Some significant sources of risk and uncertainty are increasing for the agricultural sector, and the financial impacts of adverse events is rising. Consequently, there is a need for farmers – and the agricultural sector more broadly – to become more resilient. Resilience can be understood as “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt and transform in response to adverse events”, which in agriculture can include market volatility, more variable weather conditions under climate change, pest and disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and even events external to the agricultural sector, such as pandemics. Resilient farmers and systems are able to absorb the impact of such adverse events (including mitigating or preventing impacts), adapt to an evolving risk landscape, and transform the type of farming system – or even the agricultural sector itself – if the current system is no longer able to adapt to or recover from shocks.
A resilience approach to agricultural risk management means putting greater emphasis on what can be done ex ante to reduce risk exposure and increase preparedness, so that farmers recover more easily from adverse events and are less exposed to such risks going forward. It also encourages policy-makers to consider systems instead of individuals, recognising that the actions of individuals can have negative consequences for the wider agricultural sector due to linkages and knock-on effects. This questionnaire explores the extent to which countries are integrating resilience into their agricultural risk management policies by examining country approaches and policy responses in the five critical resilience focus areas: time frame, trade-offs, investments in on-farm resilience capacity, no-regret policies, and participatory collaborative approaches.