$75 billion investment required to support Indian farmers to adopt climate change impact: IFAD President
International Fund for Agricultural Development’s (IFAD) President, Alvaro Lario, has suggested investments worth around $75 billion are being required for small-scale farmers in India to adapt to the impact of climate change. He added that bringing finance to rural areas is a critical challenge ahead for rural communities across the world and in India. He pointed out the three important questions need to be addressed -- ‘how do we make agriculture more remunerative for farmers; how do we enhance productivity at the same time as we're tackling a lot of the climate shocks and how do we move from food security to nutrition security’.
According to the 10th agriculture census of 2015-16, small and marginal farmers with less than two hectares of land account for 86.2 per cent of all farmers in India, but own just 47.3 per cent of the farming land. He emphasized the need of financial inclusion of these farmers, highlighting that the small-scale producers, hundreds of millions of rural people, are only receiving less than one per cent of the overall global climate finance. He also lauded schemes like 'soil health card' which gives farmers personalised recommendations on how they can improve their soil health, as well as incentives to adopt treat irrigation and other water-saving technologies. He underscored the importance of focusing on how these small-scale farmers can continue increasing their income through crop diversification, improved water management, or micro irrigation systems, and also creating community seed banks or using drought tolerant seeds.
He noted that ‘agriculture accounts for around 20 per cent of GDP in India and it employs around 42 per cent of the workforce. So even though there has been a lot of progress, we believe that continuing investing in pro-poor inclusive value chain and connecting small-scale producers to markets continues to be fundamental’. He also stressed on bringing private capital into the sector by bringing a partnership of the public, the private, and the producers themselves. He added that IFAD is adopting agro-ecological approaches that are currently supporting commercially viable and sustainable value chains. According to IFAD, it has invested over $1.5 billion in India in the last 45 years, reaching over 6 million families.
