THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, April 11, 2024
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met with videoconference this day at 9:01 a.m. [ET] to examine and report on issues relating to agriculture and forestry generally; and, in camera, to discuss future business.
Senator Robert Black (Chair) in the chair.
The Chair: Good morning, everyone. It’s good to see you here. I’d like to begin by welcoming the members of the committee, our witnesses and those watching this meeting on the web. My name is Rob Black, a senator from Ontario, and I chair this committee.
Before we hear from our witnesses, I would like to start by asking our senators to introduce themselves, starting with our deputy chair.
Senator Simons: Hello, I’m Paula Simons, senator from Alberta. I come from Treaty 6 territory.
Senator Burey: Good morning. I’m Sharon Burey, senator from Ontario.
Senator McNair: Good morning. I’m John McNair, senator from New Brunswick.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Good morning. I’m Chantal Petitclerc from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Oh: Good morning. I’m Senator Oh from Ontario. Welcome to Ottawa.
The Chair: Today, we have as esteemed witnesses, from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO, Beth Bechdol, Deputy Director-General; Lauren Phillips, Deputy Director, Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division; and Nicholas Sitko, Senior Economist, Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division.
I understand that Ms. Bechdol and Mr. Sitko will be delivering opening remarks. We have one panel today, so we’re not going to really hold you to a time. We’ll give you between 7 and 10 minutes to make your presentation, after which time, we will have questions for you. If it gets close to 10 minutes, I’ll put up my hand, and when it is at 10 minutes, we will try to wrap it up.
With that, the floor is yours, Ms. Bechdol.
Beth Bechdol, Deputy Director General, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Great. Thank you so much, Senator Black and distinguished members of the Senate. We’re very pleased to be with you here in Ottawa. We do very much appreciate the opportunity to brief you today on a very timely and important report called The unjust climate.
It is very nice to see so many familiar faces here at the table. All of us at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations would very much just like to express our appreciation for the continued support of the members of this particular committee and for your trust in our work, for the leadership that so many of you have shown in working on so many of our shared priorities and for always bringing attention to global food security and other important agricultural issues.
We have been here in Ottawa these last two days as part of an informal regional conference that we hold with officials here in Canada and with counterparts from the United States government. We have covered a variety of topics from trade to climate to gender, and they have been very productive and valuable discussions. Being able to now close out our trip before we return to Rome later today — many of us — is a very special recognition of the shared work.
Canada has clearly been a global champion for promoting gender equality and also addressing climate change together, so we are confident that this new report will support your own work in these two important areas. Just last year, many of you will recall that we had a dedicated session with some of you to present another seminal report from our organization, The status of women in agrifood systems, which brought forward important evidence on gender gaps in the global agri-food economy.
The report we will present to you today provides even further data on the impacts climate change have on the poor and, specifically, on women and youth. It puts front and centre those who bear the brunt of the climate crisis, which most often are those who contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions and other climate-related issues.
I’m pleased to be joined here today by both Mr. Sitko and Ms. Phillips. As you said, Mr. Sitko is going to present to you on the findings of the report, and then we very much look forward to taking your questions, hearing your comments and engaging in what I know will be a very interesting and valuable discussion.
With that, I’d like to go ahead and pass the floor. Mr. Sitko, over to you.
Nicholas Sitko, Senior Economist, Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Thank you, Ms. Bechdol, and good morning, distinguished senators. It’s my pleasure to be here today. I’m very happy to be able to share with you some of the key findings from our recent report, The unjust climate: Measuring the impacts of climate change on rural poor, women and youth.
Before I get into the key findings, maybe I’ll give you a quick background on the data that can underline the analysis contained in this report.
What we have used here is household survey data from 24 low- and middle-income countries. This is survey data covering more than 100,000 rural people in those countries, statistically representative of 950 million people in low- and middle-income countries. We’ve taken this survey data and connected it in both time and space with satellite weather data covering a period of up to 70 years. With that combination of data sets, we’re able to disentangle how extreme weather events, like heat stresses, droughts and floods, as well as long-term changes in temperatures are differently affecting rural populations based on their wealth status, their age and their gender.
With that, I’ll shift now to some of the key overarching findings. Later, we’ll touch more upon individual specific-level outcomes, focused mostly on sub-Saharan Africa.
Our research shows that extreme weather events are having disproportionately adverse effects on rural women, people living in poverty and older rural populations. We find that, in an average year, these kinds of extreme weather events are causing these more vulnerable rural populations to lose between 3% and 8% of their total incomes compared to less vulnerable rural populations. To put those numbers in a monetary context, if we were to look across all low- and middle-income countries, what we’re talking about are income losses faced by these populations of between $16 and $37 billion per year. They are substantial income losses.
It’s not just extreme weather events that are adversely affecting these populations. The analysis shows, for example, that a 1-degree long-term change in average temperatures is causing a 34% reduction in the incomes of female-headed rural households compared to male-headed households. We’re also finding that poor households are being pushed to depend more on agriculture as a form of livelihood and are less able to access non-farm income as a result of long-term temperature rises, making them, in the long run, more vulnerable to changing climates.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the data sets allow us to move from the household level down to the individual level to the specific agricultural plots managed by individual people as well as their labour time and how they are allocating their labour.
In sub-Saharan Africa, we found that exposure to extreme weather events is pushing rural women and the plots they are managing to adopt more climate-adaptive practices at a rate that’s similar to or sometimes greater than plots that are managed by men. They are adopting things like intercropping cereals with legumes, investing more in irrigation, using organic fertilizers and those sorts of practices.
