Strengthening Agricultural Resilience in the Face of Multiple Risks
This report explores how countries can strengthen the resilience of their agricultural sectors to multiple risks. A shifting risk landscape in agriculture – due to increasing weather variability, natural hazards, pests and diseases, and market shocks – will require public and private actors to consider the risk landscape over the long term, place a greater emphasis on what can be done ex ante to reduce risk exposure and increase preparedness, and prioritise investments that build resilience capacities both on-farm and for the sector as a whole. This report offers a framework for applying resilience thinking to risk management in agriculture, and explores how four OECD countries – Australia, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands – are mainstreaming resilience into their agricultural risk management policy frameworks.
Executive summary
The agricultural risk landscape is shifting, with producers increasingly confronting new sources of risk caused by a changing climate, unanticipated changes in policy, or the economy-wide effects of shocks external to the agricultural sector, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic. Confronting this landscape will require disciplined application of an holistic risk management strategy – specifically, ensuring that decisions are no longer made from a paradigm of reactivity, but from a more proactive “resilience” perspective instead. This implies focusing on preparedness, with the goal of either reducing the negative impact of events, or significantly reducing the likelihood that those events occur.