The urgently needed transformations in food and land-use systems to address and adapt to climate change must meaningfully engage food producers and rural communities by placing justice, equity, and rural livelihoods at the center of their efforts.
The IPCC report last month was a distressing reminder that human activity is causing irreversible change to the planet on a devastating scale—the effects of which are already impacting the most vulnerable populations.
Much of the focus tends to fall on the energy sector, and issues such as fossil fuel divestments, the elimination of subsidies, and the promotion of renewable energy technologies. The significant social and economic impacts arising from such policies and investments have provided the rationale for the concept of a just transition.
But with food, agriculture, and land use responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions, just transition pathways for food systems are also needed. This is important for many reasons and goes beyond the need to address emissions. Research shows that growth in food and agriculture is 2–4 times more effective at reducing poverty than growth in other sectors. Agriculture workers and their dependents currently make up two thirds of the 740 million people facing extreme poverty. The impact of the global pandemic, changing weather patterns, degraded soils, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, lack of labor, and changing market demands are among a growing list of complex challenges faced by our food producers that require both locally-tailored and systemic solutions.
This isn’t just about addressing the growing social inequality between urban and rural populations and ensuring food producers have living incomes. It’s a prerequisite for addressing one of the most pressing challenges of this coming decade—providing nutritious, affordable food for a growing global population while protecting the vital natural systems that sustain life.
Despite all the technological advances of the past century, around two billion people still suffer from food and nutrition insecurity. With the global population projected by the United Nations (UN) to rise to 10 billion by 2050, the pressure on our lands, seas, and natural resources will continue to grow.
We all stand to benefit from resilient, sustainable food and land-use systems that provide a wide range of nutritious, affordable food. But this will only come about if we focus our collective efforts on the role of food producers and accelerate a just rural transition. We need fair processes and fair outcomes. Fair processes mean that food producers have a meaningful say in the future being envisioned. Fair outcomes mean the social, economic, and environmental impacts of the transition are equitable, not regressive.
The Just Rural Transition Initiative (JRT) was launched at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 to address these challenges at the global, national, and local levels. A multistakeholder community, JRT has focused its efforts to date on three key enablers—each of which can unlock significant opportunities to accelerate a just rural transition.
Repurposing policies and public support to food and agriculture
The global food and agriculture sector receives more than USD720 billion in public support each year, but much of this is not currently geared toward addressing the mounting challenges faced by food producers described above. The majority of public support through price incentives, for example, goes towards commodities that have high greenhouse gas footprints, such as beef, milk, and rice. Unlike fossil fuel subsidies, the focus of the campaign is not elimination, but the repurposing of public support to food and agriculture. The improved targeting of public support and incentives for producers help improve food and nutrition security, strengthen soil and water quality, increase biodiversity, build resilience, and mitigate climate change, therefore delivering better outcomes for people, nature, and climate.
There is growing evidence from countries on how this can work in practice. In 2015, to mitigate emissions from the overapplication of fertilizers, the Indian government began requiring 75 percent of urea—a nitrogen fertilizer—to be sold with a coating of neem oil. This offered the potential to improve nitrogen-use efficiency and boost crop yields. Costa Rica uses an incentive-based conservation approach involving the transfer of money to farmers that is conditioned on improvements in ecosystem services (such as clean water, healthy soils, or increased biodiversity). Switzerland’s 2014–2017 Agricultural Policy reallocated per-hectare and per-animal-head payments toward direct payments in support of biodiversity targets with positive results.
This year, as part of the UN Food Systems Summit and the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) Nature Campaign, JRT has supported engagement with over 40 governments, UN agencies, food producer organizations, among others, to share knowledge and experiences, as well as build momentum around the opportunity for repurposing public support. The Policy Action Agenda for a Transition to Sustainable Food and Agriculture sets out pathways and actions countries can take to repurpose public policies and enable a just rural transition, while providing opportunities for other stakeholders to channel their expertise, knowledge, and resources.
