FAO helps Lao farmers cope with food price volatility
FAO helps Lao farmers cope with food price volatility
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has increased efforts to help poor farmers in Laos to face challenges due to food price volatility and climate change.
FAO with support from the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) yesterday held a meeting with government officials to discuss a project to help poor farmers in rural area of Laos to adjust to climate change and produce crops for a variable market.
Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Dr Phouang Parisack and a number of senior government officials attended the meeting in which the objectives, scope and budget of the project were discussed. The project will run in Laos from 2013 to 2016.
According to FAO, the project aims to enhance the institutional capacity of Laos to analyse, formulate and implement public policies to help protect the rural poor from various risks, which will be associated with the integration of a landlocked country into the world community.
Laos has become a member of the World Trade Organisation and will open its market to Asean countries in 2015 after the regional economic community is established. The world and regional integration will bring both a positive and negative impact to the farmers, in particular the poor.
One of the big challenges which Lao farmers are expected to face is the volatility of agriculture prices in domestic and regional markets. Over the past few years, the price of sweet corn and other cash crops has dropped, causing problems for the local farmers.
According to FAO, the volatility in international food prices since 2006 has been unprecedented since the mid 1970s. Food prices increased sharply from September 2006 to June 2008, when the FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) rose from 125 to 224 points. It then started to decline and reached 141 points in February 2009.
In July 2010 it began to increase again, reaching 238 points in February 2011, its highest level since January 1990 in both nominal and real terms. Since then the FFPI has declined again reflecting decreases in international prices of all the commodities included in the index to an 11-month low of 216 points in October 2011, which was still 5 percent above its value a year earlier and more than double when compared to that of 10 years ago.
Another challenge which Lao farmers face was climate change causing problems such as flood and drought. These natural disasters caused serious damage to Lao farming output over the past few years; some of the farmers experienced an increase in their debt to the banks as they could not harvest enough products to sell.
The frequency of natural disasters in Asia almost doubled in the past decade, according to FAO. Most smallholders in this region are located in the tropics, which are facing greater climate change issues than elsewhere, causing greater difficulty for smallholders to cope with the impact of natural disasters.
vientiane times
