Agroecological approaches and other innovations for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition - HLPE e-consultation on the Report’s scope, proposed by the HLPE Steering Committee
Please note that in parallel to this scoping consultation, the HLPE is calling for interested experts to candidate to the Project Team for this report. The Project Team will be selected by the end of 2017 and will work until June 2019. The call for candidature is open until 15 November 2017; visit the HLPE website www.fao.org/cfs/cfs-hlpe for more details
Proposed draft Scope of the HLPE Report
by the HLPE Steering Committee
Innovation has been a major engine for agriculture transformation in the past decades and will be pivotal to address the needs of a rapidly growing population and the increased pressure over natural resources (including biodiversity, land and water) in a context of climate change. Agroecology and other innovative approaches, practices and technologies can play a critical role to strengthen sustainable agriculture and food systems in order to successfully combat hunger, malnutrition and poverty and contribute to the advancement of the 2030 Agenda.
Building sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition (FSN) will require not only to develop new knowledge and technologies but also: to fill the technology gaps; to facilitate the effective access and use of existing technologies; and to develop context-specific solutions, adapted to local food systems and local ecosystems.
Beyond technical issues, this report will assess the importance of bottom-up and people-centered approaches, building on different forms of knowledge, as well as the role of good governance and strong institutions. It will explore the enabling conditions needed to foster scientific, technical, financial, political and institutional innovations for enhanced FSN.
Agroecology, described simultaneously as a science, a set of practices and a social movement, will be studied in this report, as an example of such holistic innovative approaches combining science and traditional knowledge systems, technologies and ecological processes, and involving all the relevant stakeholders in inclusive, participative and innovative governance mechanisms.
This report will also examine the limitations and potential risks of innovative approaches for FSN, human health, livelihoods and the environment. Confronted by major environmental, economic and social challenges, policy-makers need to understand how to optimize and scale-up the contributions of agroecological and other innovative approaches, practices and technologies, while harnessing these potential associated risks.
The HLPE report shall address the following questions:
- To what extent can agroecological and other innovative approaches, practices and technologies improve resource efficiency, minimize ecological footprint, strengthen resilience, secure social equity and responsibility, and create decent jobs, in particular for youth, in agriculture and food systems?
- What are the controversies and uncertainties related to innovative technologies and practices? What are their associated risks? What are the barriers to the adoption of agroecology and other innovative approaches, technologies and practices and how to address them? What are their impacts on FSN in its four dimensions (availability, access, utilization and stability), human health and well-being, and the environment?
- What regulations and standards, what instruments, processes and governance mechanisms are needed to create an enabling environment for the development and implementation of agroecology and other innovative approaches, practices and technologies that enhance food security and nutrition? What are the impacts of trade rules, and intellectual property rights on the development and implementation of such practices and technologies?
- How to assess and monitor the potential impacts on FSN, whether positive or negative, of agroecology and other innovative approaches, practices and technologies? Which criteria, indicators, statistics and metrics are needed?
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Please see my book --- "Green" GREEN REVOLUTION: AGRICULTURE in the perspective of CLIMATE CHANGE, www.scribd.com/Google Books, 2011, 160p
[though I submitted the revised book to a publisher, so far I haven't heard from them]
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Dear all,
Just to share a publication I have recently read recently and that adresses some of the questions raised: http://agritrop.cirad.fr/568585/
Thank you,
Carole
In my opinion, agroecological practices have already proven they improve resource efficiency, minimize ecological footprint, strengthen resilience, secure social equity and responsibility, and create decent jobs, in particular for youth, in agriculture and food systems. Case studies abound and La Via Campesina is the best repository of them.
The barriers to this sustainable approach, practiced by millions of small producers the world over, are many. But the influence of corporate agriculture to keep the industrial agricultural model, the reprehensible effect of ever increasing land grabbing displacing small farmers, the growing vertical integration of mega corporations now involved in mega-mergers… are never valiantly and proactively addressed by the HLPE. Why can so many of us see this as affecting agroecological approaches and those who are at high decision-making levels do not? Evidently, there are interests to be protected. The same need to be exposed AND addressed. …and the UN (the HLPE included) has to become part of this movement demanding changes in the global governance of these issues; so far, they have not, other than perhaps denouncing some of it --but not uniting us in announcing the regulatory measures needed to stop with this state of affairs. Creating enabling environments is not enough. We have done this for 40+ years. The root causes are never dis-enabled. Voila le probleme…
Again, quite a bit of evidence can be found in the literature about the negative impact of loaded trade and IPR rules imposed by the powerful to keep or expand their prerogatives (vide mega-mergers above).
The document under preparation by the HLPE should not used minced words about all of this. But I am afraid that another 2 years to wait till CFS46 is losing precious time. Farmers are being dispossessed, starved today --and this is not an overstatement.
In cosidering agroecological systems for environmental and human health ther are a few consideration I would like to put foward that I fele are often not included enough within the discussion:
1) the use of new crops. We often examine agroecology as an incremental improvement to conventional agriculture, however the promotion of new crops, specifically long lived tree crops, there exists an opportunity to dramitically change the form of agriculture.
2) more inclusion of indigenous cultures. What we call agroecology has been standard operating procedure for many indigenous cultures for hundres of years, if not millenia.
3) Create a broader definition of agroecological methods, with more clarity between the two. Creating boarder plantings or incorporatinga few trees into monoculture is in no way equivalant to a multi-story food forest. I think we do a diservice to the different forms of agro-ecology by grouping them together under a single umbrella without better distinguishing the differences.
4) promote a better undertanding of the economics of agroecological systems. Most of the work has been on the ecological enefits, which I think are obvious and we know, but we live in a economically dominated world are largescale adoption will only occur with better economic information on the different forms of agroecosystems.
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