SOUTH ASIAN NATIONS TO JOINTLY FIGHT HUNGER & MALNUTRITION

10,000 smallholder families from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan will double their yield in the next 7 years.

Four days preparatory phase workshop of the new SAF-BIN project from November 07-10, 2016 held at Nepal deliberated on an extensive program in the fight against hunger and malnutrition.

According to the Global Hunger Index report released by the Washington based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) South Asian countries faces serious hunger problem and ranks poorly low like India (97), Bangladesh (90), Nepal (72) and Pakistan (107).

Agriculture is the dominant sector of their economies and, agrarian structure is dominated by landless laborers, small and marginal farmers. Participants at the workshop developed common understanding of the preparatory phase, overall framework and focus areas to address the food security and climate change issue of smallholder farmers.

Led by Caritas Austria through common participatory process, 10 representative’s form Caritas organisations in Austria, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan planned to carry out situation analysis in their respective countries to general details for developing the program.

The first phase of the project Strengthening Adaptive Farming in Bangladesh, India and Nepal (SAF-BIN) had achieved impressive results.  More than 4000 smallholder families had increased their yield to one third within five years project at a cost of 150 Euros per family.

It is been proved that improvements in the large group of smallholder farmers are more successful in the fight against hunger and malnutrition than expensive high-tech farming.

The successful partnership and on-farm adaptive research models of the first phase will be replicated in the new phase and the partnership model will be extended to generate a consortium model for funding the new phase.

Rev. Bishop Paul Simik, Apostolic Vicar of Nepal; Fr. Krishna Bahadur Bogati, Executive Director of Caritas Nepal; Dr. Yubak Dhoj GC, Director General, Department of Agriculture, Govt. of Nepal  and Mr. Georg Matuschkowitz, Head of International Programmes, Caritas Austria launched the knowledge outcomes  ‘Approaching Resilience’, ‘How do Farmers Adapt to Climate Change’ and SAFBIN brochure of SAFBIN I.