Research Report: How G20 Agriculture Ministers' Meetings Influence Leaders' Commitments and Compliance

How G20 Agriculture Ministers' Meetings
Influence Leaders' Commitments and Compliance

Research Report by Brittaney Warren, Chief Compliance Analyst, G20 Research Group
July 13, 2018

On January 22, 2017, G20 agriculture ministers met in Berlin, Germany, ahead of the G20 summit scheduled for July 7-8, 2017, in the nearby city of Hamburg. This was the fourth time G20 agriculture ministers had met since the G20 was created at the leaders' level in 2008. G20 agriculture ministers held their first meeting in Paris in 2011 (see Appendix A).

At Berlin in 2017 the ministers made 29 commitments, the second highest ever. In these commitments they forged links between agriculture and climate change and between agriculture, water scarcity, migration and political instability. They thus connected the economic, social, environmental and security dimensions of agriculture.

In the lead-up to the subsequent agriculture ministers' meeting on July 27-28, 2018, under the current G20 host Argentina's leadership, it remains to be seen if the ministers will advance these links further, as the significance of agriculture to food security, climate change, the natural environment and public health continues to rise. A review of past efforts by G20 agriculture ministers and their impact on their leaders' summit decisional performance, and the delivery of their decisions, provides insight into the potential outcomes of the upcoming ministerial and subsequent leaders' summit in Buenos Aires on November 30-December 1.

Overview

G20 agriculture ministers first met in Paris on June 22-23, 2011, in response to the global food crisis unfolding then. Just a few months before, the media had rung in the New Year by highlighting reports of United Nations data showing a dramatic spike in food prices. Food prices had already been rising due to simultaneous prolonged and more severe droughts and floods, but a ban by Russia on wheat exports in 2010 in response had a deep ripple effect across the globe. Having not yet fully recovered from the American-turned-global financial crisis of 2008-09, many countries remained particularly vulnerable to price volatility; by mid January food riots had erupted worldwide. With food prices reaching heights rivalling those at the peak of the financial crisis, G20 leaders convened their agriculture ministers to manage the crisis and stop it from worsening. This first meeting, in Paris in 2011, produced the Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture. When the G20 leaders themselves met at Cannes a few months later in November, they endorsed and began implementing the plan to stabilize global food prices.

The following year, on May 17-18, 2012, agriculture vice ministers met in Mexico City. They reinforced the ideas and initiatives from the previous year. G20 leaders did so too at the 2012 Los Cabos Summit that followed in June. The action plan seemed to work — or at least global cooperation and Russia's lifting of its export ban on wheat, announced in May 2011 before the agriculture ministers met and coming into effect on July 1, did. As global food prices calmed in 2013 relative to previous years and dropped further in 2014, G20 agriculture ministers did not meet in those years. The leaders kept an eye on the issue at their 2013 St. Petersburg Summit, but by the 2014 Brisbane Summit, Russia claimed the G20's attention again, this time for its breach of international law in its annexation of Crimea. Moreover, the Ebola epidemic and slow economic growth were tagged as priorities over food security and other issues. Thus no agriculture commitments were made at the Brisbane Summit in November 2014.

In Istanbul on May 7-8, 2015, G20 agriculture ministers met for a second time, despite a World Bank report showing a five-year low in food prices. They made 16 commitments. At the summit that followed in November in Antalya, G20 leaders made 31 food and agriculture commitments.

However, high decisional attention at the ministerial level on this issue in 2016 was not mirrored at the leaders' level that year. On June 2-3, 2016, agriculture ministers met again in Xi'an, China. They made 47 commitments, the most to date. Yet at Hangzhou in September the leaders made only three such commitments, among the least to date.

The most recent agriculture ministers' meeting took place in Berlin, Germany, on January 22, 2017. The ministers made 29 commitments, largely focused on the growing issues of water security and governance, and even climate change. The ministers' primary achievement was to endorse the Action Plan Towards Food and Water Security. With water scarcity and water quality predicted to affect a third of the global population by 2050, the ministers anticipated the new crisis that would come. However, such anticipation did not prevent the forecast insecurity, as the crisis came two months later with a UN's declaration of famine in Africa.

