[PDF]Synthesis report : a synthesis of the global and sub-global IAASTD reports

Agriculture

at a

Crossroads



AASTD International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge,
Science and Technology for Development




t





Synthesis Report



International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science
and Technology for Development



Synthesis Report



IAASTD

International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development




A



International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science
and Technology for Development



Synthesis Report

A Synthesis of the Global and Sub-Global IAASTD Reports



Edited by



Beverly D. Mclntyre Hans R. Herren Judi Wakhungu Robert T. Watson

IAASTD Secretariat Millennium Institute African Centre for University of East Anglia

Technology Studies



Copyright © 2009 IAASTD. All rights reserved. Permission to
reproduce and disseminate portions of the work for no cost will be
granted free of charge by Island Press upon request: Island Press, 1718
Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009.

Island Press is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data.

International assessment of agricultural knowledge, science and
technology for development (IAASTD) : synthesis report with executive
summary : a synthesis of the global and sub-global IAASTD reports /
edited by Beverly D. Mclntyre . . . [et al.].
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-59726-550-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Agriculture — International cooperation. 2. Sustainable
development. I. Mclntyre, Beverly D. II. Title: Synthesis report with
executive summary : a synthesis of the global and sub-global IAASTD
reports.

HD1428.I547 2008

338.9'27— dc22 2008046049
British Cataloguing-in-Publication data available.
Printed on recycled, acid-free paper

Interior and cover designs by Linda McKnight, McKnight Design, LLC.
Manufactured in the United States of America



10 987654321



Contents



vi Foreword

vii Preface

1 Executive Summary of Synthesis Report

2 Statement by Governments

3 Executive Summary

12 Annex. Reservations on Executive Summary

1 3 Synthesis Report

1 5 Statement by Governments on Synthesis Report

1 7 Part I: Current Conditions, Challenges and Options for Action

35 Part II: Themes

35 Bioenergy

40 Biotechnology

46 Climate Change

53 Human Health

59 Natural Resources Management

65 Trade and Markets

71 Traditional and Local Knowledge and Community-based Innovations

75 Women in Agriculture



81


Annex A


Reservations on Synthesis Report


82


Annex B


Authors and Review Editors of Global and Sub-Global Reports


89


Annex C


Peer Reviewers


92


Annex D


Secretariat and Cosponsor Focal Points


93


Annex E


Steering Committee for Consultative Process and Advisory Bureau for Assessment



Foreword



The objective of the International Assessment of Agricul-
tural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development
(IAASTD) was to assess the impacts of past, present and
future agricultural knowledge, science and technology on
the:

• reduction of hunger and poverty,

• improvement of rural livelihoods and human health,
and

• equitable, socially, environmentally and economically
sustainable development.

The IAASTD was initiated in 2002 by the World Bank and
the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Na-
tions (FAO) as a global consultative process to determine
whether an international assessment of agricultural knowl-
edge, science and technology was needed. Mr. Klaus Toepfer,
Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Pro-
gramme (UNEP) opened the first Intergovernmental Plenary
(30 August-3 September 2004) in Nairobi, Kenya, during
which participants initiated a detailed scoping, preparation,
drafting and peer review process.

The outputs from this assessment are a Global and five
Sub-Global reports; a Global and five Sub-Global Sum-
maries for Decision Makers; and a cross-cutting Synthesis
Report with an Executive Summary. The Summaries for De-
cision Makers and the Synthesis Report specifically provide
options for action to governments, international agencies,
academia, research organizations and other decision makers
around the world.

The reports draw on the work of hundreds of experts
from all regions of the world who have participated in the
preparation and peer review process. As has been customary
in many such global assessments, success depended first and
foremost on the dedication, enthusiasm and cooperation of
these experts in many different but related disciplines. It is
the synergy of these interrelated disciplines that permitted
IAASTD to create a unique, interdisciplinary regional and
global process.

We take this opportunity to express our deep gratitude
to the authors and reviewers of all of the reports — their
dedication and tireless efforts made the process a success.
We thank the Steering Committee for distilling the outputs
of the consultative process into recommendations to the
Plenary, the IAASTD Bureau for their advisory role during
the assessment and the work of those in the extended Sec-



retariat. We would specifically like to thank the cosponsor-
ing organizations of the Global Environment Facility (GEF)
and the World Bank for their financial contributions as well
as the FAO, UNEP, and the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for their
continued support of this process through allocation of staff
resources.

