Bridges Trade BioRes Review • Volume 3 • Number 1 • June 2009

ICTSD update

Activities on climate change, agriculture and trade

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The global agricultural sector must meet three major tests in the 21st century: 1) it must adapt to climate change and, where possible, play a role in climate change mitigation; 2) it must provide sustainable global food security for a growing population, and 3) it must make good on its promise of poverty alleviation - since some 70 percent of the world’s poorest people live in rural sectors and rely on agriculture. While there is currently movement in the right direction, if these three challenges are addressed separately, the chances of success will be reduced.

Focusing on the climate change challenge alone, for example, could have negative impacts for food security and poverty alleviation. It is crucial to identify and better understand the connections between these three sets of challenges in order to formulate the appropriate policy response to address them.

Among the important questions to be explored are:

What will climate change mean for future agricultural production and, in turn, for international trade flows?
Which types of agricultural policies and practices need to be pursued to achieve global food security? What role do such policies and practices play in climate change mitigation and adaptation?
How can poor smallholder farmers achieve greater income and food security? What does climate change mitigation and adaptation mean in this context?

Recognising the need to combat these major challenges in a coordinated manner, ICTSD and the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council (IPC) propose to create an interdisciplinary platform of climate change, agricultural, and trade experts to promote increased policy coherence, to ensure effective climate change mitigation and adaptation, food security and a more open and equitable global food system. The ICTSD-IPC initiative will convene throughout 2009 and beyond, and focus primarily on the UNFCCC negotiations.

As part of this initiative, ICTSD and IPC organised a preliminary expert meeting on “Climate Change - the Role of Food and Agricultural Trade” alongside the UN Conference on Climate Change in December 2008, in Poznan, Poland. The discussions demonstrated the need for a greater understanding of agricultural policy, food security - in particular for the world’s most vulnerable populations - and trade policy within the climate change negotiations. A second dialogue on “Climate Change, Agriculture and Trade: Promoting Policy Coherence” was held alongside the UNFCCC negotiations in April 2009 in Bonn, Germany. Its objective was to discuss issues at the interface of climate change, agricultural policy and trade to assist the UNFCCC negotiators understand the linkages to agriculture and trade, and likewise, inform agricultural policy, trade policy experts and stakeholders about the policy inter-linkages between these three fields. The dialogue also sought to outline priorities for research and analysis.

In May 2009, the ICTSD-IPC initiative organised a third dialogue in Salzburg, Austria alongside the IPC’s international seminar on Food and Environmental Security. The objective of this meeting was to explore additional areas at the nexus of climate change and agricultural trade policy. The meeting brought together high level experts such as former agriculture commissioner Franz Fishler and former chair of the WTO General Council Carlos Perez del Castillo as well as respected academics including IPCC authors, farmers, civil society and private sector representatives. Substantive discussions focused on issues such as environmental payment and other trade related measures in developed countries to mitigate GHG emissions from agriculture as well as private standards and the debate on food miles. The meeting also went one step further in identifying broad recommendations on how to address issues at the interface between agriculture trade and climate change, targeting both the UNFCCC process and WTO negotiations.

In addition to providing a platform for dialogue, the project will produce a series of issue papers based on the recommendations of the experts’ group. The issue papers will be completed by the end of 2009.

This initiative is part of ICTSD’s Global Platform on Climate Change, Trade Policies and Sustainable Energy.

For more information, please contact Marie Chamay, mcha...@ictsd.ch