This document discusses the role of social protection in agrifood system transformations. It notes that while agrifood systems have contributed to economic growth and poverty reduction, they have also led to increasing inequality, environmental degradation, and the marginalization of certain groups. It argues social protection can help address persistent poverty, inequality, rising non-communicable diseases, climate impacts threatening livelihoods, and the exclusion of indigenous peoples and women from agrifood system benefits. The document calls for nutrition-sensitive, gender-sensitive, and environmentally-sensitive social protection to promote just and sustainable agrifood system transformations.

1. The Future of Food:
the Role of Social Protection
22 June 2023
Benjamin Davis
FAO

2. From rural transformation to
agrifood systems transformation
• Key differences in agrifood systems thinking and
approaches
– Systemic approach that takes into account from production to
consumption, as well as the interrelationships between
biophysical and human systems.
– Greater attention to climate change, environmental issues,
natural resource management and nutrition (often overlapping)
– Policies focus on consumption patterns, production practices,
and everything in between.
• Main proposals
– Changes in consumer behavior and land use patterns
– Adoption of alternative agricultural practices
– Reduction in fossil fuels
– Participation and democratization (?)
• Explicit handling of tradeoffs/synergies between multiple
objectives
– Nutritional and health outcomes
– Environmental sustainability
– Decent livelihoods
What is the
role of
social
protection?

3. Agrifood system transformation—
yes it looks scary
But very useful for focusing on and balancing the
trade-offs and synergies among three core objectives:
• Welfare/livelihoods
• Climate change/natural resource management
• Nutrition and healthy diets
SDGs too many—reinforce silos. AFS approach helps
us focus on three

4.  As economies develop, proportion of
men and women working in agrifood
systems falls, driven primarily by
reduction in agricultural jobs.
 Within agrifood systems employment,
composition shifts from agriculture to
off-farm activities, including
processing, trade, transport, storage
and services
 Among agrifood system workers,
women tend to be less in agriculture,
and more in off-farm AFS.
Source: Costa, V. et al (forthcoming). Women’s employment in agrifood systems.
Background paper for The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems report, 2023.
Most employment for women and men in low-income countries is in
agrifood systems, specifically agricultural production

5. Source: Costa, V. et al (forthcoming). Women’s employment in agrifood systems.
Background paper for The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems report, 2023.
This pattern is similar among African countries

6. Source: Costa, V. et al (forthcoming). Women’s employment in agrifood systems.
Background paper for The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems report, 2023.
share of agrifood-system employment in total employment
between 2005 and 2019, by sex and African sub-regions
Agrifood systems are a greater source of livelihoods
for women than for men in Sub Saharan Africa
66% of working women and
60% of men in Sub-Saharan
Africa are employed in AFS

7. Agrifood systems have been central to
economic growth and wealth generation
• As part of processes of agricultural, rural and structural
transformation, have contributed to
– Rapid economic growth,
– Feeding the world,
– Massively reducing poverty and
– Improved welfare and standards of living globally

8. yet proving unsustainable and unjust
• Poverty and hunger reduced but in recent years stagnating
• Inequality between and within countries across multiple
dimensions
• Marginalization and disempowerment of key populations:
Indigenous Peoples and women
• Increase in negative health outcomes associated with changes in
diet
• High cost of global warming, climate change, destruction of
natural resources and biodiversity—and implications for
agricultural livelihoods
• Late transforming countries face different set of constraints and
opportunities

9. What is the role of social protection
• Persistent poverty and hunger—we know what social protection
can do
• Inequality—social protection has a clear role (when
accompanied by redistribution of wealth)
• Let’s take a closer look at:
1. Increase in negative health outcomes associated with changes in diet
2. High cost of global warming, climate change, destruction of natural
resources and biodiversity—and implications for agricultural livelihoods
3. Marginalization and disempowerment of key populations: Indigenous
Peoples and women

10. AFS transformation has led to rapid increase
in obesity and NCDs
• Increased wealth
• Changing, less
nutritious food
systems
• Over 2 billion
obese (with
obesity increasing
in rich and poor
countries alike)

11. Across levels of development
Colombia
China
Ethiopia
Kenya
What is the
role for
nutrition-
sensitive
social
protection?

12. And the poor are being left behind
SOFI, 2022

13. AFS transformation has contributed to climate change
and eroding natural resource base
Agrifood systems account
for 25-35% of greenhouse
gas emissions
Deforestation, massive use
of chemical inputs,
changing diets

14. Agricultural transformation must now fit within hard
constraints imposed by mother nature (thru policy)
• Climate change mitigation: agriculture is key to achieving 1.5
degree goal
‒ Hard constraint on agricultural land expansion – and a need to reforest
marginal areas
‒ Hard constraint on increases in nitrous oxide emissions from inefficient
fertilize use, manure
‒ Hard constraint on methane emissions from rice and ruminant livestock
• Climate change adaptation
‒ Hard constraint on water availability in many places
‒ Increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events shifts attention to
importance of stability and resilience
• Biodiversity conservation and sustainable management of natural
resources
‒ Loss of agro-biodiversity (plant and livestock species) and narrow range of
species providing majority of global food supply has potential to undermine
ability to feed global population by 2050 (EAT-Lancet).
• Out of 6,000 plant species, 9 constitute 66% of total crop production
(Bioversity 2019)
What is the
role of social
protection?