They are also working more as a result of extreme weather events. Compared to men, exposure to extreme weather events in an average year is causing rural women to work about an hour more per week than men, and this is in addition to an already disproportionate burden that rural women often face as a result of domestic and care responsibilities in the household.
Despite the efforts that rural women in Africa are making to adapt and cope with climate change, it remains that their agricultural plots are more sensitive to extreme weather events. We find, for example, that an additional day of heat stress is causing plots managed by women to lose about 3% more of their value in terms of agricultural production than plots managed by men.
Another worrisome finding from the report is the effect that these extreme weather events are having on child labour in rural areas. We find that as a result of extreme weather events in an average year, children ages 10 to 14 are working more — up to 50 minutes more per week — coming at the expense, of course, of time for school, time for play, et cetera.
Despite these stark and worrisome findings, the fact remains that policy and investment attention to vulnerable populations facing climate change are low. A recent report showed that in 2017-18, of all tracked climate financing, it was found that only 1.7% of that tracked climate financing was going to small-scale producers. So just a small fraction. It’s about $10 billion, which is not even sufficient to cover the losses that some of these vulnerable people are facing.
When we look at the policy documents for the 24 countries included in this study — these include nationally determined contribution documents and national adaptation plans — we identified that across all these documents, there are about 4,000 climate actions that are proposed, and, of those, only 6% mention women, 2% mention youth and 1% mentions people living in poverty. So very little of the climate policy attention is going towards these populations.
Of course, we need more policy attention and investment, but we also need well-designed and well-targeted interventions to address these vulnerabilities. The report goes into a lot more detail, but I just want to highlight five key points.
One is that we need policies and support to address disparities in access to resources — things like land, credit, financing, et cetera. We need to focus on how we can deliver extension services and climate advisory services to vulnerable people in a more effective way, who are often excluded from traditional systems. Participatory approaches, et cetera, are shown to be effective.
Third, we need to think about ways to address the risks that rural populations face in terms of adapting to climate change and help compensate them for their losses. Examples include integrating social protection programs with climate advisory services so that you’re able to scale up and scale out support to these populations in anticipation of these events.
Fourth, we need to put more attention on the rural non-farm economy and non-farm employment opportunities. Investments in education, soft skills, infrastructure and opening new markets for vulnerable populations are all very important.
Finally, we need to move beyond just focusing on material constraints and start addressing some of the discriminatory norms that tend to perpetuate vulnerabilities in these places — gendered norms that place a disproportionate burden of care and domestic responsibility on women, for example. There are gender-transformative approaches that bring together men and women to identify solutions to these sorts of challenges that are proving to be effective.
In conclusion, by taking a more inclusive approach to climate actions and investments, we will be able to chart a more sustainable and climate-resilient future. Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your opening comments.
Senator Simons: Thank you very much, and thank you all for making the trip to be here. Whether you’ve come from Washington or Rome, we’re very grateful.
I wanted to talk about two factors, Mr. Sitko, that you mentioned in your analysis. One is access to irrigation and the other is access to credit. As heat rises and drought increases, I imagine that the pressure and competition for access to irrigation goes up, and I wondered if you can tell me: Is that one of the factors here that causes people who are socially disadvantaged by age, gender or maybe ethnic minority status to be less likely to have access to irrigation and water resources in general?
Mr. Sitko: Yes. That is a great question. Thank you very much, senator. It is absolutely the case that more vulnerable populations have less access to irrigation, and I think that there are a couple of reasons for it.
Oftentimes, vulnerable populations are pushed into more marginal land areas where access to water is already constrained. They often lack access to the capital needed to invest in irrigation equipment or access to the public services that can provide those.
Even in cases where they are connected to an irrigation system — I’m thinking, for example, of work that we’ve done in Sri Lanka — more vulnerable populations tend to be at the tail end of the irrigation infrastructure. In other words, when there’s a drought and water resources are constrained, that water doesn’t typically reach down to the end of the canal.
The people at the top of the canal are better able to access it. So there are a lot of different dynamics there related to location, access to credit and capital to invest in the infrastructure, and political economies within irrigation schemes as well.
Senator Simons: I wanted to ask about credit, and maybe I’ll ask Ms. Phillips because you spoke to us about some of these issues when you were last here. At that time, you were talking about microcredit and other things that could be done to help women in particular to get access to credit. I’ll ask you and then, Mr. Sitko, if you want to follow up.
What needs to be done to make sure that not just women but also young people and people who are minorities in their own communities have access to the credit they need?
Lauren Phillips, Deputy Director, Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Thank you for the question. The gap between men and women’s access to basic financial services is one of the small glimmers of hope that we found in our analysis that we presented last year. The gap has been narrowing between men and women’s access to basic financial services, and that means savings and basic levels of credit. However, those are not sufficient to help people fund businesses or scale up their agricultural practices, and, in fact, both young people and women often lack collateral such as land, registration titles or other types of property or wealth that they can use as collateral to access larger amounts of credit.
The combination of the fact that agriculture is seen as a very risky practice for lending and the vulnerability of these groups means that public resources, whether they come from international sources or domestic sources, can really help to underwrite the risk that is perceived by financial institutions on lending further to these groups.
There is certainly a need to adopt innovative collateral practices. Women do have some forms of wealth that they can use as collateral. Community-based approaches can also help to offset risk because communities have a good sense of who is creditworthy within their own household groups, and they help to reinforce repayment rates, which are actually generally very high even among poor and vulnerable people in developing countries.