We acknowledge with gratitude the governments and
organizations that contributed to the Multidonor Trust
Fund (Australia, Canada, the European Commission,
France, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United King-
dom) and the United States Trust Fund. We also thank the
governments who provided support to Bureau members,
authors and reviewers in other ways. In addition, Finland
provided direct support to the Secretariat. The IAASTD was
especially successful in engaging a large number of experts
from developing countries and countries with economies in
transition in its work; the Trust Funds enabled financial as-
sistance for their travel to the IAASTD meetings.

We would also like to make special mention of the Re-
gional Organizations who hosted the regional coordinators
and staff and provided assistance in management and time
to ensure success of this enterprise: the African Center for
Technology Studies (ACTS) in Kenya, the Inter- American
Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) in Costa
Rica, the International Center for Agricultural Research in
the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Syria, and the WorldFish Center
in Malaysia.

The final Intergovernmental Plenary in Johannesburg,
South Africa was opened on 7 April 2008 by Achim Steiner,
Executive Director of UNEP. This Plenary saw the accep-
tance of the Reports and the approval of the Summaries for
Decision Makers and the Executive Summary of the Synthe-
sis Report by an overwhelming majority of governments.



Signed:

Co-chairs
Hans H. Herren
Judi Wakhungu

Director

Robert T. Watson




vi



Preface



In August 2002, the World Bank and the Food and Agri-
culture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations initiated
a global consultative process to determine whether an in-
ternational assessment of agricultural knowledge, science
and technology (AKST) was needed. This was stimulated
by discussions at the World Bank with the private sector
and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on the state of
scientific understanding of biotechnology and more specifi-
cally transgenics. During 2003, eleven consultations were
held, overseen by an international multistakeholder steer-
ing committee and involving over 800 participants from all
relevant stakeholder groups, e.g., governments, the private
sector and civil society. Based on these consultations the
steering committee recommended to an Intergovernmental
Plenary meeting in Nairobi in September 2004 that an in-
ternational assessment of the role of AKST in reducing hun-
ger and poverty, improving rural livelihoods and facilitating
environmentally, socially and economically sustainable
development was needed. The concept of an International
Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Tech-
nology for Development (IAASTD) was endorsed as a multi-
thematic, multi-spatial, multi-temporal intergovernmental
process with a multistakeholder Bureau cosponsored by the
FAO, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), United Na-
tions Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP), United Nations Educa-
tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the
World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO).

The IAASTD 's governance structure is a unique hybrid
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
and the nongovernmental Millennium Ecosystem Assess-
ment (MA). The stakeholder composition of the Bureau was
agreed at the Intergovernmental Plenary meeting in Nairobi;
it is geographically balanced and multistakeholder with 30
government and 30 civil society representatives (NGOs,
producer and consumer groups, private sector entities and
international organizations) in order to ensure ownership of
the process and findings by a range of stakeholders.

About 400 of the world's experts were selected by the
Bureau, following nominations by stakeholder groups, to
prepare the IAASTD Report (comprised of a Global and
five Sub-Global assessments). These experts worked in their
own capacity and did not represent any particular stake-
holder group. Additional individuals, organizations and
governments were involved in the peer review process.

The IAASTD development and sustainability goals
were endorsed at the first Intergovernmental Plenary and
are consistent with a subset of the UN Millennium Develop-



ment Goals (MDGs): the reduction of hunger and poverty,
the improvement of rural livelihoods and human health, and
facilitating equitable, socially, environmentally and economi-
cally sustainable development. Realizing these goals requires
acknowledging the multifunctionality of agriculture: the
challenge is to simultaneously meet development and sus-
tainability goals while increasing agricultural production.

Meeting these goals has to be placed in the context of a
rapidly changing world of urbanization, growing inequities,
human migration, globalization, changing dietary prefer-
ences, climate change, environmental degradation, a trend
toward biofuels and an increasing population. These condi-
tions are affecting local and global food security and put-
ting pressure on productive capacity and ecosystems. Hence
there are unprecedented challenges ahead in providing food
within a global trading system where there are other com-
peting uses for agricultural and other natural resources.
AKST alone cannot solve these problems, which are caused
by complex political and social dynamics, but it can make
a major contribution to meeting development and sustain-
ability goals. Never before has it been more important for
the world to generate and use AKST.

Given the focus on hunger, poverty and livelihoods,
the IAASTD pays special attention to the current situation,
issues and potential opportunities to redirect the current
AKST system to improve the situation for poor rural peo-
ple, especially small-scale farmers, rural laborers and others
with limited resources. It addresses issues critical to formu-
lating policy and provides information for decision makers
confronting conflicting views on contentious issues such as
the environmental consequences of productivity increases,
environmental and human health impacts of transgenic
crops, the consequences of bioenergy development on the
environment and on the long-term availability and price of
food, and the implications of climate change on agricultural
production. The Bureau agreed that the scope of the assess-
ment needed to go beyond the narrow confines of science
and technology (S&T) and should encompass other types
of relevant knowledge (e.g., knowledge held by agricultural
producers, consumers and end users) and that it should also
assess the role of institutions, organizations, governance,
markets and trade.

