The upcoming 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 will both need to ensure that agriculture and the world's smallholder farmers are high on the agenda if we are to overcome the many challenges we face in achieving the Millennium Development Goal 1, says The Hindu.
To continue farming in a sustainable way in the face of climate change, rural women and men need to be given the resources to cope with the challenges of more frequent and extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, and new threats, such as sea level rise and the impact of melting glaciers on water supply. "Investing in adaptation measures now will be far less costly than in the future," write Prof. M.S. Swaminathan and Kanayo F. Nwanze.