What new UN goals mean to farmers

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are a set of ambitious objectives to help tackle and eradicate global problems such as hunger and poverty by 2030.

They are the successor to the Millennium Development Goals. Objective two of the SDGs states: “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture,” while Goal 13 says: “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.”

What do these two goals mean to the average farmer, who is struggling to overcome regular setbacks due to volatile pricing, weak infrastructure and inefficient markets? How can farmers take localised action to combat something as universally and potentially destructive as climate change?

These goals form the foundation for devolved units to identify and implant necessary legislative, policy and regulatory reforms that serve to unleash the vast human potential to break the cycle of rural poverty.

At this stage of development, government actors remain the most important intermediaries in transforming the agricultural sector from a subsistence-based economy to a thriving, competitive commercial-based industry that can effectively combat or overcome the effects of climate change.

TEN PRINCIPLES

As intermediaries, governmental units along with researchers, educators, technical advisers and agri-business consultants should promote the following principles:

1. Build on existing local knowledge and innovations already developed by farmers; aggregate this knowledge at the regional and national levels and disseminate widely through libraries, field days and the Internet.

2. Identify innovative farmers and use them as a resource for learning and inspiration. Thus, county governments should build and operate demonstration farms everywhere possible as a tool for local resource adaptation and knowledge transfer and dissemination.

3. Identify existing projects that have already succeeded in enabling farmers to adapt to climate change, and use these as a learning/training resource for changing farming practices at the local level.

4. Use the hundreds of already trained and experienced farmers as the prevailing source of wisdom. Use them to guide other farmers from the same agro-ecological areas to learn new useful techniques. Invest in “farmer-to-farmer” learning and exchanges. Exchanges and farmer forums are the most powerful tools for peer-to-peer learning.

5. Apply and maintain the focus on local agro-ecology systems adaptation and do not rely on generally accepted national or international approaches such as one-stop technology-transfer, nationally applied appropriate technology or GMOs can solve what is a local environmental challenge.

6. Adapt techniques to local conditions and make sure farmers understand that there are no “silver bullets” where one solution fits all challenges. It is knowledge-transfer, not technology-transfer that will transform the fieldwork of Kenyan farmers.

7. Foster and nurture a strong and enduring spirit of community-based experimentation of new techniques by those innovative farmers (see step 1) on their own land and under “real conditions”. By focusing on finding solutions at the local level by farmers on their own land, we can reduce the risk of failure by many, accelerate widespread adoption, and optimise climate resistant harvests.

8. Take the results of local on-farm experimentation and demonstration, aggregate findings, and support “community-to-community” sharing of results; encourage experimentation and innovation at the community level by investing in “pilot villages” or “pilot farm communities” where knowledge transfer and farmer exchanges are the norm.

9. Strengthen the capacities of farmer organisations/community structures to identify problems, to lead change from their own perspectives, to analyse causes and potential solutions, to test and experiment under local conditions, and promote results through farmer exchange platforms.

10. Across Kenya, farmers need to educate scientists, government officials and each other. What is appropriate in one ecology system may be completely inappropriate in another.