Abstract:

The purpose of this paper will concentrate on agricultural policies and risk management strategies to increase food security and build natural disasters resilience. Stating the impact of natural disasters on agriculture and recognizing the rural poor as the most affected and kept by the occurrence of natural disasters itself into poverty traps, the contribution will then identify a possible solution into building resilient livelihoods. This so as to render the affected communities able to recover and eventually escape the poverty trap, in line with the approach endorsed by many actors involved in efforts against natural events consequences, from small Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to United Nations (UN) Organizations. In the first part the paper introduces natural disasters and their impact on agriculture focusing on the specific effects that such terrific climate variability has on this particular sector. Then outline levels of intervention on the part of various actors to address the impacts of natural disasters on agriculture: the farmer level in order to describe the risk management strategies they have at their disposal; the national level of governmental intervention, underlying the crucial role of the state in assisting affected communities; the international level  in which international organizations perform the key task of providing guidelines and promoting coherence and integration of global actions. The analyses put evidence on the fact that despite constrained to an unequal socio-economic class, disasters still disproportionally affect individuals in the relief and recovery phase. The third part of the paper will concentrate on approaches and tools for building disasters resilience in agriculture. In the last section, the paper put evidence on several aspects emerged from the investigation led. The paper concludes that any possible strategy to cope with natural disasters and tackle food insecurity needs a holistic approach that takes into consideration a concentrated effort to build resilient livelihoods and free affected communities from vicious cycles of poverty and hunger. In the conclusion the prevention of disaster is considered to be a matter of managerial administration, rational prediction and organizational readiness. The method used for the investigation has been based on the use of the information coming from selected literature.