Toward a More Resilient Agriculture

Defining a Globally Resilient Agriculture

A resilient agriculture is one that meets both food and development needs over both the short- and very long-terms, from local to global scales, without destabilizing the Earth system. It aims to maintain or grow the full natural capital of landscapes as well as a broader set of mechanisms, such as the social networks, governance, and leadership required to meet the immediate needs of 9 billion or more people without undermining the long-term stability of social and natural systems that together provide services to people. It specifically seeks not only persistence, but also adaptive changes or even transformations needed to meet evolving environmental conditions and human needs. To do this, we must challenge the current relatively fixed configuration of our production and consumption systems and the assumption that we will be able to continue any given practice ad infinitum. Instead, a resilient agriculture explicitly allows for adaptive changes or transformations to meet evolving environmental conditions and human needs. Indeed, resilience denotes the capacity of a system to continue to develop by absorbing change and without unintentionally shifting into a qualitatively different state controlled by a different set of processes. It also involves staying within critical boundaries. Where it is inevitable or desirable to cross a boundary, this transformation to the new system is managed in such a way that preserves the key processes essential to allow the new system to operate within acceptable boundaries.³²

The concept of resilient agriculture demands that we reframe the discussion on sustainable agricultural development from its current focus, which is primarily on optimization of production relative to its immediate economic, social, and environmental costs. Rather we must ask how to build an agricultural production system capable of meeting current and forthcoming challenges, many of which are still unknown to us. To fully comprehend the magnitude of this shift, we must change our basic definitions of success and failure in agriculture. Successful agriculture is most often perceived as high yields with low economic cost. Increasingly, this also includes high yields at low environmental cost. A resilient agriculture must also consider the ability of the system to preserve key functions in the face of systemic change. We suggest that that these key functions include the following condition:

To stay within planetary boundaries for the persistence of the human-environment system, while generating the capacity to reduce hunger and malnutrition to acceptably low levels in all regions and continuing to offer livelihoods and development opportunities now and in the future.

In order for this to work, agriculture must be reasonably profitable³³ and diversified.³⁴ Success in any one measure alone does not mean agriculture is resilient: a financially successful agriculture that undermines biodiversity is not resilient, and an agriculture that produces plentiful food but is not economically viable or undermines local livelihood options is not resilient. An agriculture that causes long-term or widespread environmental crises is not resilient, no matter how economically successful or how much food is produced, making its profitability and productivity irrelevant.

We can think about resilience by understanding which management practices tend to maintain the natural capital and generate a balanced and sufficient suite of ecosystem services over long periods of time and which do not. Agricultural regions are heterogeneous around the globe and thus, resilient solutions will vary between locations. It is also true that not all goods and services need to be produced in all locations at all times. It may be that some local biodiversity is lost due to intensified agriculture in one location if this allows better maintenance of biodiversity at a larger scale.³⁵ We thus believe that a resilient global agricultural system will be a mosaic of resilient regions, each one unique in some way, interacting through trade, assistance in times of need, and transfer of learning. Resilience is often associated with diversity, including both biological diversity and social diversity. We would expect a resilient agriculture to be diverse, with many different types of agriculture happening in different places around the world, or even within the same region. This is quite different from an optimized agriculture, in which (at the logical extreme) each region does just one thing, in the way currently believed to be best.

Toward a More Resilient Agriculture

A more resilient agriculture will need to be persistent, adaptive, and transformative, each at the appropriate moment in time and at the appropriate place. Steps to promote persistence of critical functions might include absorbing shocks such as price fluctuations, invasive species, or disease outbreaks. In situations of more long-term change, such as climate change-driven increases in dry spell frequency and occurrence, the capacity to adapt without large declines in critical functions will be necessary. Finally, a resilient agriculture must be able to transform to new modes of operation without excessive damage to human or natural systems when the basic conditions for its operation become untenable. The ability to determine when persistence, adaptation, or transformation is needed, where, and to what degree is critical. There are many steps that are being taken to build persistence and to adapt to changes. Some of these steps have long-term benefits. Others have short-term benefits but can be harmful in the long-term if they are continued. For example, governments sometimes solve short-term problems with subsidies or other interventions that eventually hinder more beneficial changes as agriculturalists become dependent on the subsidies and thereby persist with maladapted agricultural practices.³⁶

