The Church of Sweden is a well-known and experienced Swedish actor in the area of development cooperation and poverty alleviation. The organization’s position paper on agricultural development for poverty reduction and sustainable development published on December 3, 2013 is now available in English. The position paper will lay the foundation for the policy dialogue relating to agricultural development the Church of Sweden engage in 2014-2017.

This organization has over the years worked with development cooperation within the agricultural sector in many countries including Ethiopia, Liberia, Uganda, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Colombia and the Central America region. In 2010-2012 around 40% of the Church of Sweden’s work, 220 billion SEK, has been allocated to support projects to support the knowledge and support of sustainable natural resource use.

The position paper is focused on the issues that the Church of Sweden sees as most central to promote an agricultural development that enables empowerment of farmers, poverty reduction and a sustainable development. It also identifies the factors that might both enable and hinder a successful development but is not analyzing these factors in depth. After identifying the most important issues the paper lists policy proposals that will be high on the agenda for the current program period.

Some of the most pressing issues are the necessity to strengthen the role and rights of small-scale farmers through recognition of land rights and working conditions, speed up the transition towards organic farming in large-scale farming, and increased investments by governments in rural areas, which in many countries has been neglected in favor of urban development. In this paper they also push for a more coherent policy aiming at promoting sustainable agricultural development by streamlining national trade policies, EU Common Agricultural Policy and other international trade agreements.

Furthermore the Church of Sweden pushes for more research on agro-ecological methods, like agroforestry, Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA), Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and Conservation Farming, and crop processing to increase the quality of the food produced and strengthen resilience of climate change.

Download the position paper through our partner SIANI's resource base here.