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This report is part of the OECD Green Growth Studies series. The OECD’s synthesis report Towards Green Growth was launched at the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting on 25-26 May 2011. The present report was prepared by Wilfrid Legg, with the assistance of Hsin Huang and input from Carl-Christian Schmidt. Other colleagues at the OECD Secretariat also provided comments on earlier drafts. Françoise Bénicourt, Theresa Poincet, Véronique de Saint-Martin, and Noura Takrouri-Jolly provided secretarial and statistical assistance.
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This report outlines a broad strategy for green growth in the food and agriculture sector. It is part of the OECD’s Green Growth Strategy that seeks to define an economic development path that is consistent with long-run environmental protection, using natural resources within their carrying capacity, while providing acceptable living standards and poverty reduction in all countries. The need for green growth arises because a “business as usual” path does not fully account for environmental limits and social concerns.
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Future challenges relating to greater pressure on natural resources and climate change imply that a “business as usual” growth model is not a viable option. Green growth places strong emphasis on the complementarities between the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.
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The challenges facing agriculture are complex. Global issues such as food insecurity, climate change, water availability, biodiversity and associated ecosystem service loss need to be addressed simultaneously. Innovation in food and agriculture is a key element in meeting those challenges. Increased productivity needs to balance immediate demands for feeding the world against future concerns for environmental sustainability.
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A key role for government is to find cost-effective ways to account for environmental externalities that are not factored into producer and consumer decisions. This means reforming existing policies, enforcing the polluter pays principle, and finding incentives for producers to generate environmental services while increasing food production.
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A green growth strategy needs measurement tools to help policy makers evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of their policies and the extent to which they are shifting economic activity onto a greener path. It is necessary to identify measurable green growth policy targets related to food production and consumption, economic efficiency, resource use, environmental impact, and social welfare. There is a need to develop indicators for the food and agriculture sector that together can track progress towards green growth.
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A green growth strategy for food and agriculture requires a well targeted, coordinated and coherent response to the economic, environmental and social challenges in the coming decades. This will involve a wide range of policy measures, some sector specific, some economy-wide. Actions to promote green growth should not only complement existing priorities but also, where necessary, change priorities in order to take advantage of beneficial overlaps (finding win-win solutions) where possible.
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The food and agriculture sector is crucially important in the green growth context because it is the major user of land, water and marine resources and has important linkages with biodiversity. While the sector can cause environmental harm, it also provides valued environmental services. This is true notwithstanding the fact that it typically accounts for a small share of employment and GDP in most OECD countries, though much larger shares in many developing countries.