I have just returned from the 2012 World Economic Forum Annual Meetingheld in Davos, Switzerland. The Davos meeting, which attracts some of the world’s biggest movers and shakers, took place this year as the world faces slowed and uncertain economic growth and continuing shifts in economic power toward emerging and developing economies. Discussions focused on unemployment, increasing inequality, and the alarming speed at which we are approaching the limits of natural resource use. All of these issues will have significant impacts on the prospects for reducing global poverty and food and nutrition insecurity, and all of them call for new models of development.

I am very pleased that global leaders are gradually coming to see agriculture in a more integrated way. As many of the sessions showed, agriculture and food security must be viewed alongside issues such as nutrition, health, natural resources, energy, and climate change. It was truly exciting to see more interaction between people from different sectors and to hear agricultural experts speak to these wider but related topics.

As one would expect, there was lots of talk. But we also need to move to concrete action:

• Continue to strengthen an integrated approach to agriculture that takes account of smallholder farming, nutrition and health, climate change, and natural resources. Because agriculture is at the nexus of all of these areas, we need to leverage it for broad development outcomes.

• Base the price of natural resources on their full market value. This means that the prices of food and resources must include their social and environmental costs, such as impacts on climate change and health.

• Set up a global system to measure, track, and monitor the cross-sectoral impacts among agriculture, food and nutrition security, energy, and natural resources.

• All of these actions require skills and knowledge at the country and local level. Capacity building is an area that was ignored in this year’s discussion.

Tags: agriculture, development, food security, World Economic Forum
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