Dear members of the HLPE Project Team and Steering Committee,
We appreciate the much-needed focus on agroecology for food security and nutrition. As noted by other commenters, agroecology, the right to food and food sovereignty should be the foundations of agriculture and food policies. We share concerns over climate smart agriculture that is raised in a joint submission by CIDSE and those raised in several other submissions on the need for greater clarity in this report on the definitions of agroecology and the dilution of and diversion from agroecology under the wide-open rubric of “other innovations” that undermine rather than complement agroecology and the right to food.
It is unclear to us why in the context of Sustainable Food Systems (SFS) and Food Security and Nutrition (FSN), “innovation” is emerging as the central criterion with which to assess the utility of agroecology as well as other agricultural approaches. Such an approach tends to marginalize community based agricultural practices and knowledge that have evolved and fed communities for generations, even without the support of governments and international agencies. Innovation prizes the new and patentable product, even if such products are sub-optimal means to realizing FSN and SFS targets in poor countries. Other parameters such as agricultural resilience, adaptation, equity, empowerment as well as the precautionary principle might even be more relevant lenses with which to assess the utility of agricultural technology and practices as they help fulfill food security and nutritional needs in an era of climate change. Rather than expanding the report to cover numerous unrelated technologies and practices, a more useful contribution of the HLPE report would be to maintain a central focus on agroecology.
In addition, we would like to raise these specific concerns:
A glaring omission in the report is the assessment of agroecology and other “innovations” in the context of a climate vulnerable world. The new IPCC Special Report on 1.5 degrees highlights that for human systems to survive, including food systems, we must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees by 2050. This means that our production estimates must be significantly revised to incorporate the imperative for a serious assessment of global food supply chains and a dramatic cut in consumption of GHG intensive foods in quantities that are not necessary for nutritional needs.
In addition, food production will be vulnerable to climate change. Rather than a simplistic focus on whether agroecology can feed the world, it is thus critical that FSN strategies prioritize regional, site-specific analysis on agriculture’s vulnerability and ensuing production, food, nutrition and distribution gaps. Global aggregate figures will be less helpful in such a scenario. The merits of agroecology are central to this adapting nutrient dense food production to climate change and should be assessed in this light. The merits of agroecology are central to adapting agriculture and food production to climate change and should be assessed in this light.
A powerful research and policy bias against agroecological approaches must be rectified. Despite ample empirical evidence that food, feed and forage crop production using agroecological methods leads to substantially better social and environmental outcomes and are much more climate-resilient than industrial monocultures, scientific research and, often, agricultural development aid, is biased towards a handful of industrial approaches that limit our ability to deal SFS and FSN holistically.
Sustainable intensification is not an adequate solution for FSN, as it understates true costs and requires externalization of a number of relevant factors to perform environmentally on a per unit of production basis. Such externalization and the subsidies available to intensified production make them poor candidates for applying to countries and producers without such subsidies.
The HLPE report should illustrate the problem of comparative technology assessment and application with case studies, including those for which scalability is an important factor in technology selection.
Recommendation 8 on the need for reforms of global trade and financial institutions should be supported in the text by evidence of the FSN impacts of trade liberalization on agricultural markets and revised to clearly state that governments must maintain the ability to apply import disciplines and support domestic production for goods critical to FSN.
Please find our detailed comments and proposals on these issues in the attachment.
السيد ASM Salim Hossain
Dear members of the HLPE Project Team and Steering Committee,
We appreciate the much-needed focus on agroecology for food security and nutrition. As noted by other commenters, agroecology, the right to food and food sovereignty should be the foundations of agriculture and food policies. We share concerns over climate smart agriculture that is raised in a joint submission by CIDSE and those raised in several other submissions on the need for greater clarity in this report on the definitions of agroecology and the dilution of and diversion from agroecology under the wide-open rubric of “other innovations” that undermine rather than complement agroecology and the right to food.
It is unclear to us why in the context of Sustainable Food Systems (SFS) and Food Security and Nutrition (FSN), “innovation” is emerging as the central criterion with which to assess the utility of agroecology as well as other agricultural approaches. Such an approach tends to marginalize community based agricultural practices and knowledge that have evolved and fed communities for generations, even without the support of governments and international agencies. Innovation prizes the new and patentable product, even if such products are sub-optimal means to realizing FSN and SFS targets in poor countries. Other parameters such as agricultural resilience, adaptation, equity, empowerment as well as the precautionary principle might even be more relevant lenses with which to assess the utility of agricultural technology and practices as they help fulfill food security and nutritional needs in an era of climate change. Rather than expanding the report to cover numerous unrelated technologies and practices, a more useful contribution of the HLPE report would be to maintain a central focus on agroecology.
In addition, we would like to raise these specific concerns:
Please find our detailed comments and proposals on these issues in the attachment.
Best regards,
Karen Hansen-Kuhn
Director, Trade and Global Governance
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy