Impacts of agricultural policies on productivity and sustainability performance in agriculture: A literature review

Abstract

This paper is published on the responsibility of the Secretary General of the OECD. The opinions expressed and the arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of OECD countries. The statistical data for Israel are supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant Israeli authorities. The use of such data by the OECD is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank under the terms of international law.

Transformation of the Food Sector: Security and Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The 47th Session of the UN Committee on World Food Security recommended joint action towards a comprehensive transformation of global agri-food systems, to make them more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable [73]. The cornerstones of the transformation are innovation [74] and productivity [75], together with the way in which the biomass for food and feed is produced, processed, and consumed [3]. During the transformation, it is essential to adopt an integrated approach that includes food waste reduction and valorization [3,76] and a shift to the climate-neutral economy [77].…”

Biodiversity, natural capital and the economy

“…As with all policy instruments, economic instruments must be effectively designed and implemented, and sufficiently ambitious in order to achieve the desired environmental impact (OECD, 2013 [96]). For example, agri-environmental payments have the potential to deliver "win-win" outcomes for both environmental and economic performance, yet evidence suggests their success has been patchy and shows significant room for improvement (DeBoe, 2020 [97]). Similarly, while biodiversity offsets can help address the residual biodiversity impacts from developments, their effectiveness can be undermined if the mitigation hierarchy (avoid, minimise and then offset) is not respected (OECD, 2016 [98]).…”

“…To reduce the biodiversity impacts of agriculture production, reforms should target the most distorting types of support including, market price support, payments based on output and payments based on unconstrained variable inputs, which have also been found to encourage negative environmental outcomes (DeBoe, 2020 [97]; Henderson and Lankoski, 2019 [103]). In 2017-19, the 54 OECD and emerging countries covered by the OECD agriculture policy monitoring report provided USD 536 billion of support to agriculture producers annually.…”

Measuring progress in agricultural water management

“…Identifying necessary policy changes or adjustments to achieve further progress requires sufficiently robust assessments of existing policies (Council of Canadian Academies, 2013 [21]). Evaluations are necessary for effective reform processes, to motivate change, or indicate directions and adjustments on a reform pathway (Gruère, Ashley and Cadilhon, 2018 [16]; Garrick et al, 2020[22]).…”

“…Policy shocks can be run to see whether it affects the cross-cutting objectives. 21 In the agriculture and water area, farm level, watershed models, agriculture sector and economy-wide models can be used to model the consistency of a policy design with cross cutting objectives. For instance, the United States Department of Agriculture's Regional Environment and Agriculture Programming Model (REAP) was set to respond to "what if" questions, while considering different types of agriculture and environmental impact (Johansson, Peters and House, 2007[69]).…”