Senator Simons: That seems like a very comprehensive answer.
Mr. Sitko: Yes, it’s a very comprehensive answer.
Senator Oh: Thank you, everyone. It’s sure nice to see you all back. I want to thank the FAO for doing such good work mapping out and keeping an eye on the global food security sector.
My question to you today is: How does the FAO assess the impact of climate change on global food security, particularly in vulnerable regions?
Second, can you provide recommendations for enhancing agricultural resilience in Canada with increasing extreme weather events and changing climate conditions?
Mr. Sitko: I will begin with the first. The methodologies used for assessing the impacts of climate change on food security involve much of what we’ve done here in this report. It’s essentially linking the information that we have on people’s reported food security — so we use a set of eight questions that vary in levels of severity beginning with moderate food insecurity up to quite severe, where you’re skipping meals because you do not have the physical access to food. It’s called the Food Insecurity Experience Scale. That scale is used to measure and monitor food security, and we can connect that with climate and weather data in order to understand how one is influencing the other. That is the standard methodology.
Of course, it becomes complicated because weather events have effects on production, but they also are covariate. They cover large areas. They also have effects on prices. So you have this dynamic between changes in production and changes in prices.
Now, some farmers can benefit from changes in prices as prices go up, but most of them don’t, in these contexts, because they are not producing a sufficient surplus so it has very adverse effects on their food security. Thank you.
Ms. Bechdol: If I could come in on the second question regarding possible recommendations, even here in Canada for further resilience, this ties very interestingly to another document that we discussed over the course of the last two days while we were here with colleagues from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, or AAFC, Global Affairs Canada, or GAC, and United States counterparts. It’s called Achieving SDG 2 without breaching the 1.5 °C threshold.
This is a piece that we can certainly provide you with more information on. It’s available, obviously, on the FAO website. It’s something we previewed at the COP last November, and senator, inside this road map it’s a multi-year process. So we are just in the early stages of laying out a number of areas where countries around the world can use a variety of recommendations and suggested actions that are maybe more unique to their own national agricultural economy.
You know it cannot really be a one-size-fits-all approach that we take to adjustments that need to come in agriculture. In this particular piece, we focus on 10 thematic areas. Some that would be obviously very relevant here to you would be crop production, livestock production, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture, food loss and waste, energy markets and energy systems to name just a few.
There are a number of recommendations and suggestions within each one of these areas. So in crops, new and different breeding techniques that allow us to have drought-resistant or more heat-tolerant varieties of plants. In livestock, better breeding, better genetics, better feed uptake that does, I think, a better job of ensuring that we can still have sustainable livestock production on this planet while also reducing the emissions that come from this particular sector of agriculture. Agroforestry. There are a number of areas that I think would be very relevant to this committee and to your work and decision making.
Our intent is that over the course of the next two years this road map will move from more of global focus to then being more regional, and then ultimately over the course of the next two years to even working with countries on specific approaches that they might take from this framework and this road map. I think that would provide you with maybe even more concrete examples. Thank you.
Senator Oh: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Mr. Sitko, you said in your opening remarks that each day of extreme weather decreased the total value of crops produced by women farmers by 3% compared with the crops produced by men farmers. I don’t have all the details. I would like to understand the reason for this. I would like to know the whole context and hear some examples. Why is there a 3% difference when it comes to women farmers versus men farmers?
[English]
Mr. Sitko: Thank you, senator. Excellent question. I think that there are a lot of things underlying the differences that we see. We see, for example, that plots managed by women are often focused on a more narrow range of crops, focused more on food security crops. So the diversity of their cropping systems is sometimes less. They have oftentimes less use of improved inputs, like improved seed varieties, fertilizer and the like, in part due to constraints they face in terms of access to credit, capital, et cetera.
So less diversified production systems, less use of improved inputs. Often, women’s plots are located in more marginal areas, sloping hills, where soil quality is low, et cetera. There’s an inherent lack of fertility because of these discriminatory norms that sort of shape the allocation of land by gender.
Those are a few of the key examples.
Ms. Phillips: Maybe just to add an additional set of constraints that women are facing in terms of being in parts of the agriculture value chain which are less profitable. They may derive less income from similar sets of production because they are working in crops which are not as valued by the market. As Mr. Sitko said, they are often working in food security crops rather than in commodity crops or in high-value cropping. They can lose more if the local market changes in a way that’s different from men.
To go back to some of the questions that Senator Simons asked, they also are much less likely to have insurance to protect against losses as well as having less access to irrigation.
Senator Petitclerc: My understanding is that because they come from a place of more vulnerability then when extreme events happen they — Can we say that in these cases women that are in agriculture don’t do it for the same reasons as men maybe or as agriculture? That’s a bit of my understanding. They do it maybe to feed their family more than market-based entrepreneurs. I just want to know, in fact. It’s a question. I don’t know.
Ms. Phillips: If I may, I think sometimes women aren’t perceived as the farmer in their family despite the fact that they are farming and they may be spending a huge amount of their time in agriculture.
When somebody comes to ask questions, they say who is the farmer and the man will answer, right? They are not considered to be the primary or the main farmer in their families. Many women would like to be entrepreneurs in agriculture or elsewhere, but they are lacking the time often and the resources in order to do so.
In many cases, they are also lacking social infrastructure. For instance, they wouldn’t be included in cooperatives or producer groups as easily, and they might not have access to technology or extension services.
Senator McNair: Thank you for being here today.
