think what that means is that farmer organisations have to be climate resilient in order to survive. They have no option and they're really rather good at putting in place the things they need to be more resilient. And that's if there's one thing I learned from this whole body of research is that farmer organisations are excellent at climate resilience and what they need is more support from us to be able to finance some of the things they'd like to put in place but can't. And that makes complete sense. People in those situations are working with their daily realities. They know what they need. It's just getting access to resources that can help them do that. Totally. And I mean I could give you many practical examples. So Noviva is a little woman's cassava growing cooperative in Togo and they're faced by more variable rainfall and drought. And so what they've done is they've introduced a nitrogen fixing tree, Lucina Lucacephala, into their fields and they lop the leaves of the tree because it provides a nitrogen rich kind of manure effectively for the plants. Then they've gone to the local extension agency and managed to get more drought resistant cassava varieties. But they haven't just limited it to the ecological on farm staff. They've packaged their cassava products into three or four different things, made new labels, tried to find new markets. They worked with the Serial Producers Association to get technical and business support. And then they joined the National Farmers Union to represent them in government. So it's a small woman's group but it's doing really sophisticated things to become more resilient to climate change. What I'm going to take is to Claire now because I know Claire in your work trying to think around how to get finance to the local level for people who are doing really considerable achievements in local adaptation. You must have both examples and ideas around how we have to get that finance working. Absolutely Liz. The story that Duncan just told is one that we've heard again and again. You really can't define how best to adapt to climate impacts at a meta level, at a high level, at the national level or international level. It's so locally specific and local farmers do know what they need. And when they are organised they can really influence the processes around them. But when we're trying to get resources to them what we're finding is that it's incredibly high transaction costs, particularly for climate finance. First of all you have to show the additionality that this is because of climate impacts and not because of you know usual development processes. That's one of the requirements in getting climate finance. But secondly because there's very high expectations of your financial management skills and so on it tends to be highly intermediated. So the donor gives it to a partner who gives it to another partner who then has a small grant scheme that you have to apply to. Your ability to influence what the donor's understanding of what your need is is very limited because of that it's that number of people passing messages to the donor means that you don't have a direct voice. The finance coming with climate finance is very short term and as Duncan and Elizabeth has alluded to it's often coming as a sort of externally driven solution, somebody else's idea of what is needed. So when about five years ago we looked at how much climate finance was actually intended to reach the local level. We found it was about 10%, one in 10 dollars is intended to actually support people on the ground responding to climate impacts. And so more recently we thought okay well for adaptation that must be better because adaptation you need this very local specific understanding. So we looked at adaptation funding only and we just looked at the funding going to the very poorest countries, the least developed countries. And what we found was that it's just 3% of what the the LDCs themselves have estimated their needs were five years ago. So the funding that's arriving now is very much less than what the countries themselves estimate that they needed even some years ago before the current level of climate impacts that we're now seeing. But of this amount only just under half had any evidence of an intention for local actors to be engaged in defining how that funding gets used and that's not putting it in the hands of local people that's just any level of engagement at all. We also found that you know only 3% was considering gender and the structural inequalities in society, 3% was considering people with disabilities, 2% was thinking about indigenous peoples. I mean the quality of this funding is really really poor if you consider what these forest and farm and producer organizations are actually looking for. So to fix this we do need to go beyond projects, we need to reduce that intermediation. And given the aggregation that Duncan and Elizabeth were talking about earlier given that we already have these organized communities that have organized themselves around their production of value. Those provide a natural platform where finance could be transferred to those institutions and they then pass it on to their local partners on a regular basis. And if you start to provide regular budgets then local communities, those organized communities have an opportunity to start to invest long term into what their games need. They know what they need today but if they know that they're going to carry on getting that budget they can start thinking about what their children might need in the future as well. So this shift from projects to institutional processes, these delivery mechanisms that get the funding and the resources down to the local level. That's what we need to see to fix this challenge. That's great Claire. Elizabeth does that resonate with you? Yeah, sure. I totally agree and that really resonates with what we're doing as producer organizations and picking it from both Duncan and Claire. I can say that resilience for us is looked at at different levels where at policy and representation level we try and make sure that farmers have a common voice. We come up with our farmer-led approaches that we can really scale up and as we speak now we have a group of farmer-led climate recipients agenda or campaign. I don't know which right to add to use but it's a farmer-led process where we are collecting stories from the field in terms of how climate change is affecting the farmers but also in terms of the solutions that farmers are putting in place to be more resilient. So we also use this sort of representation to make sure that farmers' voices are represented at different meetings like at the COP but also engaging with the different stakeholders in terms of information sharing among the producer organizations in terms of joint resource mobilization in terms of organizing peer-to-peer exchanges to be able to help them learn from each other and be able to share different information. So other resilience is also done on farm where we look at the activities that happen on the farm and how we can support our farmers to be able to adapt to climate change. I think Dan can presented on this where we support our farmers with good agricultural practices. We provide them relevant information in terms of being climate smart and also how they can be more adaptive to the shocks that you mentioned about both the dry and the wet shocks but also the pests and the diseases. Then on the