CGIAR, together with government agencies and other relevant stakeholders, conducted the country launch of the initiative on securing the food systems of Asian Mega-Deltas for Climate and Livelihood Resilience (AMD) in Dhaka on Wednesday.
With the goal of promoting resilient, inclusive, and productive Asian Mega-Deltas, the AMD initiative will not only focus on Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, being one of the main three deltas in Asia but also work on Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar and Mekong River Delta in Vietnam and Cambodia, as per a press release.
In his introduction of the AMD initiative, Dr Benjamin Belton, AMD co-lead and senior scientist of WorldFish, emphasized the importance of the deltas as home to tens of millions of people, source of food and economic security beyond this population, and hotspots of biodiversity.
However, he stressed that “the deltas are facing severe challenges such as shrinking and sinking due to climate change and unsustainable development”.
He shared that AMD’s main goal is to transform food systems toward greater climate resilience by removing systemic barriers at community, national and regional levels to enable the scaling of existing and emerging technologies and practices.
He added that this will be achieved through climate-smart agricultural practices and nutrition-sensitive interventions, which will help boost farm incomes, sustainability and employment.
The launching provided a platform to build stronger partnerships and understanding of the AMD initiative among the different partners of the AMD’s five focus areas, such as adapting deltaic production systems, nutrition-sensitive deltaic agrifood systems, de-risking delta-oriented value chains, inclusive deltaic food-systems governance, and evidence-based delta development planning.
In his remarks during the program, Mr Kamalaranjan Das, additional secretary (Research) of the Ministry of Agriculture, prioritized that “it is very crucial for our collective success to integrate, not only AMD but also all the One CGIAR Initiatives, to the government priorities and programs and other related sectors’ efforts on addressing the issues concerning the delta.”
Dr Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, 2021 World Food Prize Laureate and Global Lead for Nutrition and Public Health of WorldFish and Temina Lalani-Shariff, Regional Director for South Asia of CGIAR also spoke at the event.
Highlights of the workshop include the session on government priorities for agriculture development in the coastal areas and expectations from the CGIAR delivered by Dr Md Harunur Rashid of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC), government priorities on climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture presented by the Ministry of Environment and the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 -- priorities on agriculture and climate change shared by the BDP Secretariat.
The event also provided the partners a venue for open discussion on developing partnerships to achieve common goals of building climate and livelihood resilience in coastal Bangladesh.
More than 80 participants, both in-person and online, attended the event representing the government agencies of Bangladesh, CGIAR and its centers working for AMD, international organizations working in the region, particularly in the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, academic institutions, and other relevant stakeholders groups.