Are we just buying time?

This post is part of the Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog’s month-long series on Resilience.

Are we just buying time?

The question came up toward the end of a workshop on supply chain approaches for protecting biodiversity in agricultural commodity landscapes, co-hosted by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and EcoAgriculture Partners in early April. After a day spent learning about twenty projects that accomplished targeted objectives for three commodities in seven countries, the question prompted reflection at a higher level: are we just buying time for biodiversity in agricultural landscapes or are we truly building a new foundation for biodiversity-friendly agriculture?

The process of cocoa fermentation brings out greater flavor. Photo: Laura Elizabeth Pohl

 

Sustainability standards are meant to incentivize safer, more environmentally responsible commodity production through voluntary action in supply chains, either as a complement or as a stand-in for regulation and other public policies. Over the last five years, the Biodiversity and Agricultural Commodities Program (BACP) has been trying to find out if voluntary sustainability standards, taken to their fullest potential, can transform commodity agriculture.

BACP grantees have partnered with multi-stakeholder initiatives like the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the Round Table for Responsible Soy (RTRS), and the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) to boost adoption of best management practices in supply chains.

There have been significant successes. In the palm oil sector, grantees piloted tools for high conservation value area assessment and increased policymakers’ support for sustainable production. In the soy sector, projects field-tested multi-stakeholder and value chain processes to improve how land-use decisions and management practices affect biodiversity. In the cocoa sector, grantees built smallholders’ capacity for supplying biodiversity-friendly cocoa and created a platform for agreeing on standard biodiversity indicators.

Of course, challenges remain. Voluntary sustainability standards focus on farm-scale best management practices, but landscape-scale changes matter more for biodiversity conservation (e.g. reducing habitat fragmentation). Biological diversity underpins the supply of ecosystem services that can increase resilience of agricultural landscapes to extreme weather events and other disturbances. High levels of compliance with sustainability standards within a region could translate into productive, resilient landscapes, but without the right outreach, technical assistance and monitoring mechanisms, this outcome remains uncertain.

Agricultural landscapes and value chains are highly variable and so are the protocols required by the proliferation of sustainability certification schemes. It’s not easy to track what’s happening or to learn what works. Credibility is key for certified products, but so is expanding participation to the majority of producers, including smallholders who will need assistance in meeting minimum requirements.

So, are we just buying time for biodiversity in agricultural landscapes? Not necessarily. The BACP project shows that:

Getting people from different sectors to work together on a specific project has spin-off benefits for building trust and changing mindsets that open the door to greater ambition – like developing high conservation value maps. For example, RSPO has offered to share concession maps to catalyze progress on Indonesia’s One Map initiative, which will make geospatial data more accessible to the public.

Attacking the problem from multiple angles is a must. For example, the World Resources Institute developed palm oil suitability maps on degraded lands at the same time they were pushing back legal barriers to land swaps.

Doing the hard work of building quantitative and spatial analysis tools can pay off especially when these tools are translated to other regions and for groups that have less experience (eg, smaller-scale farmers and companies). For example, Solidaridad’s BACP project has matured into a fully-automated (i.e. labor-saving) self-assessment toolkit for smallholder soy producers considering certification.

At the April workshop, the group did not shy away from making some big suggestions to the IFC:

Help us help governments and companies: BACP grantees pushing for resilient tropical agriculture saw first-hand how much help governments and companies need to create an effective mix of incentives, sanctions, and capacity building that can deliver market transformation. For example, how can governments set and enforce minimum standards for production practices that complement the higher bar set by certification schemes?

Measure the impact of certification for companies, producers, and landscapes: It’s difficult for any one industry player to tackle this alone and whoever does step up might be seen as having an agenda. Collaborative, multi-sector studies should look at avoided supply chain costs that result from best management practice adoption, such as reduced losses from flooding or drought, as well as changes in resilience of livelihoods, biodiversity, and ecosystem services.

Don’t forget emerging markets: So far, public procurement and consumer demand in wealthy countries have been the focus for building markets for certified agricultural products. But fast-growing – and rapidly changing – consumers in the developing world have the power to shape the global food system for good or ill and it’s time to invest in them.

Everyone who contributed to the Biodiversity and Agricultural Commodities Program deserves real credit for the advances that have been made. EcoAgriculture Partners has published “Transforming Markets for Conservation,” which showcases the BACP projects and proposes top priorities for building on their good work by expanding investment.