Persistence

There are many small to moderate disruptions that influence agriculture in any particular location or region. These include economic factors like fluctuations in the price of inputs or outputs that affect the viability of farming or the affordability of food; climatic factors, like droughts, floods, and heat waves; and ecological factors such as the loss of pollinators or the eruption of new diseases. Farmers must persist in the face of these inherent and expected shocks if agriculture is to be sustainable.

Among the mechanisms forged to encourage persistence, some are sustainable and some are not. Policies for persistence are often designed to insulate farmers from the effects of specific shocks, for instance, through insurance or relief. However, long-term sustainability of agriculture requires some amount of adaptation to these shocks if they are inherent features of the system, and especially if their probability and severity are changing over time. For this reason, policies that recognize and allow feedbacks to remain in place, such as internalizing externalities and providing true cost accounting of costs and benefits of agricultural management, could improve agriculture’s long-term persistence at the cost of short-term fluctuations. Persistence mechanisms that preserve the regulation of ecosystem services and natural capital and that maintain adequate levels of reserves and inter-regional transfers, will promote long-term sustainability. On the other hand, efforts that aim only to increase productivity and efficiency in a narrowly defined set of dimensions leave inadequate buffering capacity in the system to cope with inherent variability.

Adaptability

Adaptability is the capacity of a system to adjust its responses to changing external drivers and internal processes and thereby allow continued development along the current trajectory.³⁷ Being adaptive and sustainable over the long term means that agriculture must be able to make changes relatively quickly in relation to the rate of change in the circumstances and do so without reducing the overall capacity of the system to support human well-being.¹⁸

Among current mechanisms to encourage adaptation, we again find a mix of sustainable and unsustainable practices, where sustainable practices are those that maintain natural and social capital, regulate ecosystem services, and promote social self-organization. For example, governments adapt to changing market pressures by manipulating subsidies and tariffs, but all such programs create dependencies that may impede change and adaptation in the long run.³⁶ On the other hand, some local adaptations can create sustainable practices. For example, extensive experimentation with soil amendments and tillage practices in Wisconsin led to new approaches for building soil organic matter, conserving soil water, and decreasing runoff of nutrients.³⁸ Some efficiency-oriented approaches are sustainably adaptive: for instance, it is hard to argue that reducing the current 30 percent wastage in the farm-to-fork chain would be anything but a good thing, and there is no reason to believe that such improvements would be inherently unsustainable.

Transformation

Transformability is the capacity to create entirely new types of development and cross thresholds onto a new development trajectory.³⁷ It is not achieved by incremental increases in efficiency or sustainability of agricultural practices. It means a fundamental change in the agricultural landscape, with new structures, functions, and feedbacks. For example, farmers in southern Niger who primarily used to cultivate millet are now actively managing the natural regeneration of trees on their crop fields, which has resulted in an improvement in both provisioning and regulating ecosystem services and improved coping capacity among farmers.³⁹ This change required substantial social transformation in the farmers’ relations to trees, their field practices, and the institutions by which communities managed resources, including decentralized tenure rights to trees.⁴⁰ In the last 20 years, more than 200 million trees, an average expansion of 250,000 ha/y, have been established in the region.⁴¹ This socio-ecological transformation has likely been further enabled by a general increase in precipitation over the same time span.⁴²

