The World Bank advised farmers to diversify their crops to make the agricultural sector more resilient to climate change.
Speaking with reporters over lunch, World Bank Group Vice-President and Special Envoy on Climate Change Rachel Kyte also encouraged farmers to use hybrid varieties of crops that were made to survive floods and other extreme weather conditions.
Crop diversification and use of technology, she said, will ensure that farmers still harvest something even after storms hit their area.
This comes after typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan) struck the central Philippines last November and brought about losses in agriculture worth P31.13 billion.
The World Bank has loaned the Philippines almost US$1 billion for reconstruction and rehabilitation projects for Yolanda-affected communities.
Ms. Kyte also said that the Philippines should make use of technology and beef up its irrigation systems. “We have lots of innovation on how to make irrigation systems more resilient so that they don’t silt up and then collapse, so that they are able to come back to full use and withstand the storm so that they could still be productive afterwards,” she added.
“What’s important now is to anticipate,” said World Bank Sector Manager Ousmane Dione. “We now have to ensure that resilience is built on every piece of agenda,” he said.
Ms. Kyte said that climate change resilience must be built into all plans to achieve growth as the cost of disaster now is four times more than it did thirty years ago. “Climate change puts prosperity out of reach for millions and rolls back decades of development. “The cost of not acting [against climate change] is now much more than that of acting.”
