A regional experts consultation meeting was held on “UN Decade of Family Farming: Formulating Strategies and Action Plan to Strengthen Smallholder Family Farmers in South Asia” during 5-6 Nov, 2020virtually. This program was organized jointly by SAARC Agriculture Centre (SAC), Dhaka, Bangladesh; Asian Farmers Association (AFA), Philippines; ICA-AP, India; and technical support by FAO RAP, Thailand. The chief guest of the program was Dr. AbdurRouf, Aditional Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Bangladesh and welcome remarks by Dr. Mian Sayeed Hassan, Director of the SAC. This program was coordinated by Dr. Rudra Bahadur Shrestha from SAC; Esther Penunia from AFA; Pierre Ferrand from FAO RAP; and Mohit Dave from ICA-AP, India. The main objective of this program is to formulate strategies and action plan to strengthen smallholder family farmers in South Asia.

The South Asia region is home to 1.7Billion people, or 24% of the global population, with the largest youth labor force in the world. Of this, 65% of the population resides in rural areas, majority are smallholder family farmers adopting integrated farming system consisting of agriculture, livestock, forestry, fisheries. Family farmers in South Asia produce at least 70% of the foods in the region with women putting in as much as 80% in farm work. The United Nations has declared 2019-2028 as the UN Decade of Family Farming. The Decade’s theme, “Feeding the World, Caring for the Earth,” captures the ideas that family farmers are about more than production, they are also about stewardship — stewardship of the soil, seeds, biodiversity and human-animal interactions that make up a family farm.

The two days program was arranged in such a way that some keynote speakers had presented their keynote speech on the family farming and UNDFF from FAO Rome, IFAD Rome, high level scientist from Bangladesh, ICA India, and WRF on the different perspectives of UNDFF; National Focal Point Experts made presentation on National issues and challenges and prospective National Action Plan of the particular countries. The Thematic Experts made presentations on each thematic areas of each pillar of the Global Action Plan of the UNDFF in the regional perspectives. Furthermore, Farmers Organization (FOs) had given their presentations on the issues and challenges at the field levels related to family farming. The program was closed endorsing the Joint Communique.