Isha Foundation Press Launch: Scaling Impact through 4 Strategic Action Tracks in Soil Data, Agri Finance, Farmers, and Nutrition - Press Conference, UNCCD COP17

Hi everyone.
Good afternoon.
It's a very quiet afternoon here, but I hope it's not so quiet out there.
Thanks a lot for all of you are here.
It's great to be today here this afternoon at Cobb in Mongolia.
Um I'm Pravina from Safe soil.
I'm the Chief Science and Policy Officer for the global Policy Engagement and with me, we have Tor, who's a principal scientist and head of Spatial Data Science and we also have Marthy who's from Safe Soil.
She's coordinating the Agriculture Finance action Laboratory.
We have Akshanch from Bs Dairy.
He leads the new initiatives, and we have Rico who is formed Safe soil and also happens to be the global youth focal point for UNCCD.
We are all here to launch four action labs that Safe soil is intending to work on in the next 2.5 to three years for ourselves.
A little bit about Safe soil before we get into the aspects of what we are here to launch.
Safe soil is a global movement.
We work with farmers.
We do a lot of citizen awareness generation, and we also engage with global mechanisms and with countries to see how to have sustainable soil management policies in place.
The reason we want to do this is to support the farmers for the largest stakeholder, at least a number of people who are the stewards of land to be supported, and for all of us as consumers and citizens of this planet, to be responsible in terms of what we consume and how we support the producers of what we consume.
And also have the farmers who produce this be supported not just through resources like knowledge and training, but also financially so that they can do the right thing to the land and soil, building soil health and life into the soil.
Little bit of context, maybe for two or 3 minutes, I'll say as to how these action labs happen to be.
In the last three or four years, a group of us like Safe soil, we're all volunteers.
We come from different backgrounds, engaging with country and farmers is something we have known.
Because we have been doing farmer engagement over 25 to 30 years.
We have engaged with one government, that is Indian government in the last ten years.
But when we went global based on our experience, hands on farmer experiences, we started engaging with various global platforms suggesting we should have farmers participate in the climate forums, in the biodiversity forums, in the land forums because they have so much to contribute and they're also to the problem and also the solution.
But What we saw is that a high level recommendation of pay the farmers to do the right thing, have the farmers to participate.
Let's have nutrition dense foods.
These recommendations were at such high level that a lot of us were making that sound, not just safe soil.
But what we saw was that to say something in these platforms and to have them actually become a reality of farmers getting better income doing the right thing to soil, the consumers actually willing to pay for nutrition dense food.
It's a huge journey.
It's a long journey, and this journey was not happening because there was structural problems and the structural problems with how money flows, structural problems in terms of the trusting aspects that exist below the reasons why the money doesn't flows, gaps existing there, that being the soil data, and then the willingness of the consumer to pay, they trusting a food is healthy or not.
Then the fact that overall, the voice of the farmers across various conventions, although there is not concerted enough to make governments support them.
These are the four gaps that we saw and we have set up these action labs to, first of all, showcase a number of organizations and institutions who have solved for this over decades.
There are solutions for the problems and the gaps that I just mentioned, but these solutions are like islands across the world.
The solutions are not showcased.
They are known to the people who have implemented it, who have funded it, but these solutions are not scaled and uh The solutions for them to become scale, they need to be documented.
They need to be showcased, they need to be top down with big drums across the world saying that it works, it works, it works, let's support.
Then we need to be able to abstract them and make them relevant to the stakeholders, be it financial institutions, regulators or governments.
We are launching these action labs as platforms on which we showcase.
We abstract those solutions into something relevant to stakeholders and maybe help scale the solutions in the process.
That's the whole point of the launch of these action labs.
Here we have with us, the experts and the coordinators who are running these laboratories.
I'm going to ask them to share their inputs starting with TOR, there are four action labs, as we just said, the agriculture Fnance, the soil data, and the Farmer voices and the soil nutrition connection.
Can you please share where is soil data right now in terms of inspiring public or private finance to flow into soil management practices that builds soil health? Yeah, sure.