The IAASTD is a multidisciplinary and multistakeholder
enterprise requiring the use and integration of information,
tools and models from different knowledge paradigms in-
cluding local and traditional knowledge. The IAASTD does
not advocate specific policies or practices; it assesses the ma-
jor issues facing AKST and points towards a range of AKST



vii



options for action that meet development and sustainability
goals. It is policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive. It
integrates scientific information on a range of topics that
are critically interlinked, but often addressed independently,
i.e., agriculture, poverty, hunger, human health, natural re-
sources, environment, development and innovation. It will
enable decision makers to bring a richer base of knowledge
to bear on policy and management decisions on issues previ-
ously viewed in isolation. Knowledge gained from historical
analysis (typically the past 50 years) and an analysis of some
future development alternatives to 2050 form the basis for as-
sessing options for action on science and technology, capacity
development, institutions and policies, and investments.

The IAASTD is conducted according to an open, trans-
parent, representative and legitimate process; is evidence-
based; presents options rather than recommendations;
assesses different local, regional and global perspectives;
presents different views, acknowledging that there can be
more than one interpretation of the same evidence based
on different worldviews; and identifies the key scientific un-
certainties and areas on which research could be focused to
advance development and sustainability goals.

The IAASTD is composed of a Global assessment and
five Sub-Global assessments: Central and West Asia and
North Africa (CWANA); East and South Asia and the Pa-
cific (ESAP); Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC);
North America and Europe (NAE); Sub-Saharan Africa
(SSA). It (1) assesses the generation, access, dissemination
and use of public and private sector AKST in relation to
the goals, using local, traditional and formal knowledge;
(2) analyzes existing and emerging technologies, practices,
policies and institutions and their impact on the goals; (3)
provides information for decision makers in different civil
society, private and public organizations on options for im-
proving policies, practices, institutional and organizational
arrangements to enable AKST to meet the goals; (4) brings
together a range of stakeholders (consumers, governments,
international agencies and research organizations, NGOs,
private sector, producers, the scientific community) involved
in the agricultural sector and rural development to share
their experiences, views, understanding and vision for the
future; and (5) identifies options for future public and pri-
vate investments in AKST. In addition, the IAASTD will en-
hance local and regional capacity to design, implement and
utilize similar assessments.

In this assessment agriculture is used to include produc-
tion of food, feed, fuel, fiber and other products and to in-
clude all sectors from production of inputs (e.g., seeds and
fertilizer) to consumption of products. However, as in all
assessments, some topics were covered less extensively than
others (e.g., livestock, forestry, fisheries and the agricultural
sector of small island countries, and agricultural engineer-
ing), largely due to the expertise of the selected authors.
Originally the Bureau approved a chapter on plausible fu-
tures (a visioning exercise), but later there was agreement
to delete this chapter in favor of a more simple set of model
projections. Similarly the Bureau approved a chapter on ca-
pacity development, but this chapter was dropped and key
messages integrated into other chapters.

The IAASTD draft Report was subjected to two rounds
of peer review by governments, organizations and individu-



als. These drafts were placed on an open access web site
and open to comments by anyone. The authors revised the
drafts based on numerous peer review comments, with the
assistance of review editors who were responsible for ensur-
ing the comments were appropriately taken into account.
One of the most difficult issues authors had to address was
criticisms that the report was too negative. In a scientific
review based on empirical evidence, this is always a difficult
comment to handle, as criteria are needed in order to say
whether something is negative or positive. Another difficulty
was responding to the conflicting views expressed by review-
ers. The difference in views was not surprising given the
range of stakeholder interests and perspectives. Thus one of
the key findings of the IAASTD is that there are diverse and
conflicting interpretations of past and current events, which
need to be acknowledged and respected.

The Global and Sub-Global Summaries for Decision
Makers and the Executive Summary of the Synthesis Report
were approved at an Intergovernmental Plenary in April
2008. The Synthesis Report integrates the key findings from
the Global and Sub-Global assessments, and focuses on eight
Bureau-approved topics: bioenergy; biotechnology; climate
change; human health; natural resource management; tradi-
tional knowledge and community based innovation; trade
and markets; and women in agriculture.

The IAASTD builds on and adds value to a number of
recent assessments and reports that have provided valuable
information relevant to the agricultural sector, but have not
specifically focused on the future role of AKST, the institu-
tional dimensions and the multifunctionality of agriculture.
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