A major spending boost is needed to bolster agriculture in the fight against hunger, poverty, and other consequences of climate change, the head of the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development told AFP.

"We are seeking a 1.7 billion dollar contribution," from member states to cover 2022 to 2024, IFAD president Gilbert Houngbo told AFP on Monday.

"The needs have considerably increased," with the rise in hunger around the world, he added, explaining what would amount to a 54 percent jump in the budget for the UN agency tackling poverty and hunger in rural areas of developing countries.

"This leads us to launch an appeal which is all the more exceptional because of the growing challenges linked to the climate," the former Togolese prime minister said in a telephone interview.

The appeal would be made at the fund's board meeting in Rome this week.

The fund solicited $1.2 billion in voluntary contributions from member states in 2017 and received $1.1 billion.

G7 and Nordic countries have been the main donors, stumping up three-quarters of the budget, followed by China, the Netherlands, India, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Ireland and Austria.

IFAD hopes to double its impact by 2030 and help more than 250 million people living in rural areas to increase their income by at least 20 percent.

The number of people suffering from malnutrition has been on the increase since 2015 and reached 820 million in 2018.

Hunger and small-scale agriculture are intricately linked as 80 percent of the poor live in rural areas and small farmers account for half of the food by calories produced in the world. With climate change making it more difficult to farm in some areas, there is added pressure for migration.

"Our objective is to show that all these subjects are linked, that we shouldn't treat them in silos," said Houngbo.

"It is impossible to eradicate poverty," one of the UN's goals, "if we don't start with small producers," he added.

The World Bank estimates that climate change could push more than 100 million people into poverty, with half of that due to its impact on agriculture such as inadequate rain and lower yields.

Houngbo called for shifting some of the climate change funding which overwhelmingly goes towards helping reduce pollution to ameliorating its impact.

In particular he advocated investing in equipment and stockage infrastructure in Africa where as much as 40 percent of production is lost due to a lack of machinery and adequate storage. This would in turn reduce pressure on land and water resources, and need for fertiliser.

13 activists held in Paris over storming of BlackRock offices
Paris (AFP) Feb 11, 2020 - Thirteen people are in custody in France over the storming of the Paris offices of US investment giant BlackRock by activists who spray painted the walls and carpets with environmental and anarchist slogans, police said Tuesday.

Around 100 climate and anticapitalist activists occupied the central Paris offices of the world's biggest private investment firm on Monday morning.

"This intrusion was in no way peaceful. 17 arrests of which 13 are still in custody," the Paris police department tweeted, along with a video showing the destruction caused.

The footage showed the walls and carpets covered in graffiti and documents strewn on the ground.

"Our planet, your crime," read a slogan daubed on one wall in big black letters while in a corridor, the anarchist circle-A symbol had been sprayed on the carpet.

In a statement, the Youth for Climate Paris group, which led the protest, accused the fund of investing in companies with environmentally destructive activities.

But "in attacking BlackRock, we're attacking capitalism" as well, they said.

Some of the graffiti referred to France's controversial pension reforms, in which some critics see the hidden hand of BlackRock.

"Give back the pension," one slogan read.

The intrusion was the second since the start of the year at BlackRock's Paris offices.

Last month, dozens of striking rail workers briefly occupied the entrance, chanting slogans and lighting flares in a protest over the government's plan to fuse 42 pension schemes into one.

Critics of the overhaul say it will force people to invest in private US-style pension plans -- to the benefit of foreign asset managers like BlackRock, whose French head Jean-Francois Cirelli recently received the Legion of Honour, France's highest distinction.

BlackRock has denied trying to influence the reforms.

It has also announced plans to clean up its investment portfolio by divesting from companies that get over 25 percent of their revenue from thermal coal production.

But the firm, which was also targeted by climate protesters in London last year, continues to be viewed with suspicion among many on the French left.

The leader of France's Greens, Julien Bayou, on Tuesday condemned the vandalism but maintained his fiercest criticism for the firm.

"What I condemn is BlackRock, the biggest investor in fossil fuels, the biggest investor in the Amazon region," he said.

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