farm activities also we look at the entire value chain how do we make sure that our farmers become more innovative for example in terms of access to markets how do we make sure that let's say they do e-marketing where they are facing a number of challenges in terms of access to market due to issues to do with climate change how do they bring in technologies how do you create a favorable environment but also lobby for infrastructure for our farmers to be more resilient. But what we've learned from all this is that most of the farmers are efforts that they are you know bringing on board in terms of trying to be more resilient is really not very much I can say there is limited appreciation of those efforts I can say our contribution is not valued and most often we are branded as a problem to the environment and yet as farmers we're putting a lot in terms of making sure that we preserve the environment we protect it for our future generations and we've also had challenges in terms of access to different services as producer organizations and by services we mean let's say access to insurance access to financing I think as has already been mentioned by Claire when you look at the support that is on board for climate resilience which is mostly accessed by you know big corporations and for smallholder farmers they end up really not having access to such kind of you know financing so it really makes it very difficult even where farmers want to put in place resilient mechanisms they have such limitations to do with with financing and we have again some working models as self-generating resources in our communities and these are financial cooperatives the saving and credit associations where you know they mobilize their internal resources and lend among themselves that are pretty working well so I believe if this can also be used as channels where such kind of funding maybe can be accessed it would be an easier and closer route to reach out to to the producer organizations thank you Elizabeth I think we really understand don't we from what we've talked about this morning that this group of farm and forest producers and other smallholders I guess are a hugely proactive resourceful skillful and kind of on it group of people but what they need is the certainty that they can find the kind of funding that they need the kind of financial resource that they need to keep things moving and sustainable and to scale where they need to we need to draw to a close now and I do like to finish the program with a sort of what change do you want to see immediately apart from the obvious ones that we've been talking about the big ones what do you think the small change or a change might be right now that could start to get this this journey to better finance on the way but I'm going to start with Claire if I might a single change Liz that's a tough one um I suppose I mean the transparency of climate finance is shockingly poor Dona's reported over the last few years about 35 billion going to adaptation in the least about countries the poorest countries specifically when we looked at it we could only verify six billion of that actually had adaptation as a primary objective some donors don't provide any detail often project names don't align with their own a transparency websites so you can't look at the international database and understand what it's actually going on by looking at their websites because they don't use the same names but this discrepancy between the reported finance and what we could verify is really enabled by the lack of any definition of climate finance we need to agree what its purpose is and then that would provide us with a functional definition and then we could have third party verification to understand what funding is supporting what and what quality of that funding looks like so we've it's it we've got too much of the funding that's going to the big corporates that you know reckon that they can solve small farm and forest dwellers problems with a quick fixed solution we need much more reaching those forest and farm producer organizations themselves those organized communities local governments who actually understand in their context what they most need to prioritize and even if it's not large amounts that if that funding comes regularly it'll have a big impact so that's that transparency that definition of what climate finance is is meant to be doing and then there's transparency to actually track it I think it's the single thing that I would ask for that's really interesting thank you Elizabeth what's the kind of big change that you want to see happen you've told us about the the high level and there is a lot to do there but what would a change right now a particular change right now that would really help move things along I think like was already mentioned by by by clear I think transparency in climate finance is is very critical and in addition to that we really need to see self accountability for our actions and contribution to climate change we need to hold each other accountable but as we also hold each other accountable we need to see that there is this you know rebalancing over of the benefits and losses that we usually have across the the very chains so that it's not only the farmers to fill the losses but where that benefits then farmers should also you know benefit from those benefits we need to value the contribution of each and everyone in terms of monetary terms as farmers when we put in a lot to make sure that we become more resilient we preserve the environment what comes back to us that is why we are calling for equal partnerships you know being respected as also partners in making sure that we become more climate resilient thank you so we've got transparency we've got accountability we've got better benefit sharing and we've got more equal partnerships Duncan what would be your change now that you would be advocating thanks Liz yes I think my first emphasis would be on that word now the immediacy of what change needs to happen and that's because by 2050 if we do nothing we're expecting to see 250 000 additional deaths from heat and and related mortality an additional 529 000 deaths from food shortages and 720 million people pushed into extreme poverty so we can't ignore climate resilience my main change would be that at the moment the main climate funds are channeling their money through accredited agencies and the accreditation processes are choosing certain types of organization that are deemed fit to channel funding and they don't currently involve the farmer organizations and I would turn that around and say unless your accreditation process is directly selecting and channeling funds through farmer organizations then you're missing the people who can actually do something about climate resilience so that would be my main change that's brilliant that's very clear from all of you it's clear that there are changes that could be made that this is possible and I know that iid and our partners and colleagues will be working to share those messages in the key moments and events during this super year so thank you again to my guests today thank you very much for coming and sharing your experience and ideas I hope you our listeners will agree that we've had a lot to think about and during this very busy time in the super year when there will be lots of interest in these issues please do tell friends 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