FAO at the International Dialogue on Migration (IDM 2022)
FAO at the International Dialogue on Migration 2022
28/02/2022-02/03/2022
(Virtual format)
FAO Statements (as delivered)
Panel: Migration, Environment and Climate Change: From Adaptation to Regular Pathways
The new IPCC 6th Assessment Report points to heightened vulnerability in rural areas due to high reliance on climate-sensitive livelihoods.
Climate change has negative impacts on food production and food security, disproportionately affecting rural households and small-scale farmers with direct and indirect implications for migration and displacement.
Migration is a common adaptation strategy for rural households. Through social and financial remittances, it has the potential to strengthen households’ adaptive capacity and contribute to building climate-resilient livelihoods.
Forced migration and migration that is undertaken via irregular pathways, on the other hand, have been shown to perpetuate vulnerability.
To support migration as positive adaptation to climate change, FAO works with rural populations to address the adverse drivers of migration, promotes the sustainable use and management of natural resources, and helps create climate-resilient livelihoods and green employment opportunities in rural areas.
The role of migration as adaptation needs to be explicitly recognized by States and supported by creating safe and regular pathways for those who choose to or need to move in the context of climate change.
To harness the positive contribution of migration to climate change adaptation, it is critical to create enabling environments in areas of origin, transit and destination and recognize gender-specific needs.
This will require improved coherence and coordination between sectoral policies and programming, as well as enhanced collaboration between policy actors.
Panel 2: Rethinking skilled migration to address persistent labour shortages
Migrants play a critical role in agri-food systems. The pandemic has served to highlight how indispensable migrant workers are in that regard.
Agriculture has many particularities, such as the seasonality of work and peaks in labour demand and challenges such as weather conditions, physically demanding work, remote locations, and early starts.
Meeting labour demand requires recruiting and deploying skilled workers, to respond to employers’ needs and to the seasonality of agricultural work as well as protecting the rights of migrant workers.
There may be few incentives for employers to invest in skills development of migrant workers due to the nature of seasonal employment.
However, investing in training for upskilling and re-skilling migrants, especially women and youth, is important to improve productivity. Skilling could also be included in pre-departure and post-arrival training as part of broader labour migration agreements to address labour shortages.
Multi-seasonal employment of agricultural migrant workers offers migrants opportunities to acquire experience and improve skills and secures labour force for successive agricultural seasons.
Skills developed at destination can be applied in countries of origin when workers return home.
In agriculture, applicability is determined by the access to the same technologies as abroad, availability of identical crops in the country of origin, access to land and plans to continue working in the agricultural sector upon return.
FAO works with diaspora and diaspora organizations to promote the transfer of skills in support of agribusiness development and employment generation in countries of origin.
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