Conference Session 1: “Our generation’s challenge: getting young people back into farming”
Modern agriculture demands a skilled workforce that engages in innovative tools including up-to-date technologies, financial mechanisms and communication tactics. These offer endless opportunities for fitting modern career demands and desires while simultaneously being necessary for climate change adaptation, mitigation and food security. However, narratives of primitive, labor intensive and time-consuming work are dissuading youth from viewing agriculture as a viable and attractive sector to build careers from. The isolation of rural areas, unappreciation of difficult and essential work, intensifying environmental risks and the unreliability of incomes and yields also interact with major mental health issues in farmers, inciting another major concern for the younger generations entering the workforce. The speakers of this conference session engaged in a discourse of destigmatizing negative narratives surrounding agriculture, while also recognizing the reality of those narratives, in a time where reinvigorating the sector is critical.
Their arguement was this: the true narrative of farming is that it takes passionate and committed professionals, entrepreneurs and scientists who are prepared to tackle some of the greatest challenges of the climate crisis. To cater attraction to this vital sector, it is essential that young generations are aware of the possibilities and fulfillment that a career in agriculture will bring. Furthermore, for agriculture to be a viable option, young people must be sufficiently supported with appropriate financial schemes, land tenure, safety nets, community support systems and a recognition of essential work. Younger populations will be most affected by agriculture and climate change, as it is their futures at stake, therefore the urgency of rebranding farming livelihoods and scaling up resources that strengthen resilience and capacity building to attract the younger generation’s interests and perspectives is a keystone action in food system transition.
Critical policy shift/modification: Young farmers will require support from financial institutions and public-private partnerships that enable their access to securing capital and land tenure.
Stakeholders and potential tradeoffs: Banks, governments and insurance organizations must provide this support. Young farmers will benefit with focused, long term attention and support, however this may distract from needed support to older farmers. Thus caution must be paid to supporting all demographics of farmers, and encouraging collaboration amongst them.
Conference Session 2: “Building Stronger Food Systems: Identifying, Assessing and Managing Synergies and Trade-Offs”
Transforming the food system means strengthening the ability to produce healthy food that is appreciated and valued as well as sustainably produced – this requires holistic, integrated approaches that bridge the disconnect between producers and consumers. In this session, panel speakers identified synergies and trade-offs for building stronger food systems, in which they recognized that the abundance of inefficiencies creates opportunities for turning trade-offs into synergies. Solutions such as investment into ecosystem services ensure that affordable and accessible food will not compromise quality incomes for producers, which requires mindful approaches that consider interactions with every player involved. The immediate urgency but lack of quick fixes calls for perspectives that see building resilience and investing in regenerative agriculture as job engines and economic boosts; empowered women and young entrepreneurs as key change makers; and shifts to geographically appropriate plant-based and other low-emission diets as fuels for mitigation.
Thus, a key action point identified in this session was enabling climate-friendly pricing mechanisms that bridge financing with food by taking advantage of incentives that guide behavior for consumers and ultimately, producers. This approach centers around the idea that ‘metrics matter’ in measuring trade-offs for crops, and relies on food pricing that is dependent on scientific guidance. Approaches like these will require taking advantage of crop choices that have multiple benefits; internalizing the cost of food with the human, social and environmental effects; holding governments accountable for feeding healthy food to their people and assuring governments that costs are higher to avoid doing so; and guiding the agricultural sector through a shifting and diversifying mindset.
Critical policy shift/modification: A system for food pricing guided by scientific assessment will require investment in crop modelling and institutional shifts.
Stakeholders and potential tradeoffs: Market mechanisms will economize ecosystem services but must be carefully reconstructed to not harm incomes of producers or spike up food prices that threaten food security.
Conference Session 3: “The Climakers – A farmers driven climate change agenda towards the sustainability of food systems”
Solutions to the food system must not only be farmer centered, but farmer owned. Farmers from Climakers are urging the international community to recognize their roles as active players in solving the climate crisis. This call for bottom-up approaches recognizes that the food system will not be fit for purpose if farmers are not leading the political processes for climate change adaptation and mitigation. While farmers are dealing with the climate crisis, they are also suffering from a lack of supporting policies; challenging policy processes and designs that exclude their perspectives; and the consequences of climate action which demands less emissions and negative environmental impacts from agriculture yet fails to acknowledge the difficulty in this when farmers lack the necessary support and tools. Digitization and modernization of farming is essential for the composition and use of relevant data, coupled with other tools that enable the scaling up of relevant technology, such as decision-making assistance, entrepreneurial skills and farmer -to-farmer learning environments.
This session was uplifted with the notion that this transformation could serve as a ‘golden age for farming’, one that is more exciting and rewarding given the new space for opportunities and irreplaceable value of being a food producer. The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the appreciation of the role of farmers, therefore it is essential that their roles are at the center when ‘Building Back Better’. Farming can serve as a solution to the climate, biodiversity, energy and poverty crisis and the agricultural transformation can be one of the first leaders in climate shifts because it holds the key to stabilizing the atmosphere in the timescale needed, while also being essential for food security, therefore possessing great motivation for transformation.
Critical policy shift/modification: Climate policy must be farmers centered and farmer driven, with climate change funds directly allocated towards the resilience, adaptation and mitigation of agriculture.
Stakeholders: Smallholder farmers would be the primary beneficiaries, but they depend upon the support directed towards them by consumer decisions, market mechanisms and private-public partnerships, paired with systematic changes in which Business-as-Usual entities let go of, and redistribute, their power.
Conference Session 4: “Bold Actions for Food Systems Transformation”
The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated what is possible for accelerated solutions and “new normals”. What is being demanded of food systems transformation is not radical, inversely, what is radical is to leave a system that generates the core of the energy required for human life broken and under promising. This session brought together the keystone ‘bold actions’ needed across global food systems, with a recognition that sustainable food systems will look different around the world, which insists an integrated, systems thinking, holistic approach centered by flexible and mindful solutions.
Firstly, the needs of the most vulnerable must be prioritized in acknowledgment that they are a large part of the solution but lack resources, which calls for scaling up social protection systems in what must be a just and equitable transition. The ‘ability to work in fragility’ will require strong actors and partnerships between all components of the food system and civil society: farmers, consumers, CEOs, politicians, financiers and students are the moving parts of scalable solutions. In terms of marrying environmental stewardship with agriculture, agricultural regeneration as a tool for biodiversity and ecosystem regeneration must be regarded as a priority for subsidies.
The discussion concluded with a fascinating opportunity for speakers to answer the question: “what are excuses we cannot make?” We learned that regenerative foodscapes not only work, but provide incomes for farmers; trade-offs should not be barriers to movement, but opportunities; sequestering carbon in soil is necessary and possible; more sharing and collaboration amongst geographical landscapes and generations is essential for scaling up transitions; and overall, setting very clear environmental and social targets is critical.
Critical policy shift/modification: The subsidization of regenerative farming practices that focus on climate change adaptation and mitigation while guarding against centralization and privatization are necessary.
Stakeholders: Market mechanisms, public-private partnerships and agricultural systems will be challenged and benefited due to dramatic shifts, with extra support needed to reach/equip those most vulnerable.