What Asian agriculture can learn from us – and what we can learn from them

It was a very busy few days at the National Ploughing Championships, so chances are attendees might have missed the delegation from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) who were on site as part of a high-level delegation to Ireland, accompanied by Ministry of Agriculture officials from Vietnam and Mongolia.

They were there as part of a wider visit to Ireland to learn more about this country’s expertise in agriculture and agri tech on topics such as increasing production, food safety, crop protection, livestock health and phytosanitary standards.

Michiko Suga, ADB representative in Europe, told the Irish Farmers Journal: “We are here at the Ploughing to show the officials the great agricultural technology that you have. We are hoping, ideally, that they see a technology that they want to have applied in their own country.”

The ADB describes itself as “Asia’s Climate Bank” and sees the challenges around climate change and food security as some of the key measures that need to be addressed in the region.

The bank projects that agricultural output in Asia will drop by between 15% and 20% by 2050 in a “business as usual” scenario.

United Nations projections suggest that the population of Asia will grow by more than 10% in the same time period, so it is little wonder that the ADB is so concerned about climate change.

In early September, the ADB announced that it had approved a new goal to devote 50% of its annual lending to climate finance by 2030 and that it is committed to reaching more than $100bn (€89.5bn) in cumulative climate finance from 2019 to 2030.

ADB president Masatsuga Asakawa said at the time of the announcement of the update to its strategic goals that the change was to help member countries respond to the cascading shocks, which have “derailed years of development progress in Asia and the Pacific”.

The 50% of lending, which is not directly focused on climate change, will be used to increase private sector development, regional co-operation and resilience.

Robert Schoelhammer, advisor to Sectors Group at the ADB, gave an example of how the effects of climate change are already being felt on the ground in that country.

“Go visit any nomadic community who live in tents. Everyone, unprompted, will talk about climate change. This is because it doesn’t rain anymore. It used to rain every summer.

“Now it doesn’t, so the grass doesn’t grow and every winter they lose a phenomenal number of animals because they don’t have any fodder for them.

“So now when you go to the capital of Mongolia, you will find it is surrounded by these tented suburbs and when you ask the people living there what happened, they say that their animals died.”

Snow

Heavy snowfall last winter followed by drought conditions in the early part of 2024 led to the deaths of more than seven million farm animals, in excess of 10% of the country’s entire livestock.

When it comes to financing projects which will help mitigate the effects of climate change, the ADB can find itself in the position of having to develop infrastructure from the ground up.

One of the major goals for the bank is to reduce reliance in the region on burning coal for energy.

Suga gave the example of a major project undertaken by the ADB in Laos, where a 600MW wind farm was to be constructed.

The country has viable wind resources, but didn’t have expertise in wind development on that scale, and didn’t even have a port which could handle the size of modern wind turbines.

“In cases like this, you have to look at changing energy from a more holistic point of view, and as a multilateral development bank, we are equipped to do that,” Suga explained.

The Laos project is being aided by a $100m (€89.5m) loan from the ADB, as well as a $10m (8.95m) grant from the Asia Development Fund, which provides grants to lower-income member countries.

In May of this year, then Minister for Finance Michael McGrath announced that Ireland would pay €15.63m into the Asia Development Fund over 11 years from 2025, as part of the Government’s commitment to increase development spending to 0.7% of gross national income by 2030.

It felt more than a little incongruous to be sitting down at the Ploughing discussing the vagaries of the Mongolian climate with experts from the region. However, it did serve to once again highlight that climate change is a global problem.

A very wet 2023 and sluggish growth this year mean that fodder levels are low

While Irish farmers have a different set of weather phenomena to deal with, the challenges to sustainable food production – both from an output and economic perspective – are also large here.

A very wet 2023 and sluggish growth this year mean that fodder levels are low and even though the outlook is nothing like as bad as what some areas in Asia have experienced recently, the stress and worry caused should not be underestimated.

The delegation from Asian Ministries for Agriculture came to Ireland to learn from our experience of efficient and highly productive agriculture and they could not have come to a better country.

Ireland’s grass-fed livestock production system is by some distance one of the most sustainable in the world, and the expertise of our farmers is second to none.

But we cannot hide from the vulnerability of this system to the challenges from climate change. Perhaps we can also learn something from the Asian delegations about how seriously those challenges need to be taken, and how much work needs to be done to protect our production system from those challenges.