Decisions and Delivery at the Agriculture Ministers' Meetings

A more detailed review of G20 agriculture ministers' meetings and their relationship to the leaders' level summits reveals their expanding, but still largely crisis-driven, agenda.

Paris, June 2011: Food Price Volatility

The Ministers

At the first G20 agriculture ministers' meeting, held on June 22-23, 2011, in Paris, France, the sole document produced was the Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture. It was created in response to the global food crisis. The plan contained 29 precise, future-oriented, politically binding commitments, with a strong focus on enhancing productivity in agriculture to meet growing demand (see Appendix B). The ministers stated that by 2050 food production would need to increase by 70%, and by nearly 100% in developing countries. They identified plant breeding, public and private investment in agriculture, and crop diversification as methods to help boost production. The ministers also sought to increase market information and transparency, strengthen international policy coordination, develop risk management tools for governments, firms and farmers, and mitigate price volatility.

The ministers linked agriculture to climate change and to gender. They did so by declaring their support for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and acknowledging the need to strengthen food security, especially for women and children in developing countries.

They launched several crisis-response initiatives to advance their commitments. These included the International Research Initiative for Wheat Improvement, the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS), the Rapid Response Forum (part of AMIS), the Agriculture and Food Security Risk Management Toolbox, and the Emergency Humanitarian Food Reserves (a proposed pilot program).

The Leaders

The ministerial meeting thus created a solid foundation for the leaders to build on at Cannes in November. Indeed, at Cannes G20 leaders made 36 commitments on food and agriculture. All these commitments fully matched those made at the agriculture ministers' meetings.

Two food and agriculture priority commitments made at Cannes 2011 were assessed for compliance by the G20 Research Group. On the trade-related commitment, to remove food export restrictions, the G20 complied very well. Average compliance was 98%. Compliance with this commitment was the highest of all 22 commitments assessed from the Cannes Summit across all issue areas, with an average of 74%. It was also higher than the 70% average compliance with all six assessed G20 food and agriculture commitments from all years. Yet on the second commitment, to develop risk-management instruments to protect those most vulnerable to fluctuations in food prices, the G20 fared relatively poorly with just 58% compliance. Average compliance with these two assessed 2011 food and agriculture commitments was thus 78%.

Impact

In 2011, 29 ministerial commitments were followed by 36 leaders' ones, and a ministerial-leaders match of 100% was followed by 78% compliance with the assessed leaders' commitment. Thus a set-up agriculture ministerial meeting that produced a high number of commitments seems to have encouraged the leaders to pay almost equal decisional attention to the same subject at the summit level and to deliver them to a significant degree (Kirton 2018). On compliance, however, with only two commitments assessed, conclusions cannot yet be confidently inferred.

Mexico City, May 2012: Sustainable Agricultural Production

The Ministers

In 2012 G20 agriculture vice ministers and deputies, rather than the ministers themselves, met in Mexico City on May 17-18. This lower-level meeting sought primarily to reinforce the initiatives taken the previous year. Rather than producing a concluding declaration, the vice ministers released a report that had two objectives: to report on progress made on the 2011 Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture and to make recommendations on sustainable agricultural production, linking agriculture with sustainable development. Thus no commitments were made at the ministerial level in 2012.

The Leaders

One month later, at Los Cabos on June 18-19, 2012, G20 leaders made only four food and agriculture commitments. This was a significant drop from the previous year. Three of these four commitments fully matched the commitments that agriculture ministers made at their 2011 Paris meeting. The remaining commitment sought to address chronic malnutrition, an issue not addressed by the ministers.

One of these commitments was assessed for compliance. It sought to support agroforestry development, soil fertility enhancement and minimum tillage. Compliance was 68%.

Impact

In 2012, following no ministerial commitments, few leaders' ones were made and only modest compliance was achieved. Just as pre-summit ministerial-level commitments seemed to encourage an increase in leaders-level commitments and perhaps compliance in 2011, no commitments at the ministerial level in 2012 correlates with a lower number of commitments and compliance at the leaders' level in the same year on the same subject.

