On 4th of March 2013, the 30th edition of the Brussels Briefing  on “Agricultural resilience in the face of crisis and shocks” took place, organised by CTA in collaboration with the ACP Secretariat, the EC/DEVCO, Concord, and IFPRI at the European Economic and Social Committee, in Brussels.

During the two panels of the briefing, international experts and agriculturalists discussed the concept to resilience, and drawn attention to proven approaches and instruments around some key areas of special benefit to the small-scale farmers in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries.

P1010061

Highlights included a presentation of Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Honourable Minister of Agriculture of Nigeria on the six policies that have been applied in Nigeria to increase resilience. He also stressed the importance of the integration of institutions, technologies, and tools, as well as of agro-ecological approaches to build resilient agricultural systems.

Other presentations covered among others topics as: EU approach to resilience; Resilience in countries in protracted crises; the Regreening of the Sahel as a way of enhancing resilience; Drought-resilient crops at the benefit of small-scale farmers; and Building community resilience in front of disasters.

The event gathered more than 200 participants. The Brussels Development Briefing, taking place every two months, have the aim of tackling key issues and challenges for rural development in the context of ACP-EU cooperation.

 

New!  on the subject of Agricultural Resilience

Programme

Background Note

Highlights

Reader

Biodata of the speakers

Photos from the event

Infographic

Celebrating 30 Brussels Briefings

The Briefing in the news

 

Introductory remarks
Staffan Nilsson, President of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) [Remarks|Video]
Achille Bassilekin III, Assistant Secretary-General for Sustainable Development, ACP Secretariat [Remarks|Video]
– Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Head of 2020 Initiative IFPRI [Remarks|Video recording]
– Denis Salord, Head of Unit, Regional Programmes Sub-Saharan Africa and ACP wide, European Commission [Remarks|Video]
– Michael Hailu, Director of CTA [Remarks|Video recording|Video Interview]
Special guest:
Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Honourable Minister of Agriculture, Nigeria: Conducive policies in support of resilience [Speech|Biodata|Video recording|Video Interview]

Special guest: Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Honourable Minister of Agriculture, Nigeria, together with ichael Hailu, Director of CTA
Special guest: Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Honourable Minister of Agriculture, Nigeria, together with Michael Hailu, Director of CTA
From left to right: Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Head of 2020 Initiative IFPRI ; Isolina Boto, Head of CTA Brussels Office; Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Honourable Minister of Agriculture, Nigeria; and Michael Hailu, Director of CTA
From left to right: Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Head of 2020 Initiative IFPRI ; Isolina Boto, Head of CTA Brussels Office; Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Honourable Minister of Agriculture, Nigeria; and Michael Hailu, Director of CTA

Panel 1Approaches and instruments for building resilience in agriculture
This panel provided an overview of the key concepts, challenges and opportunities in building a resilient agricultural system in ACP countries.

Chair: Thijs Berman, Member of the Development Committee, European Parliament [Video]
Panelists:

– Agricultural resilience — what we know and what we need to know
Sir Gordon Conway, Professor of International Development, Imperial College London [Presentation|Video]

– Promoting Resilient Livelihoods
Thierry Kesteloot, Policy Advisor, Oxfam-Solidarité [Presentation|Video]

– The EU approach to resilience: learning from food security crises
Philippe Thomas, Head of sector, Food Crisis, DG DEVCO, European Commission [Presentation|Video]

– Building resilience in countries in protracted crises
Dominique Burgeon, Director of Emergency Operations and Rehabilitation Division, FAO [Presentation|Video]

Panel 1 Debate

Panel 2Proven successes in building resilience
This panel presented proven actions in building resilience along with lessons learned and best practices to decrease the vulnerability of agricultural systems and improve their resilience to both predictable and unexpected stresses and shocks.

Chair: H.E. Samuel Otsile Outlule, Chair of the ACP Committee of Ambassadors [Video]
Panelists:

– Enhancing resilience in the Horn of Africa
Jean-François Maystadt, Researcher, IFPRI [Presentation|Video]

– Resilience-building in the Sahel: Regreening the Sahel
Chris Reij, SLM specialist, Senior Fellow, World Resources Institute [Presentation|Video]

– Drought-resilient crops and resilience systems of benefit to small-scale farmers
Girma Tesfahun Kassie, Researcher Socioeconomics Programme, CIMMYT, Zimbabwe [Presentation|Video]

– Building community resilience
Federico Fadiga, Red Cross EU Office [Presentation|Video|IFRC video on Namibia]

Panel 2 Debate

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.