Nature Needs Us Now: Market Mechanisms to Safeguard Nature From Food Production Impacts

To meet the needs of a rapidly growing population, we have prioritized food production over planetary health. Food production has the largest impact on nature and the planet of any human activity, driving habitat conversion, biodiversity loss, water take and pollution, soil degradation, overfishing, and climate change. Voluntary environmental standards reward the better performers rather than rein in those that cause the biggest impacts. We need to reduce the impact of the worst performers to make food production more sustainable and resilient.

Codex Planetarius is a proposed system of minimum environmental performance standards to make globally traded food more sustainable and resilient. The 1% Fund is an associated initiative that also uses market mechanisms to generate the finance needed to reduce key environmental factors that are not included in prices. A 1% environmental levy would be collected on top of the declared price of globally exported food commodities. The funds would be invested to make food production legal as well as more resilient in the face of climate change, ensuring that food exports maintain or improve the natural resource base of exporting countries for present and future generations.

The intended outcome of the convening is to socialize Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund among a greater audience of government officials, companies, and NGOs, and to generate support and involvement in pilot projects, with the ultimate goal of introducing both initiatives through bilateral, multilateral, and then WTO trade agreements. A similar program, Codex Alimentarius, was established by 18 countries in 1963 as a set of minimum mandatory health and safety standards for global food. When Codex Alimentarius was embraced by the WTO as the global health and safety standard for globally traded food, more than 160 additional countries adopted it.

The goal of Codex Planetarius is to help countries measure and manage the key environmental impacts of food production, to ensure that global food trade maintains or improves food production rather than mining nature and the resource base of exporting countries. Governments need to approve Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund, but identifying the right place to pilot the programs is the current goal.

At the end of the current phase of work, WWF will work with a wide range of institutions to determine if and how Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund should be pursued and which international organizations should be involved. Since both programs are government-to-government strategies, governments and international organizations will take the work forward, not an NGO. If it moves forward, there will be efforts to analyze the impacts of Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund and how to address them. One way to move both concepts forward is for individual countries to use their own data to analyze the impacts and then pilot and test them within bilateral trade agreements. It will take time to create and analyze the results. But the willingness of countries to endorse Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund will be key for others to engage over time. It could take a decade to build support, unless there is a global food crisis or disruption and Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund are fast-tracked as ways to address them and make the global food system more resilient for nature.