Like my colleagues, the statistics and the staggering $37 billion a year when comparing the loss for female-headed households as opposed to male-headed ones are staggering. Everyone is struggling to understand specifically why there’s a difference between the farms run by females and males. You touched upon some of that.
The unjust climate report states that climate vulnerability for people living in rural areas are barely visible in national climate plans. I’m curious to know what your organization is doing to support people living in rural areas, particularly women farmers, in a changing climate environment. It might be what you mentioned: The report you unveiled at COP is part of the action plan.
I’m also curious to know what you specifically think the Government of Canada should be doing to support women farmers and Indigenous communities in the changing climate environment.
Ms. Phillips: FAO is working in a comprehensive fashion with other partners to try to support vulnerable people who are facing these kinds of losses through the provision of capacity, training, helping them to access resources and providing methodologies that try to look at the underlying reasons why women can’t participate as much in these kinds of collective organizations, as I mentioned.
So we have quite a number of methodologies that are focused on empowering women because women who are empowered, as we’ve shown in a previous report, have shown that they’re much more likely to have higher levels of household income and resilience to climatic and other shocks. Therefore, approaches that not only try to solve some of the asset and resource gaps but also try to change social norms so that women can feel more empowered to make decisions in their families and be treated as an equal in their communities are very effective approaches. We’re doing quite a lot of work on the ground across all developing regions in those areas.
In terms of the Government of Canada, maybe Ms. Bechdol will add to this, but we’re very appreciative of the fact that the Government of Canada consistently reminds all members of the FAO of the importance of gender equality and women’s empowerment as well as the very important role of Indigenous peoples in guarding biodiversity and using climate-adaptive practices. We have worked very closely with the government, and they’re providing great resources in a number of countries to undertake approaches that really value the knowledge and capacity of both women and Indigenous peoples.
Mr. Sitko: To add one more point, right now, we’re at a critical moment in climate policy cycles. Ahead of the COP in Brazil in 2025, all countries are requested to resubmit revised nationally determined contribution documents. Those are the guiding policies for climate actions at a national level — how countries are going to meet their mitigation targets and their adaptation targets. We’ve seen from the earlier rounds that questions around inclusivity and vulnerability were largely ignored in those documents. So we have a really important opportunity now to begin to push this agenda forward. I think FAO is positioning itself well to work with countries to take some of the programmatic insights that we have been developing and integrate them more thoroughly through the climate policy documents that governments will submit.
Senator Burey: Thank you so much for being here. It’s great being on this committee because, as we say, we get all the brilliant people coming to this committee. Many of my colleagues have asked most of my questions, but I was still able to drill down and have a few.
It’s also quite interesting that all the things we heard during our soil study about access to land, especially for marginalized groups, poor groups, women living in poverty and Black groups in particular regarding food sovereignty — those are the themes that are resonating. I look forward to your road map on Sustainable Development Goal 2, “Zero Hunger,” that could possibly help Canada.
We heard from some of our young women farmers who talked about the concept of land trusts and having more access to that facility, not just for women but for new immigrants who might want to access land.
Can you speak to that in the global sense as well as what we could learn here in Canada?
Ms. Phillips: Thank you.
There are a number of new and innovative ways to give people access to land that doesn’t necessarily require formal titling. In many countries where we work — so not in the context of Canada, but parts of Africa and Asia — there are other ways of giving informal or custodial rights to land, or even of creating collective land rights for Indigenous peoples or for other groups. Afro descendants in Latin America often prefer to have, for example, collective land rights rather than individual land rights.
The idea of land trusts is an excellent idea because there’s a major gap in women’s access to land globally in addition to young people because they haven’t yet inherited land; they are less likely to have access to land. Plots are becoming smaller and smaller in many parts of the world because population growth rates are still very high, and young women, in particular, are very disadvantaged in terms of having access to land even though they depend upon agriculture and food systems for their livelihoods. So there is a major gap to address there.
Senator Burey: Moving forward, how do you think we could address that gap?
Ms. Phillips: FAO is working on a couple of different things. There’s a set of voluntary guidelines on land tenure that we help governments to implement so they can follow best practices in terms of helping vulnerable people to get access to land in whichever way they choose.
The other thing we’re doing is evaluating land policies to see how inclusive they are in giving governments specific advice. For example, we’re currently working with the government of Sierra Leone to make their laws more inclusive of women’s rights to access land and inherit land. So we have member states come to us and ask for specific policy advice about how to change their land regulations and laws or to do large registrations, as has happened in Kenya over the past couple years, increasing the number of women who have access to land quite significantly, in fact.
The Chair: I have a few questions myself. One is outside of the report; it’s more about how you take things in a more personal way. You have this report and the previous report we learned about last year. You know we’ve got a soils report coming due shortly. There is always some poor news in your reports and our reports.
How do each of you manage to keep your own motivation high? As you unveil this and know that around the world, $37 billion is being lost by women and young people — and other reports — how do you keep your own motivation high? How do you get up every morning?
Ms. Phillips: I feel empowered by two things. The first is the kind of attention we’re receiving from governments like Canada to talk about this and make space for evidence. We feel very encouraged when people want to use our statistics and are eager to learn what is happening.
On the flipside, when I’m able to engage with communities on the ground. I had the occasion to travel to Gujarat in India to present the report to a large group of women farmers of the report. It was very encouraging to see, as my words were being translated into the local language, that they already knew and agreed with so much of what we said in terms of policy recommendations. They shared their own experiences, which were similar to the kinds of things we had shown to be effective.
