Rome, Italy
November 15, 2007
 Carefully
targeted payments to farmers could serve as an approach to
protect the environment and to address growing concerns about
climate change, biodiversity loss and water supply,
FAO said today in its annual
publication
The State of Food and Agriculture.
The report however cautions that payments for environmental
services are not the best solution in all situations, and that
significant implementation challenges remain.
“Agriculture employs more people and uses more land and water
than any other human activity,” said FAO Director-General
Jacques Diouf in his foreword to the report. “It has the
potential to degrade the Earth’s land, water, atmosphere and
biological resources – or to enhance them – depending on the
decisions made by the more than two billion people whose
livelihoods depend directly on crops, livestock, fisheries or
forests. Ensuring appropriate incentives for these people is
essential.”
Population growth, rapid economic development, increasing demand
for biofuels and climate change are putting environmental
resources under pressure throughout the world. For instance,
agriculture is expected to feed a world population that will
increase from six to nine billion by 2050.
One of the important reasons for environmental degradation is
the perception that many of nature’s services are free – no one
owns them or is rewarded for them and farmers have little
incentive to protect them. In addition, subsidies that encourage
the production of marketed goods at the expense of other
ecosystem services can aggravate their degradation.
Incentives
Current incentives tend to favour the production of food, fibre,
and increasingly, biofuels, but they typically under-value other
beneficial services that farmers can provide, such as carbon
storage, flood control, clean water provision or biodiversity
conservation.
Farmers can provide better environmental outcomes, but they need
incentives to do so. Payments for environmental services
represent one way of increasing incentives to adopt improved
agricultural practices—and even to offset pollution generated in
other sectors.
However, “payments may also have adverse impacts on poverty and
food security in some cases, should they result in a reduction
in demand for agricultural employment or increases in food
prices,” noted Dr Diouf.
Carbon sink
Farmers will need to play an important role in mitigating the
effects of climate change, the FAO report said.
Agriculture plays an important role as a carbon “sink” through
sequestering and storing greenhouse gases, especially as carbon
in soils, plants and trees. Less deforestation, planting of
trees, tillage reduction, soil cover increase and improved
grassland management could, for example, lead to the storage of
more than two billion tonnes of carbon in around 50 countries
between 2003 and 2012.
“Well-designed payments for environmental services are one way
to help farmers to change land-use practices and make farming
more environmentally friendly,” said Leslie Lipper, Senior
Environmental Economist. “These are payments for real services
farmers can provide, much like farmers are paid for the rice or
coffee they produce.”
Payment programmes
The report says payments can take a variety of forms as
voluntary transactions involving farmers, communities,
taxpayers, consumers, corporations and governments. They could
be direct payments by governments to producers or indirect
transfers, such as consumers paying extra for a cup of
shade-grown coffee beans.
Hundreds of payment programmes for environmental services are
currently being implemented around the world, mainly as part of
forest conservation initiatives. “But relatively few programmes
for environmental services have targeted farmers and
agricultural lands in developing countries,” the report said.
“If properly designed, payment programmes for environmental
services might also benefit many of the more than one billion
poor people in developing countries that live in fragile
ecosystems,” Lipper said. This requires careful targeting as
well as measures to monitor delivery of environmental services.
Report:
The State of Food and Agriculture (PDF 3.8MB) |
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