Sustainable Agricultural Productivity to Address Food Systems Challenges: Measurement, Data, Drivers and Policies

The opening session will discuss how sustainable agricultural productivity growth can help address the triple challenge food systems face, underlining the importance of its measurement.

Moderator: Marion Jansen – Director, OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate

• How can data and measurement track agriculture’s performance towards sustainable productivity and help overcome food systems challenges?
  

Spiro Stefanou – Administrator, Economic Research Service, United States Department for Agriculture

• How can the measurement of sustainable agricultural productivity help decision-makers orientate policy towards addressing the triple challenge food systems face?
  

Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle – Director of Strategy & Policy Analysis, Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, European Commission

• How is the academic community advancing the measurement of sustainable productivity growth in agriculture?
  

Paloma Melgarejo–Scientific Advisory Board, OECD Co-operative Research Programme (CRP)

• Farmers’ perspective: How are farmers striving to achieve sustainable agricultural productivity?
  

Rūdolfs Pulkstenis – Vice-President, European Council of Young Farmers (CEJA)

The keynote speech will introduce why the sustainable productivity of agriculture matters and why it is important to measure it.

• Johan Swinnen – Director General, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

With the increasing recognition of the need to measure sustainable agricultural productivity, several approaches emerged to align traditional TFP measures with social and environmental indicators. Most progress to date has been made on environmentally adjusting TFP measures, incorporating various environmental indicators into agricultural TFP measurement.

The session will discuss what the state-of-the-art approaches are towards measuring environmentally sustainable agricultural productivity. Through a panel discussion with leading researchers in the field, it will discuss where we stand in terms of the global benchmarking of agricultural productivity, agri-environmental sustainability and, finally, environmentally sustainable agricultural productivity. How indicators to date can be used in policy decisions and what the way forward could entail for developing indicators? Intertwined with indicators and methodological questions, the session will highlight the role of data in efforts to measure sustainable productivity.

Moderator: Jesús Anton – Head of Unit, Productivity, Sustainability and Resilience Benchmarking, Agriculture and Resource Policies Division, OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate

Panel discussion:

• Can we compare traditional TFP figures across countries?
  • Keith Fuglie – Economist, Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture
  • Simone Pieralli– Joint Research Centre, European Commission
• Can we compare agri-environmental performance across countries?
  
  • Francesco Tubiello – Senior Statistician and Team Leader, Environment Statistics, FAO
  • Guillaume Gruère – Head of the Agriculture and Resource Policies Division, OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate
  • Bruno Alves – Researcher, Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa)

Discussant: Moriah Bostian – Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Professor of Economics, Lewis & Clark College

• Can we combine productivity and environmental sustainability performance? How much is this a technical or a societal/political question? 
  • Kelly Cobourn – Associate Professor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: Environmentally Sustainable Productivity Index
  • Arne Henningsen - Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen: Using social shadow prices

Discussant: Bernhard Dahlheimer - Assistant Professor, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University

Discussion

Closing remarks by moderator: Where do we stand in measuring sustainable agricultural productivity? 

While the objectives of sustainable productivity growth (SPG) in agriculture, which encompass food and nutrition security, farmer and farmworker wellbeing, and environmental health, are universal, the practices, processes and technologies used to achieve it can vary widely.

Real-life examples of practices, processes and technologies used to advance SPG are hence diverse, illustrating that there is no single best solution for every situation.  The diversity of approaches and practices underscores the importance of assessing success in advancing sustainable productivity growth with outcome measures. The session will include brief presentations on a number of diverse, real-life examples of practices, processes and technologies that attempt to advance SPG. The presentations will focus on the methods and data used to measure outcomes and progress, considering both intended and unintended impacts on social, economic, and environmental outcomes. Through the examples, the discussion will explore the indicators that are used to assess whether, in given settings, they are contributing to SPG. The session will underline the importance of consistent measurement and reporting, while emphasising the importance of multiple indicators to capture progress towards the diverse components of sustainable agricultural productivity growth and the measurement of potential trade-offs and synergies.

Moderator: Spiro Stefanou – Administrator, Economic Research Service, United States Department for Agriculture

Segment 1. Production practices for sustainable agricultural productivity

Natural regeneration and agroforestry for sustainable agriculture productivity

• Peter Minang – Director for Africa, Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF)

Evaluating and Analysing the Environmental Performance of Innovative Livestock Production Systems

• David Kenny – Head of the Animal and Bioscience Research Department, Animal and Grassland Research and Innovation Centre, Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Teagasc), Ireland

Improving yields in organic cropping systems

• Adrian Müller – Senior Scientist, Department for Food System Science, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL)

Discussant: Allison Thomson - Scientific Program Director, Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research

Segment 2. Technologies for sustainable agricultural productivity

WaPOR: Monitoring agricultural water productivity with remote sensing

• Jiro Ariyama – Water Resources Management Expert, FAO

A Nature-based Solution for fertilizer use reduction using biological nitrification inhibition

• Tadashi Yoshihashi – Project Leader, Biological Resources and Post-harvest Division, Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS)

Delivering Rust-Resistant Soy for Africa

• Everton Capote Ferreira – Postdoctoral Scientist, The Sainsbury Laboratory, 2Blades

Discussant: Marc Müller – Project Coordinator, Brightspace Project, Wageningen University & Research

Discussion with the audience

Discussant: Maria Vrachioli – Senior Research Staff, Technical University of Munich 

Through a panel discussion, the session will explore the role of innovation in harnessing sustainable agricultural productivity. It will start by measuring the investment efforts in innovation and its impacts on improving sustainable productivity, to understanding how to overcome some of the barriers hindering innovation efforts. Are innovation efforts advancing sustainable agricultural productivity growth?

Moderator: Alessandra Zampieri – Director of Sustainable Resources, Joint Research Centre, European Commission

Segment 1. Measuring innovation performance

• Uris Baldos – Research Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University
• Nevena Alexandrova-Stefanova – Policies and Capacities for Innovation Unit Leader, FAO Office of Innovation

• Joaquin Arias – Coordinator, Observatory of Public Policies for Agrifood Systems, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA)
• Matthias Nachtmann – Digital Farming - Sustainability Business Development Lead, BASF

Segment 2. Going beyond numbers: How can we induce innovation and its adoption in a direction that ensures sustainable agricultural productivity?

• The case of genetic innovation: Yvonne Pinto – Director General, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
• The case of land use innovation: Mikitaro Shobayashi – Professor, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature

Discussant: Jean-Christophe Bureau – Professor, Agro-Paris Tech

Discussion

Summarising the results of the discussions throughout the day, the session will discuss how lessons learnt from the different sessions should be integrated into policy agendas, and how they can help policy-makers progress towards overcoming the triple challenge food systems face. Closing the conference, the session will provide a bridge to Global Forum on Agriculture which will discuss the topic from a policy perspective the next day.

Moderator: Marion Jansen, Director, OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate

Panellists:

• Elise Golan – Director for Sustainable Development at the United States Department of Agriculture
• Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle – Director of Strategy & Policy Analysis, Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, European Commission
• David Laborde – Director of Agrifood Economics and Policy Division, FAO
• Guillaume Gruère – Head of the Agriculture and Resource Policies Division, OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate
• Johan Swinnen – Director General, IFPRI