Richard Burden – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for International Development

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Richard Burden on 2016-05-19.

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what recent assessment her Department has made of the effect of climate change on (a) agriculture, (b) food security and (c) levels of malnutrition in developing countries.

Mr Nick Hurd

DFID is supporting research organisations to make assessments of the impact of climate change on agriculture, food security and malnutrition. This includes support to the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Programme. One of its recent assessments found that 60% of production of beans in sub-Saharan Africa was at risk from climate change. DFID also supports the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition which has recently made an assessment of the effects of climate change on food systems and nutrition.

DFID is using these assessments to inform our policies and programmes on agriculture. For example DFID’s Agriculture Policy Framework includes action on climate change as one of its priorities for our programmes. An example is our support to the International Fund for Agriculture Development’s Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP). Our support to ASAP is helping 6 million smallholder farmers to cope with the effects of climate change and at the same time increasing their agriculture productivity, incomes and food security.