Beyond one’s own four kitchen walls – the SDC opens a window on development cooperation
Bern, 08.10.2015 - The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) will be welcoming visitors to discover a world of exotic fragrances and tastes at this year's Swiss Agriculture and Food Fair, the OLMA (Hall 9.0). At a special exhibition, the SDC will be presenting seven selected projects from different continents illustrating its efforts to help reduce poverty and hunger in the world while promoting environmentally sound agriculture. This year’s OLMA will be held in St. Gallen, from 8 to 18 October 2015.
Franshesco is a 52-year-old cocoa farmer from Honduras; 34-year-old Silverio plants spruce trees in the highlands of Peru; 18-year-old Gezime works in a greenhouse in Kosovo. All of them have succeeded in improving their quality of life with the help of SDC programmes for reducing poverty and hunger. At the SDC special exhibition presenting examples of its efforts around the world, interested visitors will be able to talk with SDC staff and to literally look beyond what’s on their own plates. Members of the Swiss Humanitarian Aid Unit (SHA) will also be on hand to talk about their work in refugee camps. Younger visitors will have a chance to test their knowledge by answering quiz questions and see how chocolate bars are cast into moulds – made, of course, from cocoa beans grown by people like Franshesco in Honduras.
The SDC helps farmers gain access to markets
Whether they live in the north of Laos, in Honduras, Kosovo, or the South Caucasus, farmers who can sell their products at a decent price will try to produce more than their own families or village communities can consume. They help to feed other members of the societies they live in, and can store up provisions for tougher times. But the challenges they face are great: gaining access to a market and to investment is essential to success. For millions of farmers in the world today, local, regional, and national markets still remain closed. There is a lack of adequate infrastructure, incentives, and protection against unfair competition. Cheap manufactured products from industrialised countries often have easier access to the markets of the South than locally produced goods.
The SDC provides farmers with assistance in developing cooperatives and better organisational structures so that their products can find their way at least to the local market. In Honduras, higher yield cocoa plants help boost incomes; in Georgia this can be done with dry fodder for cattle. A programme in Kosovo provides training to teach farmers how to process their products for better preservation. This helps also to create jobs for people like Gezime.
Distribution and climate change as additional challenges
Food shortages are by far not the only cause of hunger in the world. The high costs of food and armed conflicts often create situations where people go hungry even in places where available quantities of food should normally be sufficient. The SDC’s Humanitarian Aid Department distributes high-nutrition emergency food in refugee camps in Africa, but also encourages the people there to seek paid work, since even there daily life must go on.
Climate change is creating enormous challenges for agriculture all over the world. In the Andes, the SDC assists people from the local population, such as Silverio, in adapting to the already visible signs of climate change, by such means as planting trees, for example. In Benin, where 10 to 20% of the grain harvest is lost during storage due to insects and mould, the SDC is testing the introduction of simple metal silos, which can help to minimise those losses.
Smallholder and subsistence farmers, shepherds and fishermen are the people who lay the foundations for feeding the globe. 500 million small family farms produce some 50% of all food in the world. Agriculture remains today the most important source of income and the largest sector of the economy worldwide. One third of all working people are employed in agriculture – but, at the same time, it is that sector that also comprises roughly 70% of the world’s poor. Better cultivation methods, in most cases simple improvements in technology and skills, more suitable seed varieties, and various agro-ecological strategies, have a tremendous potential for increasing productivity and sustainability. The SDC does its part to help ensure that the additional food produced is truly available where it is needed.
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