Breakdowns in agriculture should open opportunities for learning and for new practices to emerge. In some situations, marginal adaptation (tinkering to squeeze a bit more productivity or efficiency from the system) cannot lead to a resilient agriculture. Bigger and more systemic changes are needed. Transformation is often difficult and comes at a cost. For example, the dietary shifts that are likely needed for sustainable agriculture on a planet of 9 billion or more are likely to require significant increases in the relative price of animal-based foods. The coming decades are likely to be characterized by increasing food security crises and possibly conflict over food, land, and water. Governments and non-governmental organizations often step in to ameliorate crises and reduce human suffering. They do this through policies such as subsidies meant to provide economic assistance, which are often needed in times of crises. While interventions like subsidies may be necessary to prevent suffering in the short term, they should not be allowed to block longer-term adaptive changes that decrease the risk of future breakdowns.

In general, current agricultural policies tend to steer away from true transformation because it is disruptive of existing patterns and interests and can incur short-term losses in agricultural productivity or development opportunities. In practice, the push toward a more efficient agriculture can postpone inevitable transformation because of the increased potential for transient inefficiencies during the reorganization process. Instead, we tend to opt for policies that focus on persistence and sometimes modest adaptation. However, ignoring the importance of maintaining natural capital and providing a variety of ecosystem services, while suppressing experimentation, is just as likely to undermine agriculture as failing to consider the importance of development opportunities. More than anything else, in recent decades, we have avoided transformation in agriculture. The time has now come and renewed transformation is inevitable. How can we ensure that it is successful and not catastrophic?

A Positive Transformation

Efforts to improve short-term efficiency and optimization are not ensuring sustainability and may simply be setting us up for a bigger fall down the road. A marginally greener revolution is unlikely to lead to a resilient agriculture. Instead, we must search for systemic changes in agricultural practices and institutional arrangements that allow agriculture to be productive but not static. Ensuring resilient agriculture for the long term will require a bold new focus on innovation and on institutions to facilitate sharing the learning and knowledge that results from that innovation.

Yet important questions remain: How can this transformation occur without unacceptable loss of the well-being of both consumers and producers of agricultural products, particularly the most vulnerable people? How can this be done without propping up maladaptive agricultural practices? And what sorts of institutions are likely to be able to lead toward a more resilient agriculture?

There are no easy answers. Achieving a sustainable agriculture will require patience to allow policies to work, protection for vulnerable people in difficult times, experimentation with effective monitoring of the results, and recognition of the opportunities for learning that result from allowing unsuccessful practices to fail. In fact, the period immediately after a crisis or failure is the best time to promote innovation and experimentation and create new capacity.⁴³

Focusing on innovation, maintaining diversity, and improving outmoded policies will help ensure a more transformative agriculture. A transition to a resilient agriculture requires a focus on innovation.⁴⁴ Innovation can be achieved through the reorganization of existing building blocks into new families of practices that meet multiple goals in a particular biophysical, geographic, and socio-economic setting. Johnson⁴⁵ highlights enabling conditions for innovative ideas. Innovation in agriculture will surely draw parts from existing practices, while the truly new ideas will come from bricolage (putting together several pieces into a new formulation), exaptation (building on existing complex ideas), or platforms (building complex things from complex networks). Innovation can be promoted by providing time and resources to experiment and learn from outcomes and by providing opportunities for ideas to connect randomly. This innovation will require experimentation, flexibility, local learning, and these must be fostered by institutions at local, regional, and global scales.

The diversity of socio-ecological systems and food reserves both contribute to the resilience of agriculture. Diversity, including variety of crops, cropping systems, farm sizes, agricultural landscape types, institutional arrangements, policies, and food systems, all provide functional diversity. This diversity provides the raw material needed for innovation and avoids getting locked into traps that are set by having one solution available.