One of the things that we've been working on for a number of years is how we scale assessments of soil health in a more holistic way, and that includes the use of new technologies for soil analysis that brings the costs down so it becomes more approachable, more like we can make it available to farmers in a more cost effective way.
This is something that has been piloted a lot in India, but it is also being done in other parts of the world.
The other part of it is also the use of remote sensing or satellite data in conjunction with soil data from the lab.
Basically allowing us to then scale these assessments across continental scales as well, while at the same time having a level of granularity that allows us to assess soil health at the farm level.
Essentially bridging this gap that we have at the moment where we have observations here and there and being able to have soil data that is continuous across large areas to inform management.
Thank you.
Marthy, do you want to share what has been your research until now with respect to the money flow part? Hello, with respect to the agriculture Finance Action lab, we've been looking at firstly, what is the issue before arriving at the solution or looking into what the solutions are.
We find that there is a lot of money available in the market with finance, with private sector, with the government, but a very, very small percentage is actually going towards farmers for sustainable land management.
Um, there are many reasons for that.
It's not an easy answer to share.
But one key reason is the way finance is structured, um, for decades, um, it has, um, incentivized short term yields, immediate repayments.
Those are the kind of language and that's the kind of structure that has stuck on for decades now.
But now we see that businesses, government, even financial institutions are finding that they are open to a lot of risk with respect to agriculture because of climate change, because of land degradation, and now they want to invest in a manner that might help reduce that risk, but there is no ready answer on how to do that for them.
There are solutions in pockets as Flavia mentioned, we saw even today, a financial drought resilience fund being launched to fund action that's more long term.
We're seeing slowly emergence of such solutions, but then they are very rare and not as much as we'd like them to be.
What we're doing as part of the action lab and what we want to do over the next few months is look at what is the evidence across the world and different scales.
It could be at the level of the government or financial institutions, development banks.
What are the different models that are working? What are some design features that we can pick from all of these and scale them in different geographies for different levels of farming, a small scale or commercial.
As of now, we have come out with a white paper called soil not an asset Class, trying to understand what are the limitations, and we'll be moving on to finding evidences of solutions that have worked, and that's going to be the focus of our work for the next one year.
Thank you so much.
Akan G, as a business that works with large number of farmers and also have consumer facing products.
Can you share with us what has been your experience in venturing into region to produce? Is there a willingness to pay? What does it take for consumers to pay for such things? Because while money flows from public, private financing production process, money also flows from the demand side of things.
Thank you.
A small context will help.
Dairying in India is not like commercial daring and it is essentially a lot of livelihood farming.
When we talk about dairying, we are supporting communities and we are supporting livelihoods.
We are home to roughly 80 million farmers who subsist on dairying and the combined worth is more than that of all the staple cereals and the pulses put together.
Now in this context, when we look at an organization like Bans dairy, which is Asia's largest dairy, at the entire intersection of soil and nutrition.
That's where the farmers lie in the center of it.
In the center of it is that part which takes nutrition on one side and delivers nutrition to the consumers.
In this where the farmers come, the finance part is the fourth part which has to come to make it happen on the ground.
On the input side, while there is a trust, but there is more communication required that input has to be taken and that connect between the farmer for the payout for the procurement side.
That is an area that is under progress, but at the same time, what is delivered, that link is already established.
When the customer pays for nutrition in terms of fat or SNF or the quality of milk, that link is already established.
When organizations like us work and see this kind of, uh, work on soil, on finance, on nutrition happening, we realized that the future lies more in quality than quantity.
When quality reigns over quantity, that's where excellence happens.
When the large commodity market moves into a niche market, when sustainability becomes the core, because then Quality is always the soul of this whole process and that's where we are working.
It's very, very gratifying to see that nutrition intensity of foods could one day be a criteria of rating and paying for them.
There are bits and pieces of that already happening, including traceability that is coming, but then there is much more and research of this kind will generate trust.
It's systems, processes, measures which need to get established and that work like this will make that happen.
Amul is the second name of trust as a brand.
