Climate Change and Agriculture - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 465

government factions. After moving to another group, the program had to be sold to
higher and higher levels of government in order to overcome obstacles from lower
levels. Even after the National Congress approved it, conflict during the budgeting
process cost the program more than one-third of potential revenues. The delays and
changes severely hampered project efficiency and equity. Policymakers will have to be
aware of and attempt to prevent leakages—for example, instances in which the regula-
tion protects one forest and the logging activity only moves to another forest (Wunder,
Wertz-Kanounnikoff, and Ferraro 2010).
Putting these factors together, it is likely that perfect full-costing will not be an
attainable reality in the near future. However, it is possible to take steps in that direc-
tion to bring private and social costs/benefits into greater alignment. Doing so will take
advantage of the synergies between climate change, agriculture, and poverty and has
the potential to increase system resiliency, improve market efficiency, and enhance food
system sustainability. Regardless of what the final impacts of climate change are, these
are investments worth making. The worse we believe climate change will be, the greater
is the urgency to do them and the potential benefits to be derived from them.
Conclusions
Much of the literature on climate change, poverty, and the environment is quite depress-
ing for anyone hopeful about the human condition. Difficult trade-offs seem inevi-
table. In these choices among poor options, most research recognizes that the most
deleterious impacts of climate change are expected to fall on the poorest, who are least
well-equipped to adapt to it. There is, however, an alternative conceptual lens for looking
at the intersections. This chapter has explored significant complementarities and syn-
ergies between agricultural production, climate change, and poverty. These synergies
imply that multiple wins exist and that complementary investments will be increasingly
necessary as the estimated impacts of climate change rise. This leads to the conclusion
that ongoing investment in agriculture and poverty reduction are essential parts of
efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change, whereas policies to mitigate and adapt to
climate change are themselves tools to improve food security and reduce poverty.
Food systems cannot be sustainable without proper natural-resource management.
Agriculture has a significant role to play in preventing climate change and helping
humans adapt to its impacts. Adaptations will inevitably involve some mix of individual
learning and change, technological progress and the incentive structures produced by
public policy. On the latter, this chapter examined as an example an expansion of the
Environmental Kuznets Curve to explain the dynamics that produce soil mining and
deforestation at very low-income levels when farmers make difficult choices in order to
survive in the face of negative shocks.
Individual farmers and land managers operate in systems over which they individu-
ally have no control. It is cheaper and more effective for individuals and governments