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East and South Africa

Caribbean

Southeast Asia

Supporting UNCCD Parties to embrace gender equality and women’s empowerment as a guiding principle in LDN projects

Jackie

Siles

Potential as a Transferable Model

Brazilian farmer in a sunflower field

SEAD

According to Costa et al, “Brazil was the first country in the world to implement a National Policy for Agroecology and Organic Production”. It is therefore worthy of notice that the Policy has been widely implemented in the country, succeeding as a good example of a multi-sectoral public policy, despite the challenges it still faces. Furthermore, PNAPO has served as inspiration for Brazilian States (such as Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, Goiás, São Paulo and Amazonas), the Federal District and Municipalities to elaborate their own state and municipal policies, following the guidelines of the National Policy and adapting them to their own realities and necessities. Hence PNAPO is likely suitable to be transferred to other situations.

Indeed, there were many exchanges with other Latin American countries, thanks to (and within) REAF – Rede Especializada da Agricultura Familiar. Within this context, a number of the strategies, initiatives and programmes set out by and developed under the umbrella of the PNAPO, such as the Segunda Água Programme and the public calls for ATER, are highly transferable to other countries with common characteristics and issues, with emphasis to those from the global south with large agricultural areas.

In particular, Brazil’s National School Feeding Programme has been recognized by various actors (UNDP, WFP, FAO) and has spiked interest from governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Documentation and dissemination of results

Potential as a Transferable Model

Evaluation Framework

TEEB

Funds have been secured to apply the TEEBAgriFood Evaluation Framework in various contexts at the country level in Brazil, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Senegal, Tanzania and Thailand. Across Senegal, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Ghana, the application will feature a regional narrative with national case study examples on agricultural systems, practices, products, and policy scenarios, with the overall aim of contributing to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and a wide range of SDGs. In Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, and Thailand, the application of the TEEBAgriFood Initiative aims to protect biodiversity and contribute to a more sustainable agriculture and food sector with a view to moving towards a level playing field by avoiding unfair competition through low environmental standards.

With the support of donors and through the take up by governments, private sector etc., the TEEBAgriFood Initiative will unfold its full impact.

The foundations of the work plan will be based on an internationally agreed methodological framework, introduced in the G8+5 context by the EU, addressing the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity. It will bring together governments, business and other key stakeholders from civil society to implement activities aimed at influencing decisions and behaviours in participating countries. It will be the first time that the methodological framework developed by TEEB will be applied to an industrial sector (the agri-business sector) across the entire value chain of that sector, assessing scenarios with a view to promote change.

Implementation

Global

Development of TEEBAgriFood

Eco-agri-food value chain

TEEB

TEEB, known for its pioneering research on the economic values of nature in 2010, brought together more than 150 experts from 33 countries to deliver a strong and urgent message to the global community on the need for a transformation of our agriculture and food systems that is sustainable, equitable, and healthy. The TEEBAgriFood initiative brings together scientists, economists, policymakers, business leaders, and farmers’ organizations to agree on how to frame, undertake and use holistic evaluations of agricultural systems, practices, products, and policy scenarios against a comprehensive range of impacts and dependencies across food value chains.

TEEBAgriFood is hosted by The Economics of the Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) Office at the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment). The Global Alliance for the Future of Food, the European Commission, and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation support the initiative.

As a result of interdisciplinary collaboration, TEEBAgriFood goes beyond the original TEEB in that it seeks to be inclusive of externalities that are not typically included in environmental economics. This includes the social externalities, cultural externalities and health-related externalities of food systems, both negative and positive (the stocks of eco-agri-food systems comprise four different “capitals” – produced capital, natural capital, human capital and social capital – which underpin a variety of flows encompassing production and consumption activity, ecosystem services, purchased inputs and residual flows).

Planning phase

Multi-national

Global

TEEBAgriFood’s Evaluation Framework and methodologies

Sustainable Food Systems

TEEB

TEEBAgriFood’s Evaluation Framework answers the question: What should we evaluate about food systems? And TEEBAgriFood’s methodologies answer the question: How should we do these evaluations? TEEBAgriFood illustrates five families of applications to compare: (a) different policy scenarios; (b) different farming typologies; (c) different food and beverage products; (d) different diets/ food plates; and (e) adjusted versus conventional national or sectoral accounts.

TEEBAgriFood gives ten examples showing how to apply this framework and methodologies for various types of evaluations. One of them is, for example, a study in New Zealand of 15 conventional and 14 organic fields that valued 12 ecosystem services and found both crops as well as other ecosystem services to be higher in the organic fields.

The TEEBAgriFood evaluation framework provides a structure and an overview of what should be included in the analysis. However, methods of valuation depend on the values to be assessed, availability of data, and the purpose of the analysis. Ideally one should be able to say with some confidence what are the externalities associated with each euro or dollar spent on a given kind of food, produced, distributed and disposed of in a given way. The application of the framework requires an interdisciplinary approach, where all relevant stakeholders, including policy-makers, businesses, and citizens, understand and identify questions that are to be answered by a valuation exercise. Therefore, stakeholder engagement across sectors is critical to the effective application of TEEBAgriFood in specific contexts and policy arenas.

Inception phase

Implementation

Monitoring

Documentation and dissemination of results

Objectives

Loop diagram of a generic eco-agri-food system

TEEB

TEEBAgriFood is a systems approach for bringing together the various disciplines and perspectives related to agriculture and food, a framework for evaluation that supports the comprehensive, universal and inclusive assessment of eco-agri-food systems, a set of methodologies and tools for the measurement of positive and negative externalities, and a theory of change to help integrate TEEBAgriFood into the wide landscape of platforms and initiatives, like the SDGs, that are tackling these complex issues. It therefore plays a crucial role in the transformation of food and agriculture systems.

TEEB has three core principles:

Recognizing that the externalities of human behaviour on ecosystems, landscapes, species and other aspects of biodiversity is a feature of all human societies and communities.
Valuing these externalities in economic terms is often useful for policy-makers and business stakeholders in reaching decisions.
Managing the externalities involves the introduction of mechanisms that incorporate the values of ecosystems into decision-making through incentives and price signals.

Dedicated to uncovering the hidden costs and benefits, i.e. the negative as well as the positive externalities of agriculture and food, the beneficiaries of TEEBAgriFood are diverse, ranging from consumers to smallholder farmers. Stakeholders are policymakers, researchers, farmers, consumers, businesses, investors, the funding and donor communities.

Planning phase

Inception phase

Global