9 June 2021, Rome – Grassroots support for the world’s 1.5 billion smallholder farmers – who are highly vulnerable to climate threats – to help them diversify their crops, products and practices is increasing food security while conserving forests, storing carbon and creating resilient landscapes.

This was the message arising from a virtual “independent dialogue” held today by the Forest and Farm Facility and the Vietnamese National Farmers Union under the UN Food Systems Summit.

“The reality of climate change is hitting forest and farm smallholders, communities and indigenous peoples hard,” said Forest and Farm Facility manager, David Kaimowitz. “Increasingly they don’t know what best to plant, or when to plant it – threatening their food security.”

But these smallholders also hold the key to the world’s food security. For example, smallholder farms in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa operate on only 12 percent of the world’s agricultural land but produce more than 70 percent of the food calories consumed by the people living in those regions. Building the resilience of smallholder producers in the face of climate change is imperative.

One secret lies in helping smallholders diversify, and the best way to do this is through their own grassroots organizations. Case studies of some of the organizations supported by the Forest and Farm Facility, presented at todays dialogue showed the role that forest and farm producer organizations are already playing in building the climate resilience of their members through practices such as crop diversification, agroforestry, soil and water conservation and value adding.

In northern Ghana, for example, changing rainfall patterns are causing crop yields to dwindle, threatening livelihoods. In response, a cooperative union called KANBAOCU is assisting its members put in place new practices featuring agroforestry, organic composting and clever water harvesting and fallowing. They are introducing drought-resistant crop varieties and helping smallholders add value to their products through local processing.

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