We already have a pathway to success at the Convention On Biological Diversity ... and to a sustainable planet.
Sok Sotha was born on a three-hectare farm in rural southeast Cambodia. His connection to the land grew with the rice he helped his parents harvest. With secure land rights, Sotha’s family invested in their farm, improving its quality – and their lives – over the years. Today, Sotha is a firm advocate for agroecology, in part for its environmental impact.
"Agroecology is very important for human health [and] soil health. It also sustains the environment and protects it from land degradation,” he explains.
An agroecological farming operation will recycle nutrients and reduce external inputs (like pesticides) to increase soil and crop health and protect biodiversity.
But agroecology is not just an environmental practice.
From a farmer’s rights and access to land, to the way they farm it, the conditions they work under, and how they market their products, it is a holistic approach to agriculture and food systems. As advocates like Sotha understand – it’s also one of the only agricultural approaches to guarantee both ecological and social well being.
We met Sotha at a recent side event during a meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) technical body, SBSTTA, in Nairobi. There, he represented the Cambodian Farmers Federation and Association of Agricultural Producers, part of the International Land Coalition (ILC) network – joining supportive governments and international organisations in advocating for agroecology as a pathway to protecting biodiversity alongside the Biovision Foundation, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, WWF, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (CGIAR), the Agroecology Coalition, the Pesticide Action Network UK, the International Land Coalition, and IUCN.
Robust state-led backing of agroecology remains limited. In an analysis of LANDex data collected across 22 countries, only 11% of respondents believed that the State was doing enough to support an agroecological model for farming. More broadly, the assessment indicates disappointingly lacklustre support for family and small-scale farming systems.
But thanks to Sotha and others like him, support for agroecology is slowly growing. The CBD’s monitoring framework – to be adopted at COP-16 in Cali, Colombia this October – is an important opportunity to further gain momentum. Specifically, Target 10 of the framework recognises agroecology as a pathway to sustainable agriculture and land management.
It also includes land rights as a sub-indicator to measure progress in achieving the target.
As the International Land Coalition’s Eva Hershaw underscored “Without secure rights to land, we know that farmers, producers, Indigenous Peoples and other land users cannot invest in their land and have more difficulty transitioning to an agroecological model.”
For Target 10 to have real traction on the ground, however, states must formalise their commitments to agroecology in their National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans (NBSAP) -- country-level blueprints guiding state measures. Some countries – like Costa Rica – are already making headway. "Over the past 15 years, agroecology has been gaining momentum in the country," said Giovanna Valverde Stark, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Costa Rica to UN agencies, UNEP and UN Habitat in Nairobi.
"[It's] considered a solution, together with climate smart agriculture, that would make the food system more sustainable."
While support for agroecology has grown in Costa Rica, aligning the internal policies of different agricultural and environmental authorities to the NBSAPs will require further "fine tuning," says Valverde. She joined the same side event as Sotha in hopes to learn from other countries, as they too prepare for COP-16. Take Colombia, for example. As COP-16’s host, the country is working hard to update its NBSAP and link it to an Agroecology Law whose launch is planned in fall 2024.
"In Colombia, we say that one swallow doesn't make a summer," says María Teresa Palacios Lozano -- NBSAP’s Lead policy and institutional coherence component for the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, Colombia -- also at the Nairobi side event.
Palacios is working to ensure that the principles of agroecology will be "expanded into all kinds of food systems and territories (...) visualised beyond local smallholders and community economies and linked to the entire production chain, all the way to the consumer."
Together with the other co-organisers of the event, Biovision’s Charlotte Pavageau hopes to support farmer organisations like Sotha’s in their national level advocacy work, guiding governments with six key areas of action to ensure agroecology is effectively built into biodiversity strategies and action plans:
- Flexible and adequate financial mechanisms that address the current investment gap of agroecological actors
- Cross-sectoral coordination and partnerships to increase coherent collective actions around the 13 agroecological principles in the food system
- Capacity building of actors on holistic approaches (e.g. extension services, environmental regulatory agencies)
- Conducive policy that creates an enabling environment by addressing systemic barriers for agroecology and food system action (e.g. land tenure insecurity, lack of recognition of and support for farmer-managed seed systems, inconsistent chemical input regulation in the global trade system)
- Uptake of holistic approaches (e.g. True Cost Accounting) in monitoring and evaluation frameworks
- Foster inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (smallholder farmers, pastoralists) and other users of agroecological practices into the design and implementation of NBSAPs
If governments implement these six action areas, they will not only be advancing towards other global commitments that mandate support for agroecology, but other biodiversity targets in the Global Biodiversity Framework itself – including Target 7 which calls for a reduction of pesticide use.
"There are huge synergies across what I regard to be the three UN global frameworks on the triple planetary crisis of biodiversity loss, climate change and pollution," said Jago Wadley, International Advocacy Lead with event co-organizer, the Pesticide Action Network in the United Kingdom (PAN-UK).
For Sotha, to ensure that agroecology does become a synergizing force, we’ll need to scale up and coordinate commitments. As farmer’s organisations and civil society mobilise, so too must governments and international actors.
“We’ll only do this working together,” Sotha said. “We cannot be doing this work alone.”
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