A lack of investment will derail efforts to ensure Africa’s farmers can feed future generations in the face of climate change, a report has warned. Food shortages, malnutrition and migration will undo decades of development unless more funding is made available, the authors added. Failure to act could jeopardise UN global development goals, they warn. The findings were compiled by the Montpellier Panel, a group of experts from Europe and Africa.
The report – The Farms of Change: African Smallholders Responding to an Uncertain Climate Future – recommended that international donors and governments took action in a range of priority areas, including:
- bringing climate change’s threat to food and nutrition security to the top of UN and national governments’ agenda,
- investing in sustainable farming systems to help smallholders adapt to and mitigate climate change,
- investing in research and local capacities to understand the responses of different crops and livestock breeds to drought, floods and heat stress,
- scale-up proven community-based adaptation projects.
Montpellier Panel chairman Prof Sir Gordon Conway observed: “Progress made in the last two decades to combat hunger and poverty in Africa will be irrelevant if action is not taken on climate change.
“African smallholders cannot escape poverty unless they are equipped to adapt to a changing climate – and this requires serious, large-scale investments,” he added.
