Facing up to climate change
Social innovation through cooperatives
Development and environment
Economies that are based on agriculture or ranching, with a huge majority of their
population working in these sectors, change over time when economic growth proceeds.
The primary sectors lose relative and (eventually) absolute importance compared with
emerging new sectors such as manufacture and services. The population that, in the
early stages of development, is engaged in agriculture leaves this sector once new
options emerge.
The World Economic Forum in its 2015 Africa competitiveness report emphasizes the
importance of a successful structural transformation. “The slow productivity growth in
agriculture is also constraining Africa’s structural transformation process and economic
diversification. As reported in several studies on structural transformation, reliance on
subsistence production and weak productivity growth in the agriculture sector forces the
workforce to move out of this sector into manufacturing and services.
Farmers leave agriculture
This implies that not all 570 million farms with 1.4 billion farmers will remain. Most
farmers out of necessity want to leave and will leave agriculture in the coming decades.
For Agriterra these structural transformations of the economies are a given. From a
climate perspective this may be considered as a positive development since most rural
dwellers have no or hardly any access to appropriate tools, information and knowledge
on good agricultural practices and still depend on farming techniques that strongly
contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.1 like shifting cultivation (‘slash and burn’ or in
general clearing the land with fire) to subsist.
To achieve a rapid structural transformation, paradoxically, a focus on agricultural
development and investment in agriculture is paramount. Boosting agricultural
productivity therefore implies servicing those that really want to be farmers. Also
youngsters with an appetite to farm will stay when agriculture is profitable. All actions to
spur agriculture production and productivity should be addressing those farmers with an
appetite to farm. The issue becomes: How and where do you find farmers that want to
farm and modernize? Since most farmers look need economies of scale to gain a stronger
position in the market, value chain and towards a government, many of them have
organized themselves in cooperatives and farmer organizations.
Support to cooperatives and farmer organisations helps accelerate the structural
transformation away from large numbers of subsistence farmers and creates a leaner
agricultural sector with well-developed rural enterprises, good extension services and
thus significantly reduce environmentally destructive land use.

Globally, agriculture, deforestation and land-use change are responsible for almost a
quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.
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Integrated approach through cooperatives
Climate change is a recognised threat to agriculture, particularly in developing countries,
where the increased unpredictability of weather patterns and a tendency toward extreme
weather events (storms, drought, flooding) pose threats to food security and livelihoods.
Farmers are the first to be confronted with the consequences of climate change.
Productivity must improve, despite negative effects of climate change, to ensure food
security as well as to make a proper business out of farming.
Cooperatives and farmer organisations are mainly (and understandably) concerned with
primary processes such as growth and professionalization but are also ideally placed to
implement this integrated approach of new strategies, new systems, new policies and
processes and, above all, a new mind-set of millions of farmers worldwide to tackle
climate-change.
A strong agricultural organisation is able to assess risks and devise measures for
adaptation:
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Good information is vital for planning – every farmer will know, through his or her
organisation, the facts of climate change; and research data can be shared with
members.
Cooperatives may have the resources to finance climate adaptation measures
(so that farmers don’t all have to fund individual start-up costs).
Measures can be implemented on a large scale through professional extension
services reaching the thousands of member farmers.
Experts can be hired through the organisation, to make recommendations for a sector
or particular agricultural area.

Furthermore, those who want to leave agriculture need employment and preferably
nearby. Hence, the importance of rural industrialization, which is the natural outcome of
a development where farmers are in the lead. They create their own cooperative
processing and selling plants. E.g. the Ras Gayint cooperative union in Ethiopia has
boosted its sales of various agricultural crops from 300 MT in 3 years to 3.600 MT. By
starting hand-selection and cleaning the white pea beans, it could even enter in the
premium export market, creating at the same time employment for 200 women.
All of this is cost-efficient. And in the long term, an organisation that responds well to
climate change has a competitive advantage: harvests and supplies to (international)
companies remain guaranteed and (international) trade with small organised farmers can
continue.