Governments should reduce the negative environmental impact from agricultural support by identifying and addressing environmentally harmful measures and reorienting agricultural support towards environmentally beneficial measures and key general services. This would help reverse the trend of declining investments in agricultural knowledge and innovation systems, biosecurity services and key physical and digital infrastructure within overall expenditures for the sector.

Governments should make sustainable management and use of natural resources a core part of agricultural policy. Use results-based policies should be preferred over practice-based policies where possible, and governments should continuously monitor, measure and evaluate them to improve their effectiveness.

Significant and well-targeted investments in research, development and extension are required to reverse downward trends observed in several OECD agri-environmental indicators, for example by setting clear environmental requirements for farmers that the innovation system can help reach.

Governments should phase out measures that reduce the capacity of the international trading system to fulfil its role in balancing food supplies between surplus and deficit regions – a capacity that is becoming even more important in times of regional shocks and increasingly volatile growing conditions due to climate change.

The OECD’s established risk management framework can help guide reforms to countries’ risk management systems. This involves enhancing the capacity and readiness of producers to cover normal business risks, facilitating private market solutions for insurable risks, and responding to catastrophic risks that are beyond the capacity of farmers or private institutions to bear.

Many distorting forms of support are also less efficient at generating additional income for farmers. Alternatives such as payments based on farm income can provide greater benefits to producers.