It’s gratifying to see that we have both the attention of policy-makers in countries like Canada and women farmers on the ground in countries like India.
Mr. Sitko: I spend a lot of time working with farmers. For my Ph.D., I lived for a year in Zambia in a rural community and grew up in a rural community.
For me, seeing these folks who are making their living on the land, they’re not giving up, they’re working hard, they face a lot of challenges and to the extent to which we can help identify those challenges, alleviate them and make that work translate into something better is what motivates me.
Ms. Bechdol: Thank you for the very personal questions for each of us. I think you’ll hear the common refrain of what we’re motivated by. You know, Senator Black, I personally come from a corn, soybean and wheat farm, seven generations in the Midwest of the U.S., and my sister — the first woman in seven generations of our family — is now operating it, making all the planting decision, driving the equipment and financing and marketing the crop at the end of the season. She’s doing it all. For me, even though it’s Indiana, it shows the power of women in agriculture, the power of farmers, the risks that they take, the risks that they don’t necessarily want to take but that are thrust upon them and the resilience that they have. I fundamentally believe in it.
Like my colleagues, I’ve been taking over a new responsibility overseeing our emergencies and resilience work. In October, I was in Afghanistan; just two weeks ago, I was in Somalia, which are some of the hardest, most complicated, conflict-driven and fragile places, and the basis of the potential for saving those economies and saving people is agriculture. For us at FAO, we know the world needs a really strong food and agriculture organization right now, and you have three people here at the table — and others — who know that is the expectation and are committed to making sure we deliver on that.
The Chair: I have another question. What are the implications of your findings in this report for international cooperation and collaboration in addressing shared vulnerabilities? Just a little more specific, if you may.
Ms. Phillips: I think one of the most important things in the list of policy recommendations is the notice that despite the vulnerabilities, there’s just not enough financing and policy attention on the ways that climate change are impacting the poor women and people by age groups. For international corporations, one of the important things, as Mr. Sitko mentioned, is to influence policy spaces where we can put attention on that. But also, a lot of the climate financing is going to large mitigation projects in more advanced economies whereas there’s a need to shift some of the financing towards adaptation in the poorest countries.
Maybe Mr. Sitko wants to add on some of these specific policy recommendations.
Mr. Sitko: One of the major take-homes is that the vulnerabilities that rural people face differ substantially. They differ by the types of weather events that people are experiencing and they differ by their social positioning within their society. Often the policy documents that we look at will say, “and vulnerable populations (women, youth, Indigenous people, et cetera)” as if it’s a homogenous group of people. I think an important finding from this report is there is a diversity in vulnerabilities, not all are the same. They’re also multi-dimensional — they’re happening on the farm and off the farm — so it requires a much more multi-dimensional and nuanced set of policy prescriptions.
Senator Simons: I almost feel — after Senator Black’s very grand, existential questions — that I’m going to dig in the dirt a little bit.
You said there were 24 countries that were part of this aggregation. I wonder, because I don’t see them enumerated here, if you could give us an example, just so what we understand what a middle economy is. What were some of the more affluent countries — if I can use that term — and some of the others? Don’t give us a list of all 24, but some at the top and some at the bottom.
Then I also want to understand, when you’re looking for the patterns of people who are most disadvantaged, I wonder if you can tell me if it is worse at the bottom end or is it actually worse at the top end? Where is the differential the greatest?
Mr. Sitko: In response to your first question, to give you examples of countries, a middle country would be Georgia or Armenia, which are included in the study. Iraq, Mongolia, Vietnam, Peru, a lot of sub-Saharan African countries — Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone — are towards the bottom. That’s the kind of diversity we have in the report.
I don’t fully understand the second question.
Senator Simons: Is there a correlation between the development — that’s the wrong word for it —
Mr. Sitko: I see. At a country level.
Senator Simons: At the country level. For example, I can imagine in my head — and this is why I’m asking you — that in a more established country, the differential might be worse than in a poorer country where everyone is struggling. But maybe it’s the other way around. I wonder if you can extrapolate from the data which countries are most likely to have the greatest differential.
Mr. Sitko: Now I understand. Thank you for the question. That’s a great question.
We haven’t explored it in the data, but I think what the literature would suggest is that countries that are more developed have the institutions in place to help alleviate some of the vulnerabilities that people face. They may have social protection systems that function and relatively good infrastructure so that when a flood happens, it doesn’t completely decimate all road infrastructure, as was the case in southern Malawi where I was when a cyclone hit there that wiped out the roads completely and they were wiped out for a number of years. In that sense, the countries that have more resources are, in general, better able to address the vulnerabilities of their populations. Whether or not they do so in practice is a different question, but that would be my theoretical argument.
Ms. Phillips: Though, of course, the climate vulnerabilities are different in different areas. In Peru or in a country in South America, flooding might be the highest risk that they’re facing whereas in a poorer country, it might be drought that is the risk. The difference in adaptive capacity is about, as Mr. Sitko said, the ability of the government to compensate or prevent losses rather than — the climate vulnerabilities are quite high in a number of countries, which may be richer or poorer, and that depends on their vulnerability to drought, flood and other kinds of weather events.
Senator Simons: It’s the geography as much as anything else.
I have another question. One of the most disturbing figures, I think, in this report is the one that says extreme temperatures pushed children to increase their weekly working time by 49 minutes relative to prime-aged adults. That’s almost an hour more. When you’re talking about children, what’s the definition? Is that under 18, under 16 or under 14? What does it mean that so many more children are working that much harder, making it that much more difficult for them to go to school, to get an education and to be trained in a more lucrative facility?
