“What Africa ought to look at is the potential for growth with resilience. Resilience being the capacity to cope with these threats of many kinds. And we also argue that the resilience has to be built in right from the outset. It’s not something you can just sort of tag on at the end. So the future lies really with having these two components welded together – growth and resilience,” said Conway.
Sir Gordon Conway
He added resilient markets reduce food price volatility, attract more investors and encourage greater productivity for smallholder farmers. Resilient agriculture, he says, requires partnerships involving governments, the private sector and NGOs to reduce land and water degradation and increase climate smart farming techniques.
“You’ve got to have good, enabling environments that allow new technologies to be adopted. But most important, you need technologies that will give you the resilience and the production at the same time. Some of these can come from agro-ecology. Things like mixed cropping or micro-dosing or so on. Or they can come from new crop breeds, which will give you tolerance if not resistance to drought and flooding and so on,” he said.
The Montpellier Panel describes resilient people as those “able to provide stable incomes, adequate nutrition and good health in the face of recurrent stresses and shocks.”
“You need better nutrition, particularly for young children in Africa. Something like 50 percent of the children in Africa, in many countries, are stunted. And if they get better nutrition then they’re more resilient to diseases,” he said.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25