Practices that are inefficient and do not provide opportunities for innovation are maladaptive and should be discontinued. Many agricultural policies are aimed at persistence (e.g. subsidies) and adaptation (e.g. domestic protection laws during price hikes). As they are often focused on short-term benefits, they can be harmful in the long run. Such policies exist because failure is hard—on individuals and on society. However, to maintain agriculture in the long run, maladaptive practices and policies should be dismantled without extreme shocks to individuals and society. At the same time, we need to make failure safe for individuals and societies. In other words, when failure is the best option, we will require at a minimum a vision of a better way, a bridge or pathway from the current system to the better one, and a temporary damage-control mechanism to protect vulnerable people during the transition.

Building institutions to facilitate the development of new ideas will improve communication of successes and failures and make adoption of techniques likely to be successful. Institutions and incentives are needed to translate goals across scales, so that innovative local solutions to farming problems also help meet regional or global goals, such as water security, pollution mitigation, or climate mitigation. This will require new types of governance that fosters communication across scales in order to enable learning and attenuate shocks. These institutions and incentives must be multiscale and allow the solutions to be responsive to changing conditions and unexpected shocks. They can be encouraged to provide resources for experimentation while providing opportunities for bottom-up innovations to be developed locally. They must also protect the most vulnerable, poorest farmers and consumers, who are most likely to bear the cost of failed agriculture and failed policies.

Substantial resources need to be made available to promote for innovation, experimentation, and learning. Bold experimentation can be aided by policies that provide insurance to farmers for trying new farming methods. Fostering communication across scales will be particularly important to enable learning from these experiments, potentially enabled by networking and bridging organizations to transmit innovation.⁴⁶ However, modularity and weak connections between systems can also be important to allow a variety of local experimentation that sometimes succeed and provide opportunities for learning when they fail.

Agricultural development organizations can help ensure that these experiments are monitored for success or failure and that measures of success and failure are based on the characteristics of resilient agriculture. Systems to monitor progress^47,48 are important in this context. These organizations could, for example, look for bright spots of success and transmit information about what makes these places and practices particularly successful to other farmers or farming organizations for which that information might be useful.

How Resilience Thinking Can Improve Agricultural Development

Shifting focus from maximum yield to efficiency and sustainable intensification were big steps for agricultural development. These systems aim for an agriculture that eliminates hunger, provides development opportunities, and maintains, to some degree, the supply of natural capital and a diversity of ecosystem services, factors which are truly basic conditions for the persistence and prosperity of human society. Resilience thinking addresses all these goals while specifically focusing on what builds capacity to persist, adapt, and transform in a world characterized by uncertainty and complexity, where agriculture needs to respond to a rapidly and profoundly changing world. The path towards resilient agriculture will include radically new approaches. To find these best new approaches, we must allow—and even encourage—experimentation, innovation, and learning, even if they produce results that reduce efficiency or are less than optimal. A critical step will be identifying a safe operating space for agriculture in which this learning can happen without causing serious damage to the environment or to human well-being.⁴⁹ This will mean identifying the ecological and social boundaries within which we want to operate and the places where we are willing to achieve something less than optimal in order to allow room for experimentation.

A resilient agriculture that eliminates hunger, provides development opportunities, and maintains the supply of natural capital and a diversity of ecosystem services is a basic condition for the persistence and prosperity of human society. Achieving this goal will require developing an agriculture that is persistent, adaptive, and transformative. We have many successes in stabilizing agriculture in the short term and in building efficiency; however, this very success has interfered with our ability to allow agricultural systems to adapt to the rising rate of environmental change and to be transformed when needs and opportunities arise. There will be costs to allowing transformation and maintaining a resilient agriculture, but these will be compensated by the capacity to maintain human well-being in the long run.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Swedish Royal Academy and the Stockholm Resilience Center for funding the workshop that initiated much of the thinking presented here. This paper is a contribution to the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS).

