Small-scale farmers key to food security

So far, this has been a summer of extremes. Record-breaking heat waves across the Northern Hemisphere have scorched fields and strained the food systems in Western Europe, which recorded its hottest June on record. In parts of Asia, temperatures have also soared well above seasonal averages. At the same time, Typhoon Bavi has just swept across eastern China, displacing millions and leaving a trail of damage to farmland and rural infrastructure in its wake. These events are not isolated incidents. They are the latest expressions of a climate system under severe and intensifying stress.

Extreme heat already threatens the livelihoods of over 1 billion people, causing an annual loss of 470 billion labor hours across the global agricultural sector. For most major crops, yield declines begin above 30 C; livestock experience stress at even lower thresholds. In 2024, 91 percent of the global ocean experienced at least one marine heat wave. Critically, extreme heat does not act alone. It amplifies water stress, triggers flash droughts and creates conditions for pest and disease outbreaks. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization, agricultural losses can triple when heat coincides with other hazards such as drought.

China is already living the reality of climate change and the impacts of extreme heat. Over the past 50 years, the country's average surface temperature has risen by 0.31 C per decade, faster than the global average. The consequences are unfolding across its farms and threatening food production and rural livelihoods.

Typically, rice yields begin to decline once temperatures exceed 28 C. In the case of maize, every additional degree of warming reduces global yields by 7.5 percent, while extreme heat during flowering can cause even greater losses. Although China's grain output has remained above 650 million metric tons for 10 consecutive years, yields could decline by 8.7 percent across the country's maize belt by the end of the century under a high-emissions pathway.

The message is unmistakable: Climate change is no longer a future threat for China and, indeed, the world. It is already reducing harvests, degrading productive land and increasing the urgency of investing in climate-resilient agriculture.

Smallholder farmers, the "first mile" of our food system, bear a disproportionate share of this burden. In China, they represent 90 percent of the agricultural workforce and cultivate 70 percent of the country's arable land. Globally, they produce a significant share of the food that feeds the world, yet they are the least equipped to absorb the shocks that climate change delivers. Access to climate information, affordable insurance, resilient infrastructure and the financial reserves needed to recover from a bad season can remain limited.

To jointly tackle these challenges facing China's smallholders, the International Fund for Agricultural Development has long partnered with the Chinese government, centering climate resilience for small-scale producers as a core pillar of its mission. Since 1981, IFAD has invested significantly in China and partnered with the government to have an impact on the lives of approximately 4.6 million poor rural households.

In Yunnan province, IFAD-supported youth entrepreneurs have modernized irrigation networks with smartphone-controlled drip systems, greatly improving water efficiency — an adaptation measure that peer-reviewed evidence shows can offset heat impacts on crops in the short run. This matters because research confirms that irrigation expansion has been one of the primary mechanisms through which Chinese farmers have adapted to extreme temperatures over the past three decades.

China also contributes significantly to global climate resilience. Through the China-IFAD South-South and Triangular Cooperation Facility, China is actively sharing its climate-smart agricultural innovations with countries across the Global South, while also learning from their practices. A compelling example is an ongoing initiative in partnership with the International Bamboo and Rattan Organization, which is leveraging China's extensive expertise in bamboo cultivation to strengthen climate resilience among smallholder farmers in Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. The project equips farmers with climate-smart techniques for bamboo production and processing, provides small enterprises with low-cost equipment to add value to bamboo products, and builds local institutional capacity.

Across its global portfolio, IFAD is investing in a similarly diverse range of climate adaptation solutions. Through our Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme, IFAD channeled $1.4 billion in climate finance to smallholder farmers between 2022 and 2024, supporting 6 million small-scale farmers worldwide. In Kyrgyzstan, herders in remote mountain pastures receive 10-day advance warnings of weather hazards, allowing them to plan their grazing routes before storms arrive. In Bangladesh, the IFAD-funded Coastal Climate Resilient Infrastructure Project built improved markets and market-connecting roads designed to remain usable during the monsoon season, increasing on-farm income from crop and fish sales by 104 percent and 50 percent, respectively, reducing poverty by 4 percent, and reducing food insecurity among participating households. These results underscore that transformative adaptation addressing the interactions between food systems and climate change requires adequate, accessible and appropriate financing that reaches smallholder farmers directly.

The challenge ahead is systemic and urgent. Extreme heat is no longer a distant risk but a present reality reshaping agricultural production, rural livelihoods and global food security. Addressing it requires collective action: governments investing in climate-resilient infrastructure; international institutions channeling finance and knowledge to those most in need; and the private sector developing affordable technologies that reach smallholder farmers at scale.

The storms will keep coming. The heat will keep rising. But with the right investments in the "first mile", and the right partnerships to sustain them, we can build resilient and enduring food systems.

The author is the China representative of IFAD and head of the Regional South-South and Triangular Cooperation Center for Asia and the Pacific at IFAD.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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