Small farmers can adapt to damages of climate change if right information is provided : Gates

Speed Post News Network

New Delhi  : Delivering the inaugural address at the 8^th International Conference on Agricultural Statistics (ICAS-VIII), Bill Gates, Co-Chair Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on November 18, 2019, said,  “The biggest challenge today is climate change at a time when we need to increase production & food availability. The work that statisticians do is very critical to face this challenge. Understanding how climate change is affecting crops, the productivity and how we can adopt and adapt to these changes is going to require the best statistics including use of new digital tools. Everyone here is part of humanity’s strive to adapt to the changing climate and to make sure that the poorest farmers of the world get all the available information.”

Gates said, “Climate change is complicated and requires learning different interventions including the development of new seeds suiting the changed climatic conditions and make them more available to poorest farmers. Small land holding farmers are over 2 billion people out of the whole 7 billion on the planet, this is a huge group requiring support. The small holding farmers‘ agricultural output is diminishing because of the climate change effects. They drain out of their savings especially due to unexpected climatic disasters like droughts and floods. The good news is that there are lots of innovations to face these challenges. Today in order to tackle the issues of climate change, we need to double the investment in developing innovative seeds particularly the seeds publicly available.”

Citing the good examples by ICRISAT & CGIAR centers in India in developing seeds for dry land cultivation, he said that more such works are required and it should reach farmers particularly the small land holders. Bill Gates also said that data revolution promises to change how statistics is gathered, not only for the farmers but for the whole world, according to a PIB release. In many cases new techniques predict productivity well in advance. Rich information is not available to the farmers.

Presiding over the function, Union Agriculture & Farmers Welfare Minister Narendra Singh Tomar said that it is a unique and important opportunity for India to host this academically enduring conference. He expressed his belief that this conference shall be a learning experience for the foreign delegates to know about Country’s rich statistical tradition and also the rich culture and diversity. Also it will provide a platform for Indian professionals to interact with global experts and to be part of international scientific developments. He stressed on the importance of agricultural statistics in realising the Government of India’s various agricultural-centric schemes.

The four- day conference has been organised in collaboration with the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, ISI-CAS, FAO, the USDA, ADB, World Bank, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Eurostat, AfDB and various other organisations. The theme this time “Statistics for Transformation of Agriculture to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals” was selected keeping in view the challenges faced by most statistical systems to generate data for monitoring social, economic and environmental dimensions of agricultural practices and policies.