References

1. Raudsepp-Hearne, C, Peterson, GD, & Bennett, EM, Ecosystem service bundles for analyzing tradeoffs in diverse landscapes, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, 5242–5247 (2010).
2. Foley, JA et al., Solutions for a cultivated planet, Nature 478, 337–342 (2011).
3. Rosegrant, MW, Agriculture and Achieving The Millennium Development Goals (International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC, 2005).
4. Steinfeld, H et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow (Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, 2007).
5. Lotze-Campen, H et al., Scenarios of global bioenergy production: the trade-offs between agricultural expansion, intensification and trade, Ecological Modelling 221, 2188–2196 (2010).
6. Smith, P et al., Greenhouse gas mitigation in agriculture, Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 363, 789–813 (2008).
7. Garnett, T et al., Sustainable intensification in agriculture: premises and policies, Science 341, 33–34 (2013).
8. Zhang, W, Ricketts, TH, Kremen, C, Carney, K & Swinton, SM, Ecosystem services and dis-services to agriculture, Ecological Economics 64, 253–260 (2007).
9. Davies, B et al. Reaping the Benefits. (Royal Society, London, 2009).
10. Godfray, HCJ & Garnett, T. Food security and sustainable intensification. Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 369, 20120273–20120273 (2014).
11. McClung, CR. Making hunger yield. Science 344, 699–700 (2014).
12. Beddington, JR et al. What next for agriculture after Durban? Science 335, 289–290 (2012).
13. Liu, J & Yang, H. Spatially explicit assessment of global consumptive water uses in cropland: Green and blue water. Journal of Hydrology (2010).
14. Fischer, RA & Edmeades, GO. Breeding and cereal yield progress. Crop Science (2010).
15. Dobermann, A, Cassman, KG, Mamaril, CP & Sheehy, JE. Management of phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur in intensive, irrigated lowland rice. Field Crops Research 56, 113–138 (1998).
16. Cassman, KG, Dobermann, A, Walter, DT & Yang, H. Meeting cereal demand while protecting natural resources and improving environmental quality. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 28, 315–358 (2003).
17. Burney, J, Woltering, L, Burke, M, Naylor, R & Pasternak, D. Solar-powered drip irrigation enhances food security in the Sudano-Sahel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, 1848–1853 (2010).
18. Arrow, K, Dasgupta, P, Goulder, L & Daily, G. Are we consuming too much? Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, 147–172 (2004).
19. Enfors, EI, Gordon, LJ & Peterson, GD. Making investments in dryland development work: participatory scenario planning in the Makanya catchment, Tanzania. Ecology and Society 13, 42 www.ecologyandsociety.org–vol13–iss2–art42– (2008).
20. Gordon, LJ, Peterson, GD & Bennett, EM. Agricultural modifications of hydrological flows create ecological surprises. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 23, 211–219 (2008).
21. Walker, B, Sayer, J, Andrew, NL & Campbell, B. Should enhanced resilience be an objective of natural resource management research for developing countries? Crop Science (2010).
22. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Ecosystems and Human Well-being. (Island Press)
23. Bennett, EM, Peterson, GD & Gordon, LJ. Understanding relationships among multiple ecosystem services. Ecology Letters 12, 1394–1404 (2009).
24. Vandermeer, J & Perfecto, I. in Land Use Intensification (eds Lindenmayer, D & Cunningham, SA) (CSIRO).
25. Tylianakis, JM. The global plight of pollinators. Science 339, 1532–1533 (2013).
26. Danielsen, F et al. The Asian tsunami: a protective role for coastal vegetation. Science 310, 643–643 (2005).
27. Fischer, J et al. Integrating resilience thinking and optimisation for conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24, 549–554 (2009).
28. Rengasamy, PP. World salinization with emphasis on Australia. Journal of Experimental Botany 57, 1017–1023 (2006).
