Ms Olive Moore:

I thank the committee for inviting Trócaire and PELUM, one of our partners from Uganda, to address it today. This invite follows on from the publication of Trócaire’s policy report, Food Democracy: Feeding the World Sustainably. This report was published to coincide with last October’s conference, Transformation Pathways for Developing Country Agriculture, which was organised by the Irish Forum for International Agricultural Development, IFIAD. Trócaire is an IFIAD steering committee member and we were very pleased that the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine opened the conference.

I will introduce Trócaire’s strategic plan and outline the context that informs our approach to work on agriculture and food. Mr. Joshua Aijuka from PELUM Uganda will then speak about its work on agroecology and evidence of its social equity and the resilience-building properties of agroecology. However, despite the huge potential of agroecological approaches, the policy enabling environment to support agroecology is still weak, and Mr. O'Brien from Trócaire will close with recommendations for the committee to consider.

Trócaire's aim is to encourage Ireland, through its engagement with the Rome-based food agencies - FAO, IFAD and the WFP - and through its overseas development assistance programme, to increase and deepen its engagement and support for agroecology. Trócaire’s vision is for a just and peaceful world where people's dignity is ensured and rights are respected, where basic needs are met and resources are shared equitably, where people have control over their own lives and where those in power act for the common good. Trócaire’s current strategic plan pursues this vision by prioritising three key areas of work - women's empowerment; humanitarian preparedness and response; and resource rights.

Under resource rights, we address the sustainable use and management of natural resources. In 2018, we had programmes in ten countries - Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Kenya, Malawi, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Zimbabwe. These programmes supported poor rural households to become more nutrition secure and have better economic, social and environmental futures through maintaining and enhancing the natural resource base on which they depend. In the macro environment in which we live today, the number of people living in hunger is again rising and, globally, a disproportionate number of those affected are small-scale family farmers.

These small-scale farmers continue to deliver up to three quarters of food consumed in a large part of the developing world but they are doing so on a declining share of farmland. The rapid urbanisation that is happening is accompanied by insufficient non-agricultural work. The degradation of the resource base is undermining the resilience of farmers who are trying to deal with climate change and related extreme weather patterns. Trócaire’s agricultural and food interventions are concerned with identifying the agriculture and food approaches that are best placed to reconcile responses to the multiple and interconnected challenges of food security, nutritional adequacy, environmental protection and social equity. At a time of increasing hunger and malnutrition, land degradation, rapid urbanisation, climate crisis and unprecedented levels of biodiversity loss, there is an urgent need to reframe agricultural and food policies to ensure they are adequate for tackling poverty and hunger, increasing small-scale farmers' resilience to climate change and promoting biodiversity.

Based on Trócaire’s country programme experience and the growing compendium of research that examines these and related issues, our interventions are increasingly based on agroecological approaches. We are here today to talk about such approaches. In essence, agroecology is about agroecosystems mimicking the biodiversity and functioning of natural ecosystems. Such agricultural systems can be productive, pest-resistant, nutrient-conserving and resilient to shocks and stresses. Agroecological practices include integrating trees with livestock and crops, producing food from forests, growing several crops together in one plot and using locally adapted and genetically diverse crops and livestock. These practices combine local indigenous knowledge with modern ecological science to generate good yields and multifunctional benefits. The adoption of agroecological practice is growing across Trócaire's programme countries. It is being documented that a wider diversity of food types is being grown by households. We are particularly pleased to be joined today by Mr. Joshua Aijuka from our Ugandan partner, PELUM Uganda. Last year, 17 new communities in Uganda mapped their wild food resources and made plans for their protection. Thousands of additional households in Uganda are accessing water for food production through rainwater harvesting and solar systems. All of this is part of our agroecological approaches. I ask Mr. Aijuka to explain a little more about this.