On Monday afternoon, Dec. 14, three days of outside meetings in Copenhagen came to a head in an official COP 15 side event, "Beyond Copenhagen: Agriculture and Forestry are Part of the Solution." More than 400 people crowded the Niels Bohr room in Hall H at the Bella Center for a meeting organized by the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP).

The main message was food security and climate change are inexorably linked, and any agreement coming out of Copenhagen that does not address the role of agriculture will not succeed. The meeting began with an opening statement by Ajay Vashee, from Zambia, president of IFAP, who urged the negotiating parties to include agriculture in the text of the agreement. His remarks were followed by representatives of the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organzation), the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research), and by M.S. Swaminathan, the famous India plant breeder familiar to Iowans as a World Food Prize winner. The message from all the speakers was the same - food security, poverty reduction and climate change are interlinked - and agriculture and forestry play major roles in the climate change debate both in adaptation and in mitigation.

Roundtable discussions were held on themes such as the triple challenge to agriculture of increasing food productivity, climate resilience and greenhouse gas mitigation, and on unlocking the potential of emission markets for small farmers.

Vilsack gave an address and impressed the audience with his understanding of the impact climate change is having on agriculture - and the need to address climate change if we are serious about food security and poverty reduction.

He spoke about what he refers to as the Borlaug principles to evaluate our efforts - scope, scale and impact - to ensure our efforts are designed to meet the magnitude of the challenges we face. The secretary, Christie Vilsack and his staff stayed to participate in several of the "idea marketplace" discussions that followed.