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FAO Liaison Office for North America

Synergies and Tradeoffs in Sustainable Agriculture

12/05/2020

12 May 2020, Washington, DC – A vibrant, resilient and productive agriculture sector is fundamental to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, stated Vimlendra Sharan, Director of FAO North America at a webinar exploring synergies and tradeoffs in sustainable agriculture. “Bringing about such a transformation requires optimizing a range of environmental, social, and economic outcomes from agricultural systems, from yields to biodiversity to nutrition. It is obvious that these outcomes are never independent of each other, and interact in both positive and negative ways.”

FAO and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) co-hosted the interactive webinar, moderated by Tom Pesek, Senior Liaison Officer at FAO North America, to explore how to maximize synergies and minimize tradeoffs in policies and programs for sustainable agriculture. The session featured presentations by FAO, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the North American Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance.

The virtual event highlighted FAO’s current work in developing an analytical framework to support the implementation of sustainable food and agriculture principles that assesses synergies and tradeoffs across multiple dimensions of sustainability. As part of this process, a literature review has been prepared together with UMCES, which outlines approaches on the topic across spatial and temporal scales.

“FAO’s Vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture is a world where nutritious food is accessible for everyone, in which natural resources are managed in a way that maintains ecosystem functions to support current and future human needs, producers have decent employment conditions and work in a fair price environment,” outlined Amy Heyman, Programme Officer for Sustainable Agriculture at FAO. The Vision also highlights that “women, men and communities live in food security, and have control over their livelihoods and equitable access to resources which they use in an efficient way,” she added.

However, there are significant challenges to achieving the Vision ranging from poverty, rising food insecurity and malnutrition, climate change, volatile food prices, biodiversity loss, and the degradation of natural resources. ”In order to address these challenges, a transformative change will be necessary. FAO has outlined five key principles for sustainable agriculture, and works with policymakers around the world to evaluate risks and benefits,” said Heyman.

Andrea Rossi, a Sustainability Expert at FAO, presented the new analytical framework for assessing and managing synergies and tradeoffs. “The ways synergies and tradeoffs materialize depends on a broad range of factors, including spatial and temporary scales, barriers to sustainable intensification, and the interaction with other economic sectors and policies,” said Rossi. Indicators such as SDG Indicator 2.4.1 on agricultural sustainability is a useful tool for assessing the current state of the agricultural sector and for monitoring progress from farm to landscape to national levels.

“Different stakeholders will perceive synergies and tradeoffs differently, and will be impacted differently,” Rossi added. “There can be both tradeoffs and synergies between productivity and sustainability, but neither is inevitable.”

Xin Zhang, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, presented the main findings of the aforementioned literature review. “The single goal for agriculture has long been to increase productivity, and we have been doing it pretty well globally. However, is agriculture also becoming more sustainable? In terms of nitrogen pollution and food insecurity, significant challenges remain,” underlined Zhang. “Improving agricultural productivity will not automatically improve food insecurity.”

“We recommend changing metrics for evaluating the success of agriculture, improving the distribution and utilization of current agricultural production, developing region-specific strategies to address tradeoffs between agricultural productivity and sustainability, and coordinate global efforts to enable synergies,” Zhang concluded.

“Agricultural productivity growth is essential to sustainability,” emphasized Elise Golan, Director for Sustainable Development at the USDA. If production efficiency remains constant, feeding the planet in 2050 might require clearing most of the world’s remaining forests, Golan added, highlighting the role of total factor productivity (TPF), “which really tells us if we are doing more with less.”

“Over the last 90 years in the United States, commodity production has increased by 400 percent while acreage in production has dropped by 9 percent,” she added. She emphasized that the USDA’s Agricultural Innovation Agenda aims to increase U.S. agricultural production by 40 percent while cutting the environmental footprint of U.S. agriculture in half by 2050. “We can't accept productivity growth or sustainability. We need both,” she concluded.

“Not all productivity is created equal,” urged Fred Yoder, a fourth-generation farmer from Ohio and Chair of the North American Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance. “We have to look at ways that we can work with nature, instead of working against nature. We should be regenerating the soil and growing our productivity through enhanced soil health. One of the ways we do that is with no-till and cover crops.”

“When I bought the farm from my father, he asked me to leave it in better shape than what you have. I think that's the best piece of advice I can give,” Yoder concluded.

The session highlighted different approaches to understanding how to put sustainable agriculture into practice within a framework of minimizing the negative impacts across social, environmental and economic pillars while maximizing opportunities for synergies.

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