We need new strategies to redesign agriculture and food systems for people and planet

The role of business is crucial in shaping truly regenerative food systems that are better for human rights and a decarbonised future. This includes prioritising the agency of farmers, workers, and farm communities in the design of regenerative practices, learning from indigenous leadership, and shaping consumer demand.

Existing efforts to decarbonise key industry sectors were illustrated in the recent IHRB-Wilton Park Just Transitions Dialogue. One of those sectors was agriculture and our wider food systems, which account for an enormous share of global emissions.

When it comes to the social impacts of climate action in this sector, new strategies are urgently needed to ensure that decarbonisation and adaptation efforts are undertaken in a rights-respecting and inclusive manner, ensuring greater access to better foods for all, and greater resilience in the global food system. Responses should be integrated within economic development planning and centred on people across all levels of the value chain, from farmers and farmer communities, to workers across fields and factories, local indigenous peoples stewarding the majority of our planet’s remaining biodiversity, as well as consumers worldwide. 

But the reality is that there is still much work ahead to achieve these aims. 

A current state of play that is failing people and planet 

The transformation of agrifood systems is vital not only to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss but also in reducing global poverty and malnutrition. In the worst-case climate change scenario, over 30% of global crop and livestock areas could become climatically unsuitable by 2100. Conversely, successfully limiting global warming to 1.5°C could reduce the number of people exposed to climate-related risk and poverty by up to several hundred million by 2050.

This mega-sector is both a major emitter, as well as highly sensitive to climate impacts. The global food system accounts for roughly one-third of global emissions, 80% of biodiversity loss, 70% of freshwater use, and risks the collapse of global fishing stocks. Correspondingly, climate change has already reduced yields of the world’s three staple crops (maize, rice and wheat), which provide 50 percent of all calories consumed globally. 

The sector is also the single largest in terms of jobs and livelihoods globally, with a staggering one billion engaged in work. Smallholder farmers produce around a third of the world’s food, but are disproportionately impacted by climate change, despite small-scale traditional and biologically diverse agriculture generating lower emissions. Communities hit hardest by climate change also need support, including adaptation finance for small-scale production and promoting shifts to more diverse, low-input agriculture. For stakeholders in the agriculture and food system, the challenges of climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience come all at the same time.

Without this, farmers and their communities will be pushed further into poverty, increasing the risk of social conflict and gender-based violence. This social disruption in turn increasingly threatens the effectiveness of climate action and achieving net-zero in time. 

Emerging initiatives to advance a just agricultural transition

Building on the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021, the recent climate summit in Egypt, COP27, provided a key moment for showcasing public, private, and multistakeholder efforts to advance socially integrated approaches to lower-carbon agricultural practices. Here’s is a sample of those we observed:

• The Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), a network of global CEOs, released a white paper urging industry and government to address the knowledge gap to ensure farmers follow best practices and that all stakeholders – from farmers to food producers to government, banks and insurers – align behind a shift to more sustainable practices.

• The Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST). Egypt, among the countries suffering the worst consequences of the global food crisis, launched this  global agriculture initiative to implement climate finance contributions for food systems.

• The Koronivia joint work on agriculture and food security emphasized scaling up action and access to finance and technology development, to enhance adaptive capacity and reduce the vulnerability of farmers and other vulnerable groups to climate change. This emphasis aligned with proposals by organisations like the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), Africa’s largest civil society organisation, to prioritise climate adaptation, as well as the Stockholm Environment Institute’s work to highlight the transboundary risks of failing to adequately adapt global systems.

• The FAIRR Initiative, a coalition of investors worth $70 trillion AUM, notes that a just transition for agriculture so far lacks the in-depth analysis already published on energy transitions. FAIRR’s paper puts forward recommendations for policymakers, finance institutions, investors and companies on the types of policy mechanisms that could facilitate a just transition for farmers and agricultural workers towards a more sustainable food system. Similiarly, the Meridian Institute backed by the UK’s FCDO since COP26 in Glasgow has been developing a set of principles to guide the “just rural transition” (forthcoming).  

Despite these and other promising initiatives and advocacy messages, in the negotiating rooms at last year’s COP27 in Egypt there was a heavy focus on making industrialised agriculture ‘bigger and better’, with more public-private support for fossil fuel fertilisers and tech solutions. There was a similar narrative at the Food Systems Pavilion for green fertilisers and methane reducing additives among the innovations for ‘climate resilient’ agriculture. 

Ultimately, many of these initiatives were viewed as merely tinkering at the edges of the existing system or expanding industrial agriculture by supporting patents and techno-fixes while sidelining agroecology and alternatives. Indeed many smallholder farmer representatives regularly refrained that farmers should not be considered as recipients of aid but instead urged greater agency, partnership, and collaboration for the benefit of all.
 

The role of business in transforming the agricultural system

As developing and emerging economies bear the burden of inaction and have limited resources to cope, agricultural mitigation, adaptation, and resilience requires investments in the right policies, innovations, and institutions based on integrated socio-environmental (or agroecological) approaches. 

Not only does business play a vital role in supporting structural changes in production processes and management practices, they are also crucial in shaping truly regenerative food systems and in addressing the impacts these systems have on human rights. 

This requires a holistic lens on all potentially affected groups and understanding of the interconnected supply and demand drivers that affect them, in particular: 

• Workers: Given the high numbers of people working in agriculture, a just transition will require a strong focus on decent work on farms and along the entire agro-food supply chain. This includes a nuanced understanding of the local interrelationships between farmers, workers, and farming communities. Businesses should also support investments in research and development, as well as training and support for farmers to transition to agroecological and regenerative agriculture practices. In all this, the 2015 ILO Just Transition Guidelines should be central, and the Climate Action for Jobs Initiative (launched in 2019) is one key effort to drive implementation.

• Indigenous peoples: In parallel, given the intersecting venn diagram of agriculture’s impact on biodiversity and indigenous peoples’ leadership in protecting the planet’s remaining biodiversity, a strong emphasis on indigenous peoples right to self determination is critical. As the original regenerative farmers, indigenous peoples also have tremendous knowledge to learn from.

• Consumers: The just transition challenge for agriculture and food systems can only be met if business also considers its corresponding demand-side responsibilities. For example, marketing budgets promote lifestyles and products that might not be sustainable over the longer-term. Governments will need to help shape consumer demand, as they have on smoking and now through sugar taxes, but so too will the market itself. The balance between plant-based and meat-based diets is one example which is both deeply cultural but also likely to have a profound effect on agricultural demand in the future.

Connecting the supply and demand drivers inherent in the above is finance. Financial institutions and insurers have a powerful role to play in shaping the agricultural markets of our low-carbon future. Despite this, less than 2 per cent of climate finance is invested in supporting the unsung heroes of our global food system – smallholders – despite them facing increasingly challenging conditions due to the climate crisis.

If we can balance and align these supply/demand/finance drivers around principles of justice, equity, and human rights, then food system transitions are more likely to be sustainable in social terms. This was one of the conclusions coming out of our recent IHRB-Wilton Park Just Transitions Dialogue, and we at IHRB will be working to better understand and map these drivers for agriculture systems throughout 2023.