“Planning national, regional and international strategies on climate change, food security and trade issues in isolation could lead to fragmented policy frameworks, and negative outcomes”, said the Ugandan Minister of State for Environment Hon. Flavia Nabugere Munaaba today in Nairobi while opening a regional meeting on “Climate, Trade, and Food Security Nexus: Reviewing Policy Impacts, Practice Changes, and Increased Knowledge”. This last annual meeting of CUTS International’s PACT EAC project is taking stock of four years of many stakeholders’ efforts to enhance policy coherence across the three issues in the five East African Community Member States.
“Planning national, regional and international strategies on climate change, food security and trade issues in isolation could lead to fragmented policy frameworks, and negative outcomes”, said the Ugandan Minister of State for Environment Hon. Flavia Nabugere Munaaba today in Nairobi while opening a regional meeting on “Climate, Trade, and Food Security Nexus: Reviewing Policy Impacts, Practice Changes, and Increased Knowledge”. This last annual meeting of CUTS International’s PACT EAC project is taking stock of four years of many stakeholders’ efforts to enhance policy coherence across the three issues in the five East African Community Member States.
Food security is one of the main challenges in East Africa where food production is challenged by extreme weather conditions brought by climate change. Hon. Jesca Eriyo, Deputy Secretary General of the EAC Secretariat, reminded the audience today that “trade can be a tool to mitigate food crises. This requires better understanding of the linkages between climate change, food security and trade and developing holistic policies and strategies.”
However, using trade as an instrument to bolster food security is by no means an easy or passive process; and efforts under the PACT EAC project have been geared towards informing, persuading, training and moving to advocacy action all the key players for them to take active roles in formulating and shaping more coherent policies and institutional synergies. The initiative had materialised in 2011 with support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).
Four years down the road, evidence presented at the event indicate that East African countries are now taking more seriously the interrelations between climate change, food security and trade, with several recent policies taking them into account. A case in point is the new Kenya National Environment Policy, where the project inspired the inclusion of a dedicated section on “Trade and Environment” which provides for the mainstreaming of environmental considerations into the National Trade Policy. Similarly in Uganda, the recent National Trade Sector Development plan undertakes to mainstream climate change into the national trade agenda, particularly considering its negative effects on agricultural supply chains. The document also provides for the harmonizing any overlapping positions in both trade and climate change negotiations at the multilateral level.
In fact, the outcomes of such multilateral negotiations such as the WTO and UNFCCC will have a strong bearing on EAC countries’ policy space to tackle these issues. This is why the PACT EAC project established a bi-monthly Forum in Geneva to support the region’s WTO negotiators by connecting them to the grassroots back home. As reported by Geneva-based WTO delegates during the afternoon session of today’s event, this forum facility informed their trade negotiation positions on issues such as industrial goods, agriculture, trade facilitation, the services waiver for LDCs etc.
Tomorrow, the event will witness discussions on the implementation and impacts of the advocacy campaigns by the project’s national partners, including on the widening of some trade-related institutional mechanisms to include climate change officials.