The Markets Institute at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) proposed a new framework to support the growing demand for globally traded food while reducing the worst environmental consequences of food production.
The framework, known as Codex Planetarius, is a proposed system of performance standards for global food production, focusing on the world’s least efficient producers. It aims to identify the key environmental impacts of global food production and trade, establish metrics that are globally standardized, and inform guidelines to foster international agreement.
“By using standards to address the most significant environmental impacts of food production, we can help to ensure food security and protect the global food trade, which is becoming more important due to the impacts of climate change and will be even more important for future generations,” Jason Clay, Senior Vice President at WWF and Executive Director of WWF’s Markets Institute, tells Food Tank.
According to WWF, food production has the largest impact of any human activity on the planet. Codex Planetarius reports that global food production is responsible for 70 percent of habitat and biodiversity loss, 78 percent of water pollution, and 35 percent of global GHG emissions.
The climate crisis could depress growth in global agricultural yields up to 30 percent by 2050, Codex Planetarius finds. And Clay says, increases in population and per capita income, accompanied by dietary shifts, are exerting continuous pressure on the natural landscape and its ability to regenerate resources.
The only way to reduce key global environmental impacts, according to Codex Planetarius, is to focus on the poorest performers, not the best ones.
Immense effort and money have been put into enacting voluntary standards for specific commodities, countries, or regions over the past 30 years, Clay says. This strategy, however, has ultimately failed to reduce the global impact of food production.
Clay describes that voluntary environmental standards often focus on the practices of better producers, rather than the performance of the worst. The latter, according to Clay, “are responsible for the lion’s share of environmental degradation, but they have historically been ignored in the conversation.”
To maximize impact reduction, Codex Planetarius will concentrate on the least efficient 10-20 percent of food producers that account for 60-80 percent of the impacts, but less than 10 percent of the product. To do this, Codex Planetarius highlights the need for uniform standards to measure, address, and manage the environmental impacts in the global food trade.
“Today we’re not measuring impacts the same way, we’re not measuring the same impacts, and we’re not using the same methodologies,” says Clay.
Codex Planetarius aims to create global agreement about the key impacts of food production and establish universally accepted metrics to measure environmental performance. This approach, Codex Planetarius hopes, will inform regulatory guidelines for governments worldwide and foster international cooperation.
Alongside Codex Planetarius, WWF is proposing what it calls a 1% Solution, which will add a 1 percent environmental service fee to the price of food exports. The goal is to create a market mechanism to generate the funding needed to reduce key impacts in the global food systems while making it more sustainable and resilient.
As a first step, Codex Planetarius is engaged in a multiyear proof-of-concept phase. During this stage, international researchers are examining basic assumptions of Codex Planetarius and testing the framework through pilot projects in a handful of exporting and importing countries.
Once peer-reviewed and analyzed, research findings will be published and used to promote traction for Codex Planetarius, initially through bilateral trade agreements and then through multinational organizations.
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Photo courtesy of Ivan Bandura, Unsplash
