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.
Questionnaire on Resilience for Agricultural Risk Management
Some significant sources of risk and uncertainty are increasing for the agricultural sector, and the financial impacts of adverse events is rising. Consequently, there is a need for farmers – and the agricultural sector more broadly – to become more resilient. Resilience can be understood as “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt and transform in response to adverse events”, which in agriculture can include market volatility, more variable weather conditions under climate change, pest and disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and even events external to the agricultural sector, such as pandemics. Resilient farmers and systems are able to absorb the impact of such adverse events (including mitigating or preventing impacts), adapt to an evolving risk landscape, and transform the type of farming system – or even the agricultural sector itself – if the current system is no longer able to adapt to or recover from shocks.