The Standing Committee on Finance (SCF) was established at the COP-16 in 2010 to assist the UNFCCC-COP in exercising its functions in relation to the Financial Mechanism of the Convention. Its roles and functions have evolved to include not only mobilization of financial resources for climate action but also improving coherence and coordination in the delivery of climate change financing. The SCF is to report and make recommendations to the COP, for its consideration, at each ordinary session of the COP on all aspects of its work. Thus the 2025 Forum of the Standing Committee on Finance will be focusing on accelerating climate action and resilience through financing for sustainable food systems and agriculture. This Forum is scheduled for September 2025. Further details, including registration information, will be available at this page at a later date.

The following comments were submitted by IATP to the UNFCCC SCF on February 1, 2025 regarding the acceleration of climate action through agroecological transitions. This document is also available on the UNFCCC SCF public website.

Inputs Submitted by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) to the Standing Committee on Finance on accelerating climate action and resilience through financing for sustainable food systems and agriculture, towards 2025 Forum of the Standing Committee on Finance of the UNFCCC

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) thanks the Standing Committee on Finance (SCF) for this opportunity to submit input on its 2025 Forum on accelerating climate action and resilience through financing for sustainable food systems and agriculture.

We note that the Standing Committee on Finance (SCF), was established to assist the UNFCCC-COP in exercising its functions in relation to the Financial Mechanism of the Convention, and that involves not only mobilization of financial resources but also improving coherence and coordination in the delivery of climate change financing. Given your emphasis also on measurement, reporting and verification of support provided to developing country Parties in particular, we wish to draw your attention to the importance of generating coordinated responses to multiple crises, in the specific context of developing countries, with special attention to the least developed countries (LDCs). 

To this end, we request you to consider a new subtheme for the 2025 forum: Resolving the debt crisis that cripples LDC’s ability to invest in resilient food systems and agriculture with a focus on agroecological transitions. 

Crucially, investment in agroecological food systems can address multiple crises simultaneously, including strengthening adaptive capacity in the face of climate change; tempering high inflation, reducing demands on foreign exchange in the face of a new debt crisis, and reducing poverty and hunger. LDCs are among the countries worst affected by these crises, while having the least capacity to confront them successfully. countries. Indeed, climate finance for food systems must not be decoupled from this transformation and restructuring. 

There are 5 points we wish to underline:

1. Many proposals for climate financing linked to sustainable food systems and agriculture continue to rely on the assumptions that drove the Green Revolution (albeit with some welcome additional attention to the need to improve the efficiency of input use). These assumptions ignore the socio-economic and health harms caused by the Green Revolution.
2. Most climate financing proposals focus on foreign investments in food systems transformations in developing countries. Their authors wrongly assume that poor countries and their communities do not have the resources, whether the money or the knowledge, to invest in themselves. Nor do these proposals acknowledge the structural economic barriers developing countries face in international markets, including the ongoing misery of unresolved debt crises and unfair terms of trade. If left unaddressed, these structural barriers will undermine any proposed climate solution for food systems transformation.
3. Agroecology has been recognized as offering multiple benefits.[1]  Despite this, it remains under-financed[2] across the world.
4. We need new indicators of “development.” Instead of seeing a large share of GDP coming from primary sectors such as agriculture, fisheries, or forests, as impoverishing, economists should understand they are indicative of wealth. Not wealth to be extracted, but wealth to be protected and nurtured. These resources are the basis of sustainable food system transformations.
5. Recommend governments redirect subsidies away from GHG intensive agriculture and food imports, and direct public support instead to agroecological practices, including support for farmers’ organizations and investments in mutual learning opportunities to learn from and disseminate farmers’ local knowledge. This support should be tracked and assessed by using the Agroecology finance assessment tool developed by the Agroecology Coalition[3], a mechanism for countries and organizations to collaborate on food systems transformation[4] through agroecology to address multiple crises simultaneously. 

To continue reading, please download a PDF of the full comments.

[1] https://www.iatp.org/agroecology-takes-center-stage-global-agenda-transforming-agriculture-and-food-systems

[2] https://www.cidse.org/2020/09/30/new-data-reveals-massive-gap-in-public-funds-towards-agroecology/

[3] The Coalition’s work is guided by the 13 principles of Agroecology defined by the High-Level Panel of Experts for Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) of the UN Committee on World Food Security (UN-CFS) that are aligned with the 10 Elements of Agroecology adopted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)’s Council in December 2019. IATP is a member of Agroecology Coalition. 

[4] A manual accessible to everyone, agroecology assessment framework, complements the Agroecology finance assessment tool and provides the framework as a guide for the design of agroecological projects or calls for proposals by giving concrete examples of actions that contribute to implementing each of the 13 principles.