The United States will launch a “coalition for productivity growth” to promote the use of high-tech tools such as gene editing and precision agriculture to build a more sustainable food system, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Thursday. The coalition would stand in contrast — “a counterbalance,” he said — to the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy of greatly reducing the use of fertilizers and pesticides and putting 25 percent of European farmland into organic production.
“There has to be a recognition there are multiple ways to get to the goal [sustainable agriculture],” said Vilsack. Farm to Fork, adopted by the European Commission in May 2020, has taken the spotlight as a bold plan to transform the food system, despite U.S. criticism that it will inevitably drive up food prices by abandoning high-yielding agriculture.
“We believe that a more sustainable agriculture can, in fact, be a more productive agriculture,” said Vilsack during a teleconference, listing biotechnology, gene editing, artificial intelligence and precision agriculture as ways to increase output.
The productivity coalition would take shape at the UN Food Systems Summit next week in New York, he said. Vilsack promoted the concept in one-on-one sessions with his counterparts and during a speech at a meeting of G20 agriculture ministers in Florence, Italy. Brazilian minister Tereza Cristina expressed interest in the idea, he said. There was no targeted number of coalition members. The United States and Brazil are two of the world’s agricultural powers.
Canada, Mexico, and “a lot of South American countries” hold views similar to the United States on agricultural methods, said Vilsack. U.S. agriculture is built on mechanized, high-volume production aided by hybrid seeds and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The nation is a world leader in agricultural biotechnology.
Vilsack also said he expected to see “a significant commitment to climate-smart agriculture” in the final version of the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill being assembled in Congress. House Agriculture chairman David Scott has said he is working with the House Budget Committee to add $28 billion to the bill to support conservation and climate-smart practices by farmers and ranchers.
“In the Senate version of this, there definitely is conservation resources,” said Vilsack.
In remarks prepared for the G20 ministers, Vilsack said the United States would introduce the new international coalition at the UN food summit “to help elevate sustainable productivity growth as a strategic action priority. We must get together and get behind action for productivity growth that advances social, economic, and environmental objectives — and the new Coalition of Action for Sustainable Productivity Growth for Food Security and Resource Conservation is one way to do that.”
Farm to Fork calls for halving pesticide use, reducing fertilizer use by at least 20 percent, reducing the sale of antibiotics for farm animals and aquaculture by 50 percent, and using organic methods on a quarter of farmland by 2030. It is part of the European Green Deal intended to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.
During a transatlantic discussion in July 2020, EU agriculture commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski said the pandemic “provides us with an important lesson that we need to strengthen our food security. … We have to have as much food as possible from local fields because it may not be possible to get it from those places far away.”
The European Commission home page for Farm to Fork is available here.