29. Walker, B et al. Looming global-scale failures and missing institutions. Science 325, 1345–1346 (2009).
30. Helbing, D. Globally networked risks and how to respond. Nature 497, 51–59 (2013).
31. Rockström, J et al. A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461, 472–475 (2009).
32. Folke, C et al. Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. Ecology and Society 15, (2010).
33. Cabell, JF & Oelofse, M. An indicator framework for assessing agroecosystem resilience. Ecology and Society (2012).
34. Kremen, C, Iles, A & Bacon, C. Diversified farming systems: an agroecological, systems-based alternative to modern industrial agriculture. Ecology and Society 17, 44.
35. Phalan, BB, Onial, MM, Balmford, AA & Green, RER. Reconciling food production and biodiversity conservation: land sharing and land sparing compared. Science 333, 1289–1291 (2011).
36. Shah, MA et al. in Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Policy Responses (eds Chopra, K, Leemans, R, Kumar, P & Simons, H) 173–212 (Island Press).
37. Walker, B, Holling, CS, Carpenter, SR & Kinzig, A. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9, 5 www.ecologyandsociety.org–vol9–iss2–art5– (2004).
38. Zimmer, GF & Zimmer-Durand, L. Advancing Biological Farming. (Acres USA, Texas, 2011).
39. Smale, M. Agroenvironmental transformation in the Sahel: Another kind of ‘Green Revolution’. (International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC, 2009).
40. Sendzimir, J, Reij, CP & Magnuszewski, P. Rebuilding resilience in the Sahel: regreening in the Maradi and Zinder regions of Niger. Ecology and Society 16, 1
41. Tougiani, A, Guero, C & Rinaudo, T. Community mobilisation for improved livelihoods through tree crop management in Niger. GeoJournal (2009).
42. Seaquist, JW, Hickler, T, Eklundh, L & Ardö, J. Disentangling the effects of climate and people on Sahel vegetation dynamics. Biogeosciences 469–477 (2009).
43. McSweeney, K & Coomes, OT. Climate-related disaster opens a window of opportunity for rural poor in northeastern Honduras. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108, 5203–5208 (2011).
44. Ruttan, VW. The transition to agricultural sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96, 5960–5967 (1999).
45. Johnson, S. Where Good Ideas Come From. (Penguin, 2010).
46. Enhancing Agricultural Innovation. (World Bank Publications, Washington DC, 2007).
47. Sachs, J et al. Monitoring the world’s agriculture. Nature 466, 558–560 (2010).
48. Zaks, DPM & Kucharik, CJ. Data and monitoring needs for a more ecological agriculture. Environmental Research Letters 6, (2011).
49. Bommarco, R, Kleijn, D & Potts, SG. Ecological intensification: harnessing ecosystem services for food security. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 28, 230–238 (2013).
50. Ramankutty, N. and Rhemtulla, J. M. Can intensive farming save nature? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 10, 455–455 (2012).
51. 51. Pereira HM., PW. Leadley, V Proença, R Alkemade, JPW. Scharlemann, JF Fernandez-Manjarrés, MB Araújo, P Balvanera, R Biggs, WWL Cheung, L Chini, HD Cooper, EL Gilman, S Guénette, GC Hurtt, HP Huntington, GM Mace, T Oberdorff, C Revenga, P Rodrigues, RJ Scholes, UR Sumaila, and M Walpole. 2Scenarios for Global Biodiversity in the 21st Century. Science 330, 1496–1501 (2010).
52. 52. Baumert, KA, Herzog, T, and Pershing, J. Navigating the Numbers: Greenhouse Gas Data and International Climate Policy (World Resources Institute, Washington DC, 2005).
53. 53. Postel, S, Daily GC, and Ehrlich, PR. Human Appropriation of Renewable Fresh Water. Science 271, 785-788 (1996).
54. 54. Bennett, E. M., Carpenter, S. R. and Caraco, N. Human impact on erodable phosphorus and eutrophication: a global perspective. BioScience 51, 227-234 (2001).
55. 55. Galloway, J., AR Townsend, JW Erisman, M Bekunda, Z Cai, JR Freney, LA Martinelli, SP Seitzinger, MA Sutton. 2008. Transformation of the nitrogen cycle: recent trends, questions and potential solutions. Science 320, 889-892 (2008).