Editor's Corner

Climate change and farming

Next month COP26 gets underway in Glasgow – the critical UN-convened summit on climate change. As part of a worldwide effort to reduce humankind’s carbon footprint, the European Union has already introduced its Farm to Fork strategy as part of the EU Green Deal. This is aimed at ensuring that the entire food system effectively contributes to achieving its 2030 climate target plan. For the EU, this means the reduction of greenhouse gas carbon emissions by 55% from 1990 levels.

In this edition agricultural economists, Tinashe Kapuya and Wandile Sihlobo examine what the Farm to Fork strategy will mean for South African agricultural exports. South Africa has benefitted considerably from the SACU and Mozambique-EU Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) of 2016. Agricultural Exports were declining until then. However, the market access made possible by the 2016 agreement has seen the rate of agricultural exports grow by 4% per year from 2017 to 2020.

Kapuya and Sihlobo explain the challenges, opportunities, and risks of the new Farm to Fork strategy. They argue that the EU and the private sector may need to provide technical and financial support to help South African agriculture make the transition, so it can maintain its foothold in this lucrative market.

Agricultural exports could also shift to markets where there are less stringent regulatory requirements, such as the Middle East.

However, as climate change becomes one of the most important items on any political or social transformation agenda, it may be more farsighted for agriculture to begin to make the transition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This latest article is one of three by Kapuya and Sihlobo that have focused intently on national and international trade policy and the way it affects local agricultural exports.

In our last edition, they explained the limits to expanding exports in the African continent, which accounts for over 40% of the agricultural exports. And in the edition before that, they examined the trade-offs government must make between retaining trade policy space world-wide, pursuing more Free Trade Agreements, and making concessions to liberalize agricultural markets.

Sihlobo is the chief economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and an academic at the Department of Agricultural Economics at Stellenbosch University. Kapuya is a senior program officer at the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa in Nairobi and a research associate at the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy in Pretoria. Both bring rich experience and careful research to the Econ3x3 table, underscoring the critical role that evidence can play in crafting policies to promote inclusive economic growth.

Reducing the harmful effects of climate change caused by agriculture and retaining access to key world markets must be a critical part of the policy agenda.

Pippa Green

October 27, 2021

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Working Papers from the REDI3x3 project are available HERE

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Climate change and farming

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