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| ©IFAD/ Guy Stubbs |
The world faces the huge and complex task of providing healthy and accessible food for a population projected to reach 10 billion in 2050 while reducing agriculture's environmental and climate impacts, and improving rural livelihoods.
Tackling these challenges requires a systemic approach, states Alexander Müller, lead author of TEEB for Agriculture & Food: Scientific and Economic Foundations, a study addressing the core issues involving the agri-food sector, biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Food production has successfully been increased over the years as new agricultural technologies have augmented crop yields and productivity, but many environmental and social impacts have not received appropriate attention. These are crucial for achieving sustainable development and ensuring a more liveable world for the upcoming generations.
During a talk at IFAD HQ this week, Müller highlighted that hidden costs and benefits in eco-agri-food systems are rarely captured in conventional economic analyses because they focus on goods and services that are traded in markets.
For instance, a hidden cost of food systems is their climate footprint, estimated (along the value chain) at between 24 and 57 per cent of anthropogenic global greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, a hidden benefit is that food systems (including small-scale agriculture) employ more people than any other economic sector – agriculture employs 1.5 billion people worldwide.
A systems approach looks along entire food value chains and reveals many significant but economically invisible or non-market stocks and flows. These stocks and flows may be unpriced and not incorporated in macro-economic modelling – including Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – because they are unrecorded inputs to production, or because they are considered “externalities”.
Müller and other experts advocate for more holistic assessments in order to enable a transformation towards sustainable food systems.
India's state of Andhra Pradesh, for example, is trying to eliminate chemicals in agriculture. Instead of just focusing on food production, the government has launched a scale-out plan to transition six million farms/farmers to 100 per cent chemical-free agriculture by 2024. This is an unprecedented transformation towards sustainable agriculture at such a massive scale.
As the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, eco-agri-food systems are comprehensive and offer interconnected elements, all of which need to be addressed simultaneously.