15. Within this context,
the challenge of agricultural productivity
Winters, P, Farrae, M, de la O Campos, A and Davis, B. 2023 Reconsidering priorities for strategies, policies
and investment for resilient, inclusive rural transformation. Paper for presentation at RITI, March.
Pressure to
reduce land
expansion, while
climate change
makes increasing
productivity
more difficult

16. Climate change produces
more inequality over space and time
• Greenhouse gas emissions generated and much higher rate
by richer individuals and higher income countries
• Negative impacts are borne at higher rate by poorer
individuals and lower income countries
– Climate change and erosion of natural resource base impose
huge costs on developing countries and poor people
– Productivity pathway out of poverty weakened; limits poverty
reducing role of agricultural transformation.
– Traditional productivity-boosting tools less likely to be effective
• Insufficient support for adaption
• Very tentative Loss and Damage
• Massive implications of mitigation for land use
The danger of social protection as the dumping ground…..

17. 80% of “cost effective” mitigation potential is in
developing countries and LDCs (Roe et al 2021)

18. Managing, protecting and restoring forest and reducing
emissions and sequestering carbon in agriculture
SSA
HIC
Asia
LAC

19. What does this potentially mean in practice?
DRC as an example
• DRC, characterized by relatively low fossil fuel emissions and
high AFOLU emissions with potential to generate surplus
mitigation, largely through the protection of forests and other
ecosystems
• “Activating DRC’s mitigation potential will require addressing
drivers of deforestation (commercial agriculture (40%),
subsistence farming (20%), or wood fuel harvesting (20%) and
development challenges at the nexus of food security, rural
development, energy supply, and forest conservation.”
• Can protection of forest generate a dynamic process of
poverty reduction?
• What guarantee for subsidy over long term?
• What is the role of social protection?

20. Persisting forms of social exclusion:
Indigenous Peoples
• Indigenous Peoples always left behind in process of
transformation
• Represent 6% of global population—more than
twice as likely to live in extreme poverty
• Highly disadvantaged due to significant inequalities,
ranging from early childhood development, social
discrimination, violence, assimilation policies in the
education and health systems.
• Social exclusion manifests through unequal access to
resources, limited political participation and voice,
and denial of opportunities
What is the
role of social
protection?

21. Indigenous Peoples play central role in
managing global natural resources
• Manage or occupy over quarter of world’s land surface and 40%
of land protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes
• Over 20% of carbon stored in tropical forests lies within
indigenous territories
• Territories/natural resources under continual pressure from
extractive industries and commercial agriculture
• Face violence, social discrimination, assimilation policies and
dispossession of land and denial of land rights.
And often an alternative vision of what is desirable
transformation

22. Women continue to face specific constraints in
agrifood system livelihoods due to persistent
discrimination, marginalization and social exclusion
• Recent Report on Status of Women in
Agrifood Systems
• Role of women tends to be
marginalized and working conditions
are worse than those of men
‒ Irregular, informal, part-time, low-skilled,
labor-intensive, vulnerable
‒ They earn less, are less productive, have less
access to productive resources and have
less protection from the law
‒ Little progress since 2011

23. • Socio-cultural norms and discrimination play
an important role in perpetuating gender
inequalities and poverty in rural areas
– Care and domestic work burden, limits on
mobility, perpetuation of GBV and child marriage
• COVID-19 has exacerbated effect of inequality
– Through increased care burden, unequal job loss,
economic vulnerability, diverted
health/reproductive services
• Gender inequality can lead to negative coping
strategies affecting productive capacity,
children and youth in household, with long
term consequences
What is the
role for
gender-
sensitive
social
protection?

24. Food system transformation, nutrition and climate
action: narratives give little priority to inclusivity
• Lip service given to fate of rural people in transforming agrifood systems –
strategies and investments to ensure they benefit are lacking
• All consistent in arguing for major changes in agricultural land use,
production systems and dietary choices
• Not enough consideration of importance of agricultural and food systems
in livelihoods of poor, or specific vulnerabilities faced by women, and
livelihood implications of sustainable transitions
• Not enough consideration given to those being left behind in terms of
hunger and malnutrition
• Why important?
– Unintended consequence could be solving planetary problems on backs of
rural poor
– Success of food system transformation itself, given central role of small-scale
producers, who often face multiple market constraints
• What is the role of social protection?