Asia Pacific Regional Farmers’ Forum

Rationale

The Farmers’ Forum (FAFO) is a bottom-up process of consultation and dialogue between small farmers and rural producers’ organizations, IFAD and governments for rural development and poverty reduction. Shaped by a consensus document  that guides the collaboration, the FAFO was established in 2006, as an operational tool to provide orientation to IFAD operations and to jointly identify opportunities for the development of partnerships between IFAD and FOs.^[1] The first FAFO global meeting took place on February 2006, in conjunction with the IFAD Governing Council. Since then, five additional global meetings were held in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016.

In 2014, a study of the partnerships between IFAD and Farmers’ Organizations (FOs) noted that the momentum of these partnerships had reached a plateau, whereas country-level engagement with FOs was diminishing. One of the reasons identified was that the global FAFO process was too focused at the global level while collaboration and dialogue at regional and country level, i.e. where IFAD operates, was not systematic and thus, opportunities were lost.

In this context, during the 6th Global meeting of the Farmers’ Forum held in 2016, the FAFO Steering Committee (SC) members agreed to decentralize the FAFO process and to begin holding regional level FAFOs in order to ‘be closer’ to the farmers and to foster greater involvement of IFAD regional divisions and country programs. As such, the process will now be organized on a four year basis with global meetings organized every four years and regional consultations where IFAD operates organized in between. In addition, it was also decided to use the IFAD geographical structure for the organization of the regional FAFOs, and whenever possible to organize the regional FAFOs in concomitance with the IFAD regional divisions’ implementation workshops, in order to facilitate interactions between FOs, IFAD and the IFAD funded projects and programs.

The first Asia Pacific Regional Farmers’ Forum was held October 19-21, 2018 at Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The second Asia Pacific Regional Farmers Forum was held on October 26-27 in Bangkok, Thailand. Both AP RFAFO was well-attended by key FO leaders and IFAD managers, facilitators at country and regional level. It aimed to assess the implementation of the Action Plans at country levels, identify bottlenecks and issues, and identify courses of action to address these issues.

In 2024 February, a global farmers forum will be convened. In preparation for the global farmers forum, a national level assessment of the 2022 IFAD-FO partnership plan is encouraged. The result of the national assessment will then be feedbacked in the virtual Asia-Pacific Regional Farmers Forum.

Objectives

1. Understand, appreciate and learn from the work of IFAD  and the dynamics of FO-IFAD engagement in Asia Pacific region and country levels.
2. Assess the FaFO process at global, regional and country levels particularly the implementation of the latest action plans developed during the 2022 RFAFO meeting in Bangkok.
3. Identify areas of potential and stronger interaction and collaboration

• between FOs, IFAD and IFAD funded projects and programs at national and regional levels.
• between FOs in the region in order to strengthen the engagement between FOs and IFAD

Expected Outputs

1. Joint recommendation and action plans to strengthen partnerships (collaboration, cooperation, coordination) between FOs and IFAD and IFAD projects

• at the country level, for at least 21 countries in four sub regions in Asia Pacific : Southeast, South,  East and Pacific
• at the regional level, for regional level projects (SEA,SA, Pacific, etc)

2. Mechanisms for coordination and complementation among FOs in the region to strengthen solidarity and support in the IFAD engagement process

Dates and Venue

National level dialogue: January 5- January 15

Virtual APR FAFO: January 18, 2024 (2:00 – 5:00 pm Manila time)

Program

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