2013 and 2014: Absence

The Ministers

The Leaders

Despite no set-up ministerial meeting, attention to agriculture was sustained at the leaders' 2013 St. Petersburg Summit, where 11 food and agriculture commitments were made. Nine of these commitments fully matched those made at the 2011 agriculture ministers' meeting. Two did not. One commitment from the St. Petersburg Summit was assessed for compliance. It was on the continued implementation of the 2011 Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture. Compliance was high, at 90%. However, at Brisbane in 2014 no food and agriculture commitments were made.

Impact

There had been no agriculture ministers' meeting for two years in a row to help sustain attention at the leaders' level. This was likely due to the diversionary shocks of containing the deadly Ebola outbreak and Russia's annexation of Crimea. With the food crisis more or less contained, these two threats were more urgent. Given the previous patterns linking the number of commitments made at the pre-summit set-up ministerial with those made at the leaders' level, one can infer that had an agriculture ministers' meeting been held in 2013 and 2014, food security may have received more attention than it did. However, with other imminent crises pending, including with a former Cold War power, an agriculture ministers' meeting may have had less influence in 2014. Still, the absence of an agriculture ministers' meeting, leaders' agriculture commitments and thus compliance with any commitments in 2014 is consistent with the claim that same subject pre-summit ministerial meetings increase leaders' commitments in the same year. With more data, a link between pre-summit meetings and leaders' level compliance could be made too.

Istanbul, May 2015: Food Waste

The Ministers

In 2015, the agriculture ministerial meeting was revived. The ministers met in Istanbul on May 7-8, 2015, ahead of the Antalya Summit on November 15-16, 2015. The ministers produced a communiqué that contained 16 commitments.

The Leaders

This seemed to breathe new life into the issue at the leaders' level. At Antalya leaders launched the new G20 Action Plan on Food Security and Sustainable Food Systems. Its first paragraph stated that "in the face of intensifying pressures on natural resources and the impacts of climate change, we will need to increase productivity while simultaneously building food systems that are more sustainable and resilient." This reflected the heightened international attention to climate change, as the UN was scheduled to hold its 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in December in Paris to negotiate a new global climate pact. It also reflected the expectation that the 2015/16 El Niño, a naturally occurring phenomenon that affects weather patterns worldwide, would be stronger than usual as a result of human-induced climate change. This would put more pressure on agricultural production, water availability and livelihoods. At Antalya G20 leaders also went further than any summit before by making a precise commitment to reduce food loss and waste globally, a commitment first made by the agriculture ministers.

Impact

In all, the leaders at Antalya made 31 collective, future-oriented, politically binding commitments. Of these, 27, or 87%, fully matched the ones made by the ministers. One commitment was assessed for compliance. It sought to support youth and women's employment in the food sector. Compliance with this commitment was a low 45%. Thus, the 2015 Antalya Summit featured several ministerial commitments, twice as many leaders' commitments and a high match between the two. Higher ministerial decisional performance coincided with high summit decisional performance on the same subject yet again. Yet the single compliance assessment available suggests that high compliance may not have come.

Hangzhou, June 2016: Innovation and Technology

The Ministers

On June 2-3, 2016, agriculture ministers met at Xi'an, China, where decisions on agriculture increased. They made a record 47 commitments.

The Leaders

Despite this record, G20 leaders did not take up the issue with the same vigour at their Hangzhou Summit in September. China focused instead on promoting its core theme of innovation. Thus on food and agriculture, Hangzhou produced just three commitments. The leaders did, however, endorse the agriculture ministers' meeting, bundling several key sub-issues together.

Impact

Two of the three leaders' commitments, or 67%, fully matched the agriculture ministers' commitments. One did not as it was not applicable. No food and agriculture commitments have been assessed for compliance from the Hangzhou Summit. The inverse relationship at the Hangzhou Summit of high ministerial commitments and low leaders' commitments on the same subject may suggest that the role of the agriculture ministers is parallel rather than directly influential on the leaders-level summit outcomes. Same-subject ministerials may add to the leaders' performance rather than influence it, particularly regarding leaders' deliberation, decisions and delivery, by taking pressure off them to act and allowing them to focus on other concerns. Assessing G20 agriculture ministers' compