CGTN Europe's Juliet Mann spoke to Alvaro Lario, President of the International Fund of Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Category
🎵
MusicTranscript
00:00Well, Ovaro Lario is president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. He spoke
00:05to Juliet Mann at the World Economic Forum about the need for global cooperation to combat
00:10climate change.
00:12Well, still I think matters that very much relate on how agriculture and climate come
00:17together will continue, which relate to soil, which relate to use of water, to the extreme
00:22weather events that are happening. So those are challenges that we will all continue working
00:26on. So it's very clear that we need perhaps to focus more on issues related to job creation,
00:33to things that matter to people. And I think that discourse and that narrative needs to
00:37be there. When we talk about small scale farmers, it's just how do we support them in continuing
00:42supporting better use of water, more sustainable seeds, practices that can help them into earning
00:50more money at the same time as benefiting all of us.
00:53Are you saying that these things can happen no matter who's in the White House then?
00:57Well, I think that the US is one of the important leaders in the world, and I'm sure that they
01:02will continue also focusing on many of the aspects related to agriculture, to farming.
01:07They're a big farming producer, and they've always, even in the previous Trump administration,
01:11also put a lot of emphasis on the importance of food security. So I'm pretty sure that
01:15will continue being at the top of the agenda.
01:17You talk a lot about putting people at the centre of all of this, and it just makes me
01:22think about what China's Vice Premier Ding has been saying here in Davos. We need to
01:27build a just world of common development. What does that mean to you?
01:31Well, I think the matter that really is affecting the entire world, apart from obviously some
01:36of the extreme war events we're seeing, is inequality. We're seeing richer countries
01:40get richer, poorer countries get poorer. And even among the communities, we're seeing the
01:45richer getting richer and the poorer getting poorer. And I think that inequality is at
01:48the core of many of the challenges we have. People want to really drive their lives to
01:53have decent livelihoods, to be able to send their kids to school, to have a good education,
01:57a good nutrition, and that's everywhere in the world. And I think one of the key matters
02:01is how do we address this inequality?
02:03And what about the role of technology and new innovation in improving a lot of the global
02:10poor?
02:11Well, I would say over the last decades, clearly China has been a big example of really tackling
02:15extreme poverty. Now we're seeing also, for example, in India, rural electrification
02:20going up massively. Now there's big plans, but multilaterals such as African Development
02:25Bank, World Bank, to also bring 300 million people access to electricity in Africa.
02:31I think there's a lot of, I would say, positive and good initiatives. For us, that means especially
02:36how we can reach that last mile or first mile where food is being produced in poor rural
02:42communities. We have to work with governments, with private sector, to enable them to make
02:47farming a business.