Pavan Sukhdev Founder & CEO, GIST Impact Founder, O’land Wilderness Lodges
From your morning cup of coffee to the clothes you wear every day, global agrifood systems produce the essential goods we have come to rely on.
But the hidden environmental and social costs to sustain this system are piling up. For too long, narrow metrics such as “per hectare productivity” of mono-crops have driven food system decision-making, ignoring significant human, social and environmental dimensions of food systems. This myopic approach has further entrenched food systems with devastating impacts on humans and nature, while discounting solutions that can help solve some of our most difficult global challenges. Business-as-usual cannot continue for our global agrifood systems.
This is why I joined UNEP’s “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food (“TEEB AgriFood”) initiative as their Special Advisor in 2016. Over the course of two years, a team of almost 150 experts assembled from over 30 countries developed a framework to evaluate agrifood systems in all their complexity. This framework, the foundation for a vibrant movement known as True Cost Accounting (TCA), has now been implemented in 14 countries.
A few years later, in 2021, we put the TEEB AgriFood Framework to the test in Andhra Pradesh, India, home to a state-sponsored program with a vision to transition over 6,000,000 farmers, managing over 6 million hectares to agroecological farming. This was then, and remains, the world’s largest agroecological transition program using regenerative methods. Over three years, we studied the economic, social, and health impacts of four distinct farming approaches common to this region, including agroecological farming, better known locally as “natural farming”.
The results of this TCA study were that farms taking part in the agroecological transition program enjoyed higher yields and greater crop diversity than competing farming methods, whilst avoiding many of the harms of competing approaches. Agroecological farming therefore represented a better holistic return on public investment thanks to increased yields, lower input costs, increased small farm profits, as well as environmental and public health cost savings.
This is the power of True Cost Accounting. It illuminates costs and benefits that are often overlooked or uncounted. At the same time, it brings frequently siloed considerations into a unified conversation. By bringing these metrics together, we can make more effective, long-term decisions.
TCA has come a long way in the last decade, utilized by stakeholders including UN agencies, national governments, producers, and business leaders to make better decisions. Yet further mainstreaming this shift in food system decision-making will require even greater levels of cross-sector and global collaboration.
The TCA Action Agenda, a first-of-its-kind strategic roadmap to revitalize food and agricultural systems, aims to deliver on this goal. Built from the insights of hundreds of stakeholders from around the world, the Action Agenda is a community-produced plan to meet the last decade of momentum with action and take it even further.
Focused on five key areas, the Action Agenda sets out the most strategic priorities needed to mainstream TCA by 2030:
- Sharpen communications and advocacy strategies
- Build the business and investment case for TCA
- Activate TCA in national and international policy
- Broaden the TCA coalition
- Provide accessible TCA guidance and increased research capacity
TCA can help deliver healthier, more equitable, and sustainable agrifood systems. The power of this Action Agenda lies in its potential to drive the collaboration needed by a diverse array of stakeholders to make this paradigm shift a reality. I, for one, can’t wait to see what we will do together!
Given the far-reaching implications of this work for climate, nature and human health, we must align our efforts.
tcaaccelerator.org/actionagenda
