Feeling confused about how to increase climate resilience in the food system? Five truths that can guide us towards effective action

Confusion comes before clarity.

I came away from London Climate Week in June feeling a little dismayed. I don’t think it was the oppressive heat, but a general feeling of disappointment that I had not managed to put the pieces together in my head. Almost every conversation was framed around climate resilience, or finance to accelerate it, but it felt a bit like looking at Instagram – a series of interesting but ultimately unsatisfying and disjointed snapshots.  With hindsight I realise that it was not the speakers, but the complexity of assessing and responding to climate risk in agri-food value chains, the recent realisation that dangerous levels of climate change is already affecting food supply, and the absence of a framework to guide our response to these extremes. Most agri-food companies are acutely aware of the risks and international financial reporting standards require them to assess them, but there is no clear roadmap for action. Contrast this with the power sector and the transport sector where the roadmap to transformation is much clearer.  

Trade diversification won't save us.

International trade is the main mechanism we have relied on to protect ourselves against food shortages and price rises because it has allowed for the rebalance of supply when individual sourcing domains suffer. When grain supply from Ukraine dropped because of the war, prices went up and farmers on other continents were incentivised to plant more in the next season.  Accelerating climate disruption reduces the benefits of such trade diversification because few domains are safe from extreme weather. It’s no coincidence that it is the coffee sector that is currently moving fastest on climate resilience. It has enjoyed diversified trade for many decades and has sourcing regions spread across tropical mountains in Latin America, Africa and Asia and yet its future supply is still threatened by climate disruption. 

There is (still) no food before farmers.

The slogan seen on hay bales on my local farm is even truer outside Europe where there are many more farmers and less mechanisation. In India, the second biggest agricultural producer in the world, farmers are leaving the industry in droves, and the number of farm workers is now greater than farmers for the first time in history. If they’ve found better livelihoods off the farm and agriculture has become more productive that could be a net positive for society, but the flight from farming is now a global phenomenon and yield growth is stalling. Climate disruption is a compounding factor because farmers are forced to use up their meagre savings to survive bad harvests, and without money to invest in better farming many of them leave. Climate resilient supply won't be possible without increasing farmer incomes and conversely farmer incomes will decline if we don’t make farming more climate resilient. There is a deal to be done which creates a positive feedback loop between improving farmer livelihoods and securing more food supply. 

Competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive.

We’ve missed the window when incremental improvements in climate adaptation would protect farming. The deeper measures needed are more expensive, but not if they are shared across a sector and with public budgets. That’s the underlying case for collaboration in climate resilience but it doesn’t mean competitive advantage won't still make a big contribution. In Vietnam coffee roasters and traders are collaborating on traceability and standard setting, but they still invest privately in farmer training and compete for output. This mixed model of collaborative competition is likely to be the mode for most action on climate resilience.  

Forward investment is cheaper than crisis management.

In 2006 the economist Nicholas Stern identified a truth which has aged well ‘Crisis management is purely a defensive sunk cost—paying to patch up damaged infrastructure or cope with value chain collapse without creating new wealth’.  The Stern Report outlined how investment can transform agriculture from a primary driver of the climate crisis into one of the global economy's most resilient and productive assets.  Twenty years on we have fewer farmers but more and cheaper precision agricultural technology, more competition for land but lower levels of deforestation, a hotter climate but more experience in land restoration and regenerative agriculture. Can we turn these conflicting trends into an actionable plan to make farming more attractive and food supply more secure?

At IDH we think so. We’ve recently kicked off a five-year Resilient Coffee Partnership, alongside Aldi, nine coffee companies and Conservation International. It aims to demonstrate how this can be done at scale in sourcing landscapes in Vietnam, India, Uganda and Colombia. We are running a series of group and bilateral conversations over the coming months to test the appetite for collaborative action from other sectors, and across sectors. 

We’ll be holding discussions next week during New York Climate Week, the Sustainable Commodities & Landscapes Forum in Amsterdam and the SUTRA Summit in New Delhi in November, and at the Climate Resilience Forum in New York in December.  We’re also introducing a climate resilience lens to our longstanding business collaboration on better income amongst farmers.  Let us know if you’d like to be part of those discussions.