What beekeeping taught me about who should decide Asia’s food future

I first got involved with beekeeping and farming in hopes of serving my community in Samoa. Early on, I was fortunate to meet our most experienced beekeepers who mentored me. As my passion for beekeeping grew, they taught me about planting the nonu tree, which flowers all year round so my bees have a consistent food supply.  

Four years after my return, COVID hit. It took a pandemic for us to realize how much we relied on imported food. As businesses collapsed around us, Samoans returned to working the land for food security.

Beekeeping takes patience and endurance. I started with two hives and now we have 80. Our family continues to invest in and develop our farming by adding crops and diversifying. Today our farm grows bananas, taro and cacao. Through this work, I’ve learned that if donors and partners give farmers the right support and room to navigate their future, we can find solutions together that fit our land, our seasons and our communities.

This month, governments meet in Antalya, Türkiye, for COP31. Australia is leading the negotiations, and the Pacific hosted the talks that set them up. The conference has a focus on food, agriculture and health. That prominence is welcome progress. But it’s crucial to remember that decisions on climate finance and adaptation made in these rooms land hardest on farmers.

Smallholders produce roughly one third of the world’s food. Yet our priorities and challenges are often not reflected in the forums that shape agricultural policy and investment.

Policies made without farmers don’t look good on people and communities. We are the best judges of which methods and technologies will be adopted, and which will gather dust.

Producer groups can speak for thousands of farmers, test ideas in the field and say honestly when something isn’t working. Engaging farmers at the governance level, where they can inform decision-making from the outset, also improves accountability, because the question changes from, “will this scale?” to “will this work here, for these farmers, after the project ends?”

A single cyclone can flatten a season’s crops overnight, and droughts and rising seas caused by climate change make every season less certain. When local harvests fail, imports fill the gap — food imports have risen from 25 kilos per person per year to over 50 kilos in the past 25 years. Over time, rice, sugar, tinned food and soft drinks have replaced much of the healthier foods families once grew.

The cost of donor programs designed far from the farm shows up in our health, as the Pacific now has some of the world’s highest rates of diabetes, heart disease and other diet-related illnesses. If we continue down this road, the bill will fall on hospitals that are already stretched, on families who lose breadwinners young, and on economies as a whole.

There is a model that works, and which other funding platforms are interested in following. The Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), created by the G20 after the 2008 food price crisis, ensures that farmers are at the heart of the mission and have a place at its decision-making table. I sit on GAFSP’s Steering Committee alongside donor and recipient governments, representing civil society in Asia and the Pacific.

We bring what is happening in the field into discussions to inform what works, what doesn’t, and why. This helps GAFSP make funding allocations that respond to the challenges farmers face. 

GAFSP has committed $118 million through 43 producer organization-focused projects, benefiting almost 1,000 producer organizations worldwide and 225,000 smallholder farmers. The Pacific Farmers’ Resilience Initiative, for example, is led by producer organizations themselves. It will support 21 of them across seven island countries — the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Samoa and Tonga — reaching 15,000 farmers. Its priorities, from drought-tolerant crops to agroforestry and stronger cooperatives, come from assessments carried out with farmers. This is diversification, designed by the people who farm, making communities more resilient to increasing supply shocks.

There is a link between my beekeeping and advocacy. I’ve had a lot of losses, and I have been on the brink of giving up a few times. But I also understand the greater benefit and the time and resilience it takes to have enough successful seasons to produce honey reliably as the pollination improves the environment. At GAFSP, I work to ensure that all the farmers are not only heard but listened to over time. 

So my request to negotiators and funders in Antalya is simple. When you design the next climate fund, adaptation programme or partnership, give farmer organisations a role in governing it.