Where are the incentives for sustainability?

Over the past five years, the idea of sustainable intensification – of producing more food from the same area of land while reducing the environmental impacts – has been gaining traction in policy debate. But not only is there a strong scientific rationale for transforming farming practices, there is also a strong interest from the global corporations that make money from seeds and agrochemicals.  Not surprisingly, this commercial enthusiasm for sustainable intensification has led to scepticism from environmental organisations and food sovereignty activists.

Photo Credit: David Brazier/IWMI on Flickr

I share that scepticism. Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a new report from UNEP and IFAD looked at the issue of agricultural sustainability from the perspective of those farmers who have become “more vulnerable and less able to escape poverty” as a result of economic trends and development policy.

The bulk of the report on Smallholders, Food Security and the Environment is structured around three ‘key messages’:

• Smallholders form a vital part of the
 global agricultural community, yet they 
are often neglected
• Smallholder productivity in particular depends on well-functioning ecosystems
• Growth in agricultural production 
to meet rising global needs using prevailing farming practices is unsustainable
– a transformation is needed

To be honest, the arguments were familiar and I already agreed with the key messages, so I eagerly skimmed through the report in anticipation of some big ideas about how this transformation could be effected… and I soon reached page 34:

Conclusion:  With the right conditions, smallholders can be at the forefront of a transformation in world agriculture.

This is the crux of the matter: how do we create the ‘right conditions’?

The technology for sustainable intensification has been available for decades. We really don’t need GMOs for smallholders to improve productivity, and one of the tables in the Annex to the IFAD/UNEP report provides a number of examples that would be acceptable to Friends of the Earth: conservation agriculture, agroforestry, integrated pest management etc. But why haven’t these practices been more widely adopted?

In 2009, the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) stated, “Business as usual is not an option”.  The phrase has been repeated in numerous papers and presentations… but it isn’t true!  Business as usual is an option, and it continues at full throttle. It can’t last for ever, but right now agricultural practices that degrade ecosystems continue to provide small farmers with contracts, continue to provide consumers with cheap food, and continue to make profits for big companies.

Although researchers and activists may wish otherwise, most farmers, consumers and investors – plus a fair portion of politicians – make decisions based on the expected returns in the short and medium term.  And that applies even when they adopt sustainable policies and practices.

During my time with the FAO programme for integrated pest management, I liked to think that the reason why so many farmers stopped using pesticides was because they had learned that these chemicals were harmful to beneficial insects and human health. But the decisive factor was probably that they could save money, not in the future but immediately.  And the places where IPM training was most successful were often where a change of practice became a necessity rather than an option: where rice crops were badly affected by pesticide-induced outbreaks of brown plant hopper, or where cotton yields had collapsed because of bollworm.

In Northern Laos I have observed a different story, but with the same conclusion, involving efforts to promote conservation agriculture among maize farmers. Outside of the demonstration farms that were subsidized by development projects, smallholders could not afford to invest the time and resources that were required to establish a mulch-based cropping system, not when there were more lucrative options available. Having exhausted the fertility of their soils after 4 or 5 years of maize cropping, farmers are now leasing their land to Chinese traders who engaged in intensive banana and vegetable production.

In both cases, farmers were largely motivated by short-term profitability. I hate to say this, but training in agro-ecology doesn’t carry as much weight as the three ‘C’s: cost, convenience and certainty.

This experience made me nod my head in agreement when I read page 34 of the IFAD/UNEP report:

Successes often have one of two factors in common:

• Either they have received considerable and
 consistent government support packaged
 with a strong political will;
• Or they have reduced the relative costs 
faced by smallholders, for example through coordination of producer groups to effectively leverage the economies of scale that otherwise place smallholders at a disadvantage in the market.

That makes sense to me but, to be honest, it doesn’t fill me with optimism. Nor does the table of “Means to provide market-based incentives for smallholders” that is included in the Annex of this report. The table has three suggestions:

• Property rights over land and the natural resources managed on these lands
• Payment for ecosystem (or environmental) services (PES) schemes
• Market chain development

These are good ideas, but the examples in the Annex are unconvincing. After checking the long list of experts who contributed to the report, I felt both annoyed and disappointed that they couldn’t come up with better cases.  I was left wondering ‘is that as good as it gets?’  And that’s the problem: the right conditions don’t exist for the vast majority of smallholders. The incentives for sustainability are not in place.

The challenge we face is bigger than the transformation of agricultural practices.  We need to transform the economic system that currently encourages all of us – producers, consumers and investors - to act in an unsustainable way.

I remain pleasantly surprised that IFAD and UNEP have published a report in which they refer to “the proposed transformation to a global, greener economy centred on smallholders”.  But I also remain sceptical.  Is there sufficient political will to make it happen, or will cash-strapped governments and research institutions allow this particular vision of sustainable intensification to be hijacked by the companies that got rich from ‘business as usual’?