But then this kind of a work, without that, it will be difficult to connect with the farmers and the consumers both.
Very, very gratifying to see that this kind of work is happening.
Thank you.
Thank you, Akanji.
Rico.
Can you share from the Parmer action lab.
We had one conversation yesterday with five to six farmers from across the world.
We also spoke to various farmer associations.
How do we have? What do you take away from that particular conversation in terms of having a position of farmers that are heard their challenges, their support requirements are heard on global platforms.
Hello, everyone.
Yeah, as Pavina said, we had yesterday, a very interesting side event with many, many farmer representatives in the room.
And maybe to give a little bit more context, when we speak about safe soil, of course, the solutions that come with that need to be pharma centric that day to get the support which is needed.
For this to happen, also they have to make their demands heard in these global forums that we participating in.
And we see already that there are quite some efforts that try to make this happen.
So for example, the UNF TAC, the sister convention of this one, we have the Farmers constituency, we have funded the United Nations Development Program, Environmental Program, we also have a Farmers group.
And so there are these efforts.
We also have the World Farmers Organiation, the World World Forum and these, you know, um, organizations that try to represent farmers as best as they can in these international forums, and this is very valuable, but still we see that, for example, the impact is not really what it should be like.
For example, when we look at the money that flows into the small hold agricultural sector, then we can clearly see that there could be more impact, um, and how do we create that impact is the question that we asked ourselves, and we felt like that, um, for this to happen, we need to align these farmer voices and the language and the priorities that, um, you know, they come up with and that they communicate to the Secretariat of these conventions and the parties specifically.
If we align these things, then I think we have the chance to create a higher impact.
For example, in this particular convention, UNC City, we don't have a farmers group, farmers interest group institutionalized.
Um Here we have a gender Caucus, a youth caucus.
Now also they speak about an indigenous caucus and the local communities caucus.
We are just trying to explore, is there also a place for a farmers caucus.
Now I think the situation is like this that the farmers are represented by this local community caucus and what we really try to do with this action lab is to see if it would work, then all is good.
If this local communities caucus is working, then I think we can also here increase our impact.
But then again, we have to ask this question, is it really working? It's just in the starting stage and we are happy to continue this conversation with all the farmer representatives that we know, our friends, our partners to see how to make it work here, and then also how to make it work across conventions.
Yeah, this Farmers action lab in a nutshell.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
I think we can call the action labs launched with this conversation.
Thank you, everyone.
I just want to ask Tor and Akshan what will be your advice for us getting on this journey? Because there are a number of coalitions, number of groupings, conversations that's happening across all the conventions.
If you guys if you want us to be useful to whatever work is being done, what will be that one piece of advice that you'll give the safe soils action labs? Well, I mean, there's plenty of conversations, of course, and there's plenty of things that are being launched, but at the end of the day, it's really about what gets implemented and what makes sense for farmers.
From my perspective in terms of soil information to farmers, which is really critical, it's really about improving accessibility and like I mentioned, bringing down costs, making things scalable because we know that farmers are able to innovate a lot themselves, but often lack the relevant information that they need for their farms in terms of soil management, et cetera.
For me, that's a critical step.
I think I completely agree there that what gets measured gets done.
So tests and measures which develop into reliable systems and in small areas where they get proven, where from where pilots can start multiplying, people start seeing the benefits that gets talked about and we get the beneficiaries to become stakeholders of the success of this entire this whole enterprise.
I think that's possibly the path that will work.
As a repository of a large group of farmers, I think I must say that the farmers also are expectantly waiting for work like this to reach them so that they can come out of the stranglehold of the lives that they're leading in terms of restricted markets or good quality soil leading to good quality food not getting paid at the same rates and a low quality vitamin C citrus fruit gets possibly paid the same as the one grown in a very good quality soil, not as sweet to something much sweeter.
They both travel in the same van and until and unless frameworks like these get established on the ground, the farmer will not get his due.
We are essentially working for that farmer on the ground for whom these frameworks will be the elixir of life.
Thank you for the farmers of the world.
Thank you.