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SDIN - the world’s largest NGO network on sustainable development.
This website is made possible through financial support from the Belgian Federal Planning Service Sustainable Development (PODDO).
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ANPED's monthly newsletter
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CSD 17 - Rural Development: NGO Intervention at the IPM, 24 February 2009
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An integrated food systems approach is essential for agriculture and rural development to thrive. This entails:
- Promoting infrastructure and market development that incorporates participatory mechanisms and technological choices and innovations by farmers, drawing on the comprehensive UN International Assessment of Agriculture Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).
- Promoting comprehensive and inclusive water resources management to address conflicting water uses and demands.
- Providing community-based extension that supports traditional knowledge systems and networks, with training of local farmer-to-farmer extension agents, especially enabling women to become extension agents.
- Strengthening urban rural links and effectively linking rural as well as urban farmers to urban markets, addressing the need for access to credit, roads, and essential infrastructure such as warehouses, permanent marketplaces and livestock-holding areas near cities for cattle transported long distances to help them regain weight prior to sale,helping to capture a better price.
- Recognizing the central role of livestock in many rural economies and in sustainable development. Humane treatment of animals is central to sustainability because billions of the world’s people – according to the FAO, 1.3 billion people are employed in the livestock industry – depend on those animals for food, income and social status.
- Proper, humane management of animals (both farm & working) improves their survival, growth and production. It is also critical for management of disasters and disease outbreaks, protecting human livelihoods as well as lives based on agricultural production and processing and provision of value added products.
- Ensuring locally managed decentralized energy systems that benefit rural areas, including solar renewable energy, locally accessible and environmentally sound abbatoirs and processing facilities for livestock designed to protect water sources and community health; and small-scale, locally controlled agrofuel production subject to comprehensive, inclusive risk and impact assessments.
- Recognize that managing risk is essential for all farmers to have the confidence to take innovative production decisions in the face of increasing climate unpredictability, disease, market risks and loan repayments. Risk management tools such as crop insurance schemes and early warning systems are thus needed.
- Providing education and training programmes for rural youth that develop learning capabilities and encourage investment in their communities, and redressing lack of attention to and investment in the needs of minority farmers in developed and developing countries, recognizing their contribution to food secure communities.
- Implementing internationally agreed approaches such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Guidelines on the Fight to Food, and operationalization of food sovereignty principles.
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