As a step to expand the global food supply and mitigate global warming, countries should spend more money on climate-smart food and agriculture innovations and use public-private partnerships to speed the adoption of promising practices, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Tuesday. As examples, he cited the international AIM for Climate initiative and the Biden administration’s climate-smart agriculture project.
The five-year Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate, launched in 2021 by the United States and the United Arab Emirates, resulted in a $17 billion increase in funding for climate-smart food and agriculture systems innovations, according to a report released in New York City. Among its four key recommendations was to integrate climate-smart food and agriculture practices into national efforts to slow global warning.
“Innovation is key but innovation doesn’t work unless it is scaled [up in size], unless it’s supported not just by governments but by public-private partnerships,” said Vilsack during a panel discussion held by the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Look, we have a challenge here. If we’re going to feed the world, we’re going to have to increase agricultural productivity at a time when it’s going to be more difficult because of a changing climate. So every technology is on the board, so every way of producing food, protein, and substance has to be supported, and…it needs to be a major undertaking, in my view, of governments and the private sector and the nonprofit sector working collaboratively together,” he said.
Elizabeth Cousens, chief executive of the United Nations Foundation, said AIM for Climate has generated global momentum for food and agriculture funding. She said she was gratified by its attention to smallholder farmers, who produce 30 percent of the world’s food, and 70 percent in some part of Africa and Asia.
“We do have this time-sensitive opportunity to integrate in a wholly new way, food and agricultural innovations in countries’ nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement,” said Couzens.
The “stocktake” at the close of the 2023 UN climate summit in Dubai encouraged nations to adopt sustainable agriculture and resilient food systems as they strengthened their climate plans. The document did not set goals for the sector, which produces one-third of global greenhouse gases. The so-called Emirates Declaration, signed by 154 nations on the sidelines of the UN summit, said “any path to fully achieving the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement must include agriculture and food systems.”
This year, the climate summit will meet in Baku, Azerbaijan, from Nov. 11-22.
Vilsack said the administration’s $3.1 billion climate-smart initiative encourages farmers to experiment with sustainable practices by “suggesting the development of a new commodity, a climate-smart commodity, where we pay farmers for the opportunity for them to try out climate-smart practices.” As part of the initiative, the USDA and university researchers will gather information about how the practices worked on the farm and in the marketplace. “We share the information with the rest of the world through our climate hub,” he said.
As part of AIM for Climate, the Bezos Earth Fund will encourage research into alternative proteins, said Andrew Steer, the fund’s chief executive. Global demand for animal protein — meat, dairy and eggs — was expected to grow by 50 percent by 2050. Alternative proteins can range from plant-based foods and fungi to “cultivated” meats. The fund also will look at more efficient beef production, said Steer. One possibility, he said, was a high-tech “cow collar” that would the movement of cattle over rangeland to allow land to recover from grazing.