Online via Zoom – AsiaDHRRA speakes during the ASEAN-CNR Independent (Regional Southeast Asia) Food Systems Dialogue on 19 May 2021. The theme of the dilogue is “Innovation to Boost Climate-Smart Nature-Positive Food Production in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Region”.

The vent aimed to provide a multi-stakeholder platform for stakeholders to explore various existing and emerging approaches that have the potential to deliver nature-positive solutions at scale and encourage collaborative action in the ASEAN region and beyond and to directly inform the United Nations Food Systems Summit process.

The food systems dialogue gathered together state and non-state actors, including policyresearch institutions, universities, farmer organizations, agri-business, agricultural financiers, civil society, policy makers, oversight bodies and the media.

Read full concept note here.

Opening message of AsiaDHRRA Secretray General, Ms. Marlene Ramirez:

Meeting the demands of nature-positive production systems

Good afternoon to all of you. Thank you Dada of ACRN, and to the co-organizers of this important space to dialogue on the theme of  “Innovation Towards Boosting Climate-Smart Nature-Positive Production in Southeast Asia”. Mouthful…but I understand as innovations that will help build food systems to meet the fundamental human right to healthy and adequate food, while protecting and sustainably managing our natural resources and ecosystems.

I do not represent not a farming constituency, but  a partnership of  rural development organizations dedicated to the empowerment of farmers’ organizations or rural peoples’ organizations.  We are also  member of the AgriCord Alliance of Agri-agencies whose reason for being is the growth and development of farmers’ organizations and agri-cooperatives. AsiaDHRRA the past four years has worked with more than 60 farmers’/fishers’ organizations in seven countries in the Asean region accompanying them in their own efforts to develop their economic activities or agri-businesses, in policy lobby and advocacy, and in their task of strengthening their organizations to carry out their mission. We envision a trajectory and guided by an operational framework that survival farmers’ organizations can be supported towards consolidation, moving up a ladder of growth that leads to empowerment and entrepreneurship, and where they can take, at some point, leading roles in territorial approaches to development in their respective communities. Territorial development is seen to offer a more holistic approach taking into account opportunities, interlinkages, and local dynamics that could lead to more responsive policy options, action, and partnerships s among multi-sector stakeholders, where local players e.g. farmers’ associations and cooperatives could potentially take central or leading roles.

Most small-scale farmers and food producers are already contributing nature-positive solutions, in various ways, through their efforts to diversify production, to practice organic agriculture, natural farming, agro-ecology, bio-dynamic, perma culture, and living out principles and values that come with these range of sustainable practices, but we know that the extent or scale these practices are being adopted or practiced  is s/low.  Sustainable agriculture movements came to Asia as early as the late 1970s. For 40 years, the movement has so far only able to occupy a very small place in the agricultural landscape in Southeast Asia.  Based on data by the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), an independent institute focusing on organic agriculture, the area of organic agricultural land in Southeast Asia is almost 6.1 million hectares or 0.4 percent of the total agricultural sector in the region (2017). (1.61% in the Phils, .20%C, .32% in Laos, .53% in VN, .41% Th )

Farmers who adopt sustainable agricultural practices know that, for instance, recycling of biomass can improve soil quality and contribute to the sustainability of agricultural production by replenishing soil organic matter and supplying nutrients. But farmers have limited empirical data and lots of anecdotal information about results of biomass recycling to the soil. This is a major difficulty in convincing other farmers the importance of biomass recycling. It is also a major constraint in farmer organizations’ policy advocacy with local governments in formulating policies supportive of sustainable agricultural.  Very few researches have been done on the recycling agricultural biomass wastes as applied in agricultural production.

Zooming in on our partner farmers organizations in Indonesia, Phils, and Vietnam (such as KSPS, KPA, Ngudi Mulyo, Ngudi Makmur, API, SPI, FNN, MARCCO, ISLACO, VNFU), 10 of them are among advocates and practioners of these sustainable agricultural practises.  They  have invested in building their capacities to be able to promote these practices among their members. But what is urgently needed, to accelerate the adoption, is to reverse the traditional model of knowledge transfer which considers the farmers as simple executors of solutions identified for them,  and instead strengthen their capacity for initiative and autonomy  in the design and implementation of solutions, including local indigenous knowledge.

Farmer organizations have to be capacitated to do applied research and promote agro-ecology.  This doesn’t sound innovative, but the innovations could come in how capacity building will be done and how their learnings are cascaded to their members and communities.

The economic value of bio-mass recycling and evidence on its effects on the soil is just one example.  Another example of need or demand linked to nature-positive solution  is on Retrieval, documentation, in-situ propagation/cultivation and sharing of fast disappearing food plant species. And third is on Research and documentation of farmers experiences in farm planning and developing a tool to assist farmers in incorporating AE principles in their farming system design.  These are examples of innovative solutions that small-scale farmers and food producers would want to be capacitated on and empowered to do, by themselves. Key to this is the building of  partnerships with research institution to develop research capacities and the accompaniment of selected farmer practitioners of agroecology in the conduct of research and documentation. And the important role of government for the needed policy environment, the investments to scientific research with farmers in the fronline, and the willingness to scale up good practices on ground.

In summary,  prerequisite to the meeting the demands:

> develop more strong farmers’ organizations who can be frontliners in building capacities for agro-ecology; who can absorb emerging technologies,

> increase investment for agri research for and by farmers’ organizations

> strengthen partnerships with scientific/research community who could assist in building research capacities of FOs

> rally behind positions of small-scale farmers and food producers in the FSS, esp track 3 and track 1!

Thank you and all the best to an engaging and productive dialogue!