Mr. Sitko: Great question. In terms of the definition, we’re defining children in this case as aged 10 to 14. These children in our sample, on average, are already working 15-and-a-half hours per week. They’re already working on-farm and off-farm activities, but not on domestic things.
What is happening here is that often these households are facing these shocks and they need to recover income, they need to find ways of surviving, so that means withdrawing children from school so that they can support other activities. What’s interesting is that this number is highly correlated with women’s work as well. Women are working more. They may be bringing their children with them as they’re doing it. The school fees, the money for paying for school or the costs associated with school — they’re not able to invest in them. That’s what we’ve been finding.
Senator Simons: Did you break this out by gender at all? Do you know if more girls are being put to work in the fields and taken out of school than their brothers?
Ms. Phillips: Not in this study, but in general, we know that 70% of child labour is in agriculture globally, and that includes children even younger than 10 in some cases. There are all sorts young adolescents who are engaged in unsafe labour, which is a type of child labour.
Generally, boys engage a little bit more in terms of hours in child labour than girls, but girls have very high burdens of things like gathering water or firewood for their families, which is a form of child labour if it interferes with their schooling or other things they should be doing. There’s a different distribution of child labour between young girls and young boys, but, in general, for this we weren’t able to break out whether it was more affecting young girls or young boys.
Mr. Sitko: Young girls are more likely to be withdrawn from school when climate events happen. There is established literature on that.
Senator Simons: We talk all the time here about how we’re leaving this burden for our children and grandchildren, but this is the actual tangible, measurable impact of climate change right now. Children are losing their childhoods to cope with the impacts of climate change while we fiddle as the planet burns.
The Chair: There you have it. That’s how you get away from getting more time; you don’t watch the chair. We’ll move on to round three.
Senator Petitclerc: I don’t know if my question is in your mandate. This report is a portrait of what is happening now, and it’s very distressing. We know that this climate crisis is not going anywhere any time soon. We’re starting to have enough data to know about trends. Is anyone doing modelling, projections? In this case, would we be able to say with the trends on extreme events that we can predict what will happen in 10 years in order to find solutions? You were talking about distance, droughts and distance from water. Do you know what I’m getting at it? Are we doing that or should we be doing that?
Mr. Sitko: We are certainly modelling future climate scenarios, and we are modelling, to the extent that we can, the socio-economic effects of future climate scenarios. Modelling future climate scenarios is difficult, as you can imagine. Temperature is fairly easy, but modelling future rainfall patterns tends to be more challenging. You can say places are more prone to a drought or prone to a flood, but the exact magnitude of that is harder to model. Temperature is quite easy, though, so we are doing that.
There are not yet — that I know of — studies that are trying to model the differential socio-economic effects of future climate scenarios, but this analysis lays a foundation that could feed into a model like that, essentially taking these measurements and then trying to forecast them forward based on what you think the future climate scenario over space and time will look like. It lays a foundation for making that possible.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you, because I’m thinking if we had those scenarios and could invest in agriculture or programs to encourage people in different areas of agriculture if we know that in 10 years this will not be a good place to be.
Ms. Bechdol: Maybe I can come in very briefly on a high level. I think what you’re describing, senator, complements major advancements that are coming in the tracking of meteorological data, climate-related, weather-driven data that is obviously demonstrating more variability in trends than we’ve seen historically. Advancements in innovation, like digital analysis, geospatial, artificial intelligence, all of these in combination are opening up a wide variety of new opportunities for how we analyze, how we assess and, as you’re saying, how we predict.
This is a really important area of work for FAO and a number of other colleagues in these fragile or climate crisis-driven areas because it’s not just about the analysis and the assessment. It’s about the response on the other side and being ready or prepared to take different types of actions when you have this kind of predictive information, and so there’s a significant body of work being done around disaster preparedness, disaster risk reduction and anticipatory actions.
In an organization like ours, we can take the kind of important analysis that colleagues do but then translate that on the ground to building up the banks of rivers that we know are prone and are likely to see emerging floods; moving people out of vulnerable areas, villages, communities. There are many different types of responses that if we can understand the modelling and the assessment better, then we can ultimately prevent greater harm and greater damage to agricultural communities and livelihoods.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you, both.
Senator Burey: I’m the pediatrician on the committee, but Senator Simons has taken over, and she focused my attention on the issues with kids. Did your data really look at the effects — not just on child labour, which you definitely should — on child mortality rates? Did that increase? The spread of illnesses — I’m thinking of measles that’s going around — and, of course, we have to contend with and know future pandemics will occur in addition to these climate events. Was your data able to show any of that? You may have other data.
Mr. Sitko: Our data was not able to look at those specific outcomes, but we do know, for example, that as the climate changes the distribution of vectors for various diseases is expanding into new places where it hasn’t been. Water safety is being challenged by heavy rainfall events, et cetera, leading to dysentery and typhoid, those sorts of diseases. Certainly, it’s a concern.
Ms. Phillips: We also know that the pandemic had very strong impacts on food security globally. A stark increase between 2019 and 2020 in food security in all regions with a disproportionate burden for women was driven by the pandemic and lack of access to food as well as drops in income for both groups, and we know children are particularly vulnerable during periods of food insecurity to wasting or stunting because there’s a narrow window for nutrition in children’s early lives. If they don’t have access to healthy foods during that important period of their life, there can be very negative repercussions.