Ensuring rural communities’ resource and land tenure rights
There is strong evidence that protected areas managed by indigenous peoples and rural communities are better at protecting forests and preserving biodiversity than areas managed by governments alone. These local communities invest over USD1 billion of their own resources into forest management and conservation, especially where their tenure is secure.
Whilst these groups currently manage 65 percent of the world’s land under customary tenure, only 18 percent is formally recognized by governments. Around 20 percent of adults in the rural areas of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean feel insecure about their land rights. Therefore, it is essential that governments formally recognize the land tenure and resource rights of these communities to enable them to fulfill their role in transforming our food and land use systems. Such actions can pay dividends. In Guatemala, for example, indigenous Mayan communities, who were granted rights to 350K hectares of forests in 1995, have enlarged the net coverage of forests, increased several species, and created over 7,000 jobs through their restoration efforts.
The JRT has convened an expert Working Group on Land Tenure, Social Equity and Inclusion, consisting of leaders representing major nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and coalitions, UN Supporting Bodies, indigenous peoples’ organizations, and the World Bank, among others. The collaborative consultation process in June 2021 led to the publication of a new brief—“Land Tenure in a Just Rural Transition: Restoring Our Relationships to Land and Natural Resources”. It made the case for why just and equitable land tenure should be the centerpiece of a just rural transition by drawing on the partners’ research, evidence, and case studies.
Investing in the transition
While public finance is important, the business and investment community also has a vital role to play. The Food and Land Use Coalition’s analysis has shown that additional annual investments of USD300–350 billion could cultivate an estimated USD4.5 trillion a year in sustainable business opportunities by 2030, generating prosperity for all food-system actors. Addressing this financing gap offers a chance to align markets with the natural, social, and economic systems on which they depend, as the world “builds back better” in its recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
In collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, JRT is working to ensure that financing reaches rural communities at the scale required. This is not only essential to meeting the world’s sustainable development challenges, but also offers investors a concrete opportunity to make Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) investing a reality. ESG funds, expected to increase threefold between now and 2025, can provide new business opportunities, augment increase supply chain resilience, and offer strategic ways for businesses to stay ahead of the curve.
An example of JRT’s work in accelerating financing solutions is our work on sustainable rice finance in collaboration with the Sustainable Rice Landscapes Initiative (SRLI)—a consortium whose members research, implement, and scale techniques that reduce the environmental impact of rice. Half the world’s population rely on rice as their main staple food, with the crop supporting an estimated 144 million smallholders worldwide. At the same time, rice production emits greenhouse gases at the level equivalent to that of the aviation industry. Balancing the need to reduce this global environmental impact, whilst maintaining production essential to diets and livelihoods, requires a landscape-level approach in which value-chain actors act in coordination. Working with partners, including FAO, Clarmondial, and the Sustainable Rice Platform, we have identified potential sustainable rice finance mechanisms and are bringing together public and private sector actors to co-develop these in specific contexts, thus promoting sustainable production whilst also supporting resilient rural livelihoods.
Toward a Just Food System of the Future
We have a significant opportunity to transform food and land use over the next 10 years. However, our efforts to transform these systems will falter if they neglect the social implications of this transition and fail to support food producers and rural communities in adapting and responding to new and diversified ways of working. It’s time to listen to food producers and rural communities and place justice, equity, and rural livelihoods at the center of efforts to tackle the climate emergency.
This publication is part of a series of commentaries authored by advisory group members of the Just Transition Initiative (JTI). This series highlights the diverse perspectives and expertise of the JTI advisory group on different aspects of the low-carbon transition and its implications for equitable development.
AUTHOR
Melissa Pinfield
Melissa Pinfield Melissa Pinfield is a Senior Fellow at Meridian Institute, where she is Executive Director of the Just Rural Transition Secretariat. She is also a member of the advisory board for the Just Transition Initiative.