In The Hague, Stockholm and Paris we have heard the call for more support to producer organisations through which small-scale farmers can have a voice in the market. This call was re-iterated at the latest IIED/HIVOS provocation ‘Making markets work for smallholders or wage labour?’ — held in Manchester, United Kingdom, last week, in collaboration with The University of Manchester.
Within development circles, there’s a common, if recent, mantra that the key to reducing poverty in the global South lies in investing in agriculture. Increasingly that investment focuses on building bridges between small-scale farmers and private markets in approaches known as ‘markets for the poor’.
The world’s food systems are being squeezed from all sides: rising populations and shifting diets are increasing the global demand for food, while food production is increasingly compromised by climate change and land degradation.
Development policymakers, academics and practitioners gathered at a ‘provocation’ seminar in Stockholm, Sweden last week (3 March 2011) to discuss whether their approaches to supporting small-scale farmers sh
Agriculture is just one of the sectors in which carbon labelling — the labelling of a product to show how much carbon (and other greenhouse gases) have been emitted during its ‘lifecycle’ — is being used to show how individual products contribute to climate change. The logic behind applying carbon labels to agriculture seems sound enough: agriculture accounts for 10 to 12 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and produces much of the food we eat and the products we buy. Finding a way to tell consumers how much individual agricultural products contribute to this should encourage them to choose those products with the lowest carbon footprint and help make agriculture more sustainable. But the truth is that it is very difficult to provide accurate carbon labels for agricultural products. And carbon labelling can impact farmers in the developing world in ways that don’t support development.