We also know that women who don’t have food security cannot provide good nutrition for their babies through breastfeeding, so we know that crises like COVID but also conflict can have very negative impacts on food security for women and for men, and that’s usually transmitted to children at even faster rates than it is for adults.
Senator McNair: My question, simply put, is: What are you hoping to see come out of this report? You talk about policy development and all of that, but obviously a significant part of it is the increase in funding levels from high-income countries. Have you undertaken any sort of examination at this point to indicate what size of funding is necessary to meet some of your goals?
Ms. Phillips: I will brag for my colleague, but this is the first time that anyone has tried to quantify the specific losses of climate change for poorer groups, for women and for people by age cohorts. In fact, there was almost no data before this that showed the size of these losses, and so I feel that the lack of attention to these groups in policy documents might have been because people didn’t know — they assumed, maybe — that poor people were having a disproportionate impact, but we really needed the numbers.
So if we could at least have a conversation about covering the size of the losses we’ve estimated here as part of transforming food systems to be more resilient to climate change that would be a great start. Mr. Sitko mentioned that about $10 billion is going to all smallholder farmers in the world, and the estimated losses here are around $34 billion U.S. dollars, and it at least would mean tripling the amount of climate finance that’s available for these vulnerable groups if we extend the analysis a bit further.
Mr. Sitko: I would say another hope with the report is just to bring the focus back to people, and it’s not simply about vulnerability.
I think what’s important here for this group as well is that engaging rural people and agricultural people in the process of addressing the climate crisis is critical. Without the participation of these people in mitigation actions as well as adaptation actions, we’re not going to be able to achieve our objective. These small-scale farmers operate a large share of the world’s land. They control much of the forest. They are key players in this.
While the report is focusing on vulnerability — and we need to address it — I think that having a greater focus in general on people and the role that rural people play in addressing the climate crisis is a key objective.
The Chair: Thank you. I have a couple of questions.
Were there any surprises or unexpected findings in your analysis regarding how exposure to weather shocks and climate change affect drivers of rural transformation? Did you come upon things you weren’t expecting?
Mr. Sitko: Yes. Thank you, senator.
The biggest one for me was the effect that the climate stresses were having on young populations. If you look at the discourse, it’s often vulnerable people like women, youth and people living in poverty. What we found, in fact, was that young people are better able to cope with climate stresses than older rural people because they are able to access off-farm income opportunities at a higher rate, let’s say. That could be through migration. It could be through other mechanisms.
That doesn’t mean that they are not more vulnerable. In the long run, they are going to experience a much more severe climate than their parents. But in the short term, they are also more adaptable to climate stresses than older rural people.
I think an important outcome is we also need to think about older rural populations and the experiences of climate change for them.
Ms. Phillips: I was surprised by that finding, too, the youth finding.
There was a specific thing that was deep in the longer version of the report that young people are even able to buy up assets that are in distress sales. If there’s a drought, for example, older farmers may be selling their livestock, and younger people may be able to access some kind of income to buy up assets.
It was a surprising finding because, as Mr. Sitko said, it’s often framed as young people, women or Indigenous groups being most vulnerable to climate change, but we found something slightly different.
The Chair: Thank you.
I always tell folks that I talk to that the Senate has no money for programming, but what should we be encouraging our colleagues in the other place to do for Canada to support and move this forward? What would you like us to make sure we share?
Ms. Phillips: Continuing to emphasize, as Mr. Sitko said, that climate change is a crisis for the environment, it’s a crisis for people and that people’s vulnerabilities are different depending on where they are living and their socio-economic status. Canada often makes that point in multilateral settings, and we’re very grateful for that. Continuing to focus resources towards not only technologies that can help overcome the climate crisis but also the kinds of social programming that are part of the recommendations of this report, things which maybe we don’t think about. We think about drought-resistant seeds, but we don’t think about social protection or empowering women as solutions to the climate crisis, and I think the government would be very well placed to make those points.
Ms. Bechdol: I’ll come in as well and offer a point of helping us to really sound the alarm bells and indicate that there is, indeed, a sense of urgency. That’s probably even understating the challenge and the timing that we find ourselves in.
One of the things that is also very important for us as an organization, as we think about funding and as we think about resource mobilization, many times it’s somewhat misconstrued that FAO is fundraising for its own activities when, in fact, what we work by and what our model really is grounded upon is because of our 140-plus country office network all around the world, we are in constant interaction with ministries of agriculture, ministries of environment, water, farming communities and village leaders. We are embedded in many of these places that have been, obviously, a part of this important work.
For us, it’s about matchmaking. It’s really about identifying, bringing the information and attention to the country itself, finding that very specific need and then bringing those opportunities back to governments like Canada and partners that are in a position to really, I think, provide very important resourcing.
Certainly, drawing attention to the overall findings and to the work that this team has done but continuing, senator, to stay in close coordination with us in terms of how we might be able to best position opportunities for specific and targeted funding needs would be very much appreciated.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Simons: I would ask, as my final question, obviously there’s a huge differential in which countries are most going to feel the catastrophic effects of climate change. Some of the countries that you listed off, Mr. Sitko, are countries that I don’t think of as being nearly as vulnerable.
This is not really the study, but it arises from it. How much worse is the differential going to be — not that Georgia and Armenia aren’t facing other challenges, but it’s not the same as Somalia.
We have spent all of my lifetime trying to equalize the economic conditions of the global south. This really just drives home to me the extent to which all of the work we have done over the last 60 years is going to come apart as temperatures rise.
The Chair: Who wants to take that?
Mr. Sitko: I can’t agree more. The challenge that climate change poses, particularly for the already most fragile places, is hard to even comprehend.
