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Release date
April 16, 2009
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John Rivera
Senior Writer
Baltimore, MD
410-951-7399

CRS Launches Holistic, Market-Based Approach to Agricultural Development at Apr. 20 Symposium

April 16, 2009, Washington, D.C. —

Catholic Relief Service, one of the country's largest international humanitarian agencies, is launching a worldwide agricultural strategy that adopts a holistic, market-oriented approach to help lift millions of people out of poverty.

The five-year strategy aims to help farmers and farming communities both to recover from disasters like drought and pest infestation, as well as to support chronically hungry, agriculturally-dependent communities as they move toward development and self-sufficiency.

The strategy will be unveiled Monday, April 20 at the CRS Agriculture and Environment Symposium, a day-long event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. Two new CRS publications will be released at the event: Getting to Market: From Agriculture to Agroenterprise, and Working Together, Learning Together: Learning Alliances in Agroenterprise Development.

"This is a new way of thinking about development that is much more inclusive and less compartmentalized than the approaches we've used before," said CRS President Ken Hackett. "Agriculture serves as a platform to respond to a wide range of inter-connected needs including increasing household income, health and nutrition, environmental stewardship and natural disasters. We believe that this holistic, market-oriented approach to agricultural development will be an effective way of helping the poorest rural families poor climb out of their desperate condition."

Over the years, CRS has become very proficient in providing relief following disasters and other emergencies. In the agricultural sector, this meant helping to provide critical assets that people and communities need to begin farming again. In fostering the transition from relief to development, our focus was on increasing agricultural production, with the goal of restoring the ability of farm families to feed themselves.

This approach is still necessary and valid. But over time, we have come to a fuller understanding that the best way to help poor rural people move out of poverty and achieve integral human development is to boost household income in a sustained way. We concluded that building the capacity of poor farmers to engage in profitable enterprises had to become a core component of our agricultural development strategy.

In response, CRS, in collaboration with dozens of public, private and community-based partners, has devised this strategy for helping poor farmers link to markets where they can increase their incomes by profitably selling their crops. This agroenterprise approach has become the focus of CRS' agricultural strategy.

At the field level, this strategy is reflected in a number of activities and investments:

• In Tanzania, farmers have organized themselves into microfinance self-help groups, enabling them to obtain financing to pay for chickpea seed, fertilizer and postharvest marketing. This linkage between microfinance and agriculture has not only made the local farmers' groups much stronger, but it has also significantly improved their profits.

• In Ethiopia, farmers have begun growing navy beans and have found a buyer in one of the top sellers of baked beans in England.

• In East Africa, we are working to integrate technology into crop disease prevention, using sturdy but inexpensive laptop computers to gather vital data in the field. CRS has been awarded a $100,000 grant from Intel's INSPIRE•EMPOWER Challenge to help fund this initiative. The computers will be used as part of the Great Lakes Cassava Initiative, a six-country program in which CRS is working with a consortium of partners to provide disease resistant planting materials to counter two pandemic diseases (cassava mosaic disease and cassava brown streak) that are causing losses of up to 80% in areas affected by the diseases.

• In Haiti, farmers are suffering from a combination of excessive erosion, water scarcity and increasingly volatile weather conditions. CRS is working with local government and communities to develop more sustainable farming systems based on intensive watershed management rehabilitation, which will enable communities to adapt to climate change and build more productive agricultural systems.

The strategy reflects the views of field staff, partners and the private sector from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East which were captured through a series of consultative meetings over the past 18 months. It addresses key issues that have surfaced in the last decade in terms of market reform, urbanization and technical innovations. It also addresses the emerging threats posed by more volatile social, economic and climatic conditions that come from an increasingly populated, globalized and urbanized world.

The CRS Agriculture and Environment Symposium, a gathering of experts from around the world, is an opportunity for CRS and its partners to highlight the thinking behind the work that is being done, the wide range of new methods, as well as promising and best practices that CRS has developed and the impact that is being achieved in the lives of millions of poor people. The event will showcase success stories, with examples of best practices being put to work and how CRS and its partners are taking good ideas to scale.

Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the U.S. Catholic community. The agency alleviates suffering and provides assistance to people in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality. For more information, please visit www.crs.org.