A framework for South-South collaboration and a new community of practice emerge from an FAO peer-learning exchange in Bali
Farmer organizations, researchers, and government partners from across Asia-Pacific and Africa have agreed to pool what works — and what doesn’t — in cutting emissions from rice and livestock while keeping smallholder farmers at the center. The commitment took concrete shape at the Knowledge Exchange on Frontier Technologies for Low-Emission Rice and Livestock Systems, organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Bali, Indonesia, which convened around 100 participants from the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and other partner countries to identify low-emission solutions that are both investable and adoptable, particularly for rice farmers.
The clearest output of the exchange was a framework for South-South collaboration linking the Climate and Clean Air Coalition’s Farmers’ Initiative for Resilient and Sustainable Transformations (FIRST) Network in Africa with the ASEAN Climate Resilience Network (ASEAN-CRN), to be facilitated by the Mekong Institute (MI). The two networks agreed to work together on a set of shared priorities: low-emission rice and livestock practices, monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems that are practical for smallholders, and climate finance readiness.
To sustain that collaboration between formal events, partners committed to a slate of voluntary mechanisms — twinning farmer organizations, developing joint knowledge products, preparing joint funding proposals, and maintaining regular exchanges. Partners also agreed to keep farmers at the center of innovation, help transform promising ideas into investable solutions, and carry a shared farmer-led voice to global platforms, including the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 31) in Türkiye later in 2026.
A second major output came from the two days immediately preceding the exchange, when country teams from the Global Environment Facility–supported Food Systems Integrated Program (FSIP) and the Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration (FOLUR) Impact Program — drawn from Asia and Africa — established a community of practice on sustainable rice transformation. The dialogue set a shared goal across partners and projects: ensuring the right technologies actually reach farmers in the countries where the projects operate.
The exchange itself was built around peer learning, mirroring the way farmers learn from one another. Over three days, sessions examined farmers’ realities alongside country perspectives on the global methane landscape and pathways to net-zero agriculture, working through frontier technologies, and climate finance. Under its MIDORI Initiative for decarbonization and food security, Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) brought Japanese private companies to showcase a range of low-emission technologies for rice, livestock, and farm management systems — giving participants a direct look at tools they might adapt at home. The showcase stressed the need for stronger international partnerships to harness private sector ingenuity, scale innovations, and accelerate climate action.
Grounding the discussions in on-the-ground realities, Kustiwa Adinata, Chairperson of the Indonesian farmer organization Jaringan Masyarakat Tani Indonesia (JAMTANI), described how more than 1,000 hectares of his network’s farmland — spanning 120,000 farming households across 14 provinces — have been affected by sea-level rise, flooding, and drought, and how farmers are responding by working together and with partners.
“For us, farming is our life. It is our future. Through our farmer organization, we collaborate with different partners to implement appropriate technologies. However, we cannot simply wait for solutions to come from outside. We have to learn by doing.”
Drawing on insights gained from spending time with farmers in the field, Keith Loo, Managing Partner of Singapore-based climate-smart investor Alternate Futures, believes that farmers need better coordination among key stakeholders — even more than new technologies — to adopt and scale innovations.
“Technology needs to make money for farmers, make things easier from an NGO perspective, and be safe and appropriate from a government’s perspective. If a technology can meet all three, that’s when I think the innovator has truly understood what their technology needs to achieve.”
That emphasis on practicality ran through the exchange. Setting the tone at the opening, local host Dr. Puji Lestari, Chairperson of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), noted that rice sits at the heart of food security, rural economies, and culture across much of Asia and Africa even as it remains among the largest agricultural sources of methane emissions.
“None of this is magic. Each innovation requires investment, adaptation to local conditions, and policies that help move it from pilot projects to scale,” she said. “Our task is to be honest about what works, for whom, and under what conditions.”
For African partners, the appeal of the new collaboration lay partly in ASEAN-CRN’s track record of sustaining regional cooperation over nearly a decade. Dr. Kwaku Onwona-Hwesofour Asante, Research Scientist at Ghana’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research–Crops Research Institute (CSIR-CRI) and a member of the FIRST Network, pointed to the network’s ability to position itself to access opportunities such as climate readiness funding. “This is something that we would like to see happen in our own networks in Africa,” he said.
Each side brought specific capabilities to the table. From the ASEAN-CRN side, partners offered to share regional approaches for climate-resilient agriculture — including experience in certification, capacity development, and regional policy coordination through ASEAN mechanisms. Indonesia, through BRIN, signaled it could contribute mentorship and scholarship opportunities for African partners under Indonesian Aid and the Non-Aligned Movement Centre for South-South Technical Cooperation, along with its experience developing integrated low-emission rice production packages and scaling conservation agriculture for dryland farming.
The exchange was co-organized by FAO with MAFF, the CCAC, the ASEAN-CRN and its secretariat the Mekong Institute, and was supported by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF).
Through a panel discussion, it examined how to make climate finance work for smallholder farmers by leveraging innovative financing mechanisms and stronger market and institutional partnerships. Participants also emphasized the importance of enhanced regional cooperation on MRV to ensure credible and comparable emissions reporting, attract climate finance, support carbon market participation, and accelerate methane mitigation efforts while allowing flexibility for national circumstances.
It concluded with a field visit to the Jatiluwih Rice Terraces, a UNESCO World Heritage site where a thousand-year-old rice-farming tradition across 600 hectares of terraced paddies is sustained by the subak, Bali’s ancient cooperative irrigation system.
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