Think of where climate is changing the fastest. Obviously, it’s in the polar areas, so Canada knows very well what’s happening. That’s where it’s warming the fastest. So Mongolia, for example, is in this study, and that’s one of the places that’s heating up the fastest.
You look at places like Western Africa where there are trends towards extreme heat, exceeding the liveability levels for people, and it could be, in some parts of those countries, that it won’t be possible to work outside during some months of the year. What that poses for agriculture is a major challenge that we have to face. Central America has drying as well as being hit by repeated hurricanes, making it very difficult to sustain an agricultural livelihood.
What can we do? We need to invest in ways that we can mitigate these challenges, but we can also recognize that in some places, what were the practices for livelihoods in the past are not going to be viable in the future, and we really need to think about alternatives in those places.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Petitclerc: In this committee, in different studies that we have done, we always hear about the challenges of silos. Again, it is maybe not directly related to this report and your mandate, but I feel that there are many stakeholders, like pieces of a puzzle, in terms of coming to solutions. We were talking a lot about vulnerability of women when it comes to agriculture and climate change, but then you also mentioned young girls will be the first to be taken out of school.
My very broad question is: How well are all the players working and communicating together? Do we go to the roots of the challenges? Do we make sure the girls stay in school so they are better equipped to mitigate when they come into agriculture? How well is that going?
Ms. Phillips: There are two positive developments. The first is that reports that are produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, that look at climate change are increasingly taking a multi-sectoral approach, so they are looking at gender and people’s vulnerabilities. That’s important because those kinds of technical or scientific reports used to be focused on climate modelling and having scientists who work on the climate as environmental scientists and not including social scientists in the conversation. However, in the last report, the sixth edition, it started to shift, and there was much more focus on people. I feel that’s positive because we can start to think more comprehensively about the issues.
The second thing is that, increasingly, at FAO and within the UN system, we have been thinking about agri-food systems. That framing — thinking about agriculture and all of the parts of the food system that go all the way from the farm to the plate — helps us to think comprehensively about the varied parts of the sector that need to be involved in terms of health and education to make the food system resilient, nutritious, inclusive and sustainable — all of the things we would like to see in the future.
Ms. Bechdol: I will just close with an observation of our positioning inside the UN system and the rest of the multilateral global community.
I wish I could say that we, on our own, finally realized that we should work graciously and kindly together, but I would acknowledge that the crisis itself has created the need and the urgency to do just that. Whether it’s the other UN agency partners that are based in Rome with us — the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Food Programme — or the other UN partners that are in New York, there is very clearly a recognition today that there is no opportunity for one organization to try to really have its own impact and secure the limited amount of funding or resourcing that’s coming.
Even beyond the UN system, what I see opening up is now a recognition of bringing in other types of non-governmental partners. There is a real momentum to true partnership and collaboration with the private sector, civil society and academic and scientific institutions.
I wouldn’t say we have yet successfully found the right path to these types of transformational partnerships, but they are in their stages of formation. I, like Ms. Phillips, think that’s a really positive development.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you.
Senator Oh: We have been talking a lot about relief. For the last few years, I don’t see any very serious framing for anything that’s happening in all the continents. It seems to be fairly calm for food supply issues. Is that true?
Ms. Bechdol: We have really tried to bring the conversation around global food security around three pillars. The first is food availability, the second is food accessibility and the third is food affordability. FAO’s message to the world has been that it is not a situation, globally, where there is an availability issue; we have enough food on this planet to feed the people who inhabit it. Our problems are tied to accessibility and affordability.
Accessibility, we see with the war in Ukraine. We’ve seen it with Gaza. We are seeing it in the Red Sea and the attacks that have taken place there. We are watching the Panama Canal and the effects of drought on whether we can get shipments through that very important trade channel. So accessibility is something that we have to pay attention to.
Along with that, a number of countries continue in these different dynamics to put in place different types of market protections, whether they are export protections or other types of policies that, then, also have a distorting effect on getting food into other much-needed markets.
Affordability is also becoming an increasing concern for us. That is especially tied to even a study like this where the focus is very much on sub-Saharan Africa and places where there are dramatic lingering effects of the economic downturn of the COVID pandemic, where incomes have not returned. Also, as we all know, even in our own pocketbooks in the United States, Italy and Canada, food price inflation is very real and is something we need to make sure we are also working to address.
Senator Oh: Human costs — natural disaster.
Ms. Bechdol: Yes, both. Very clear.
Senator Oh: Thanks.
Ms. Bechdol: Thank you.
The Chair: All right. Witnesses — Ms. Phillips, Mr. Sitko, Ms. Bechdol — thanks very much for being here today. Your participation, testimony and insights are very much appreciated. We hope you have found it useful as well.
I want to thank my fellow committee members for your active participation and your very thoughtful questions. Thanks so much. Also, I want to take a moment to thank the folks who support us here in the room, for you and for us, and the folks who are behind us — the interpreters, the debates team that is transcribing our meetings, the committee room attendant, multimedia service technician, the broadcast team, the recording centre, the Information Services Directorate and our page, all of whom support us. We can’t do it without them, and we do really appreciate your support. Thank you very much.
We will take a short break and come back for a short in camera meeting. It is not planned or on the agenda, but we have some work we had sent our analyst away with at the last meeting that she has come back on.
Senators, is it agreed that we suspend briefly to proceed to the in camera portion of our meeting?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: We will suspend now to go in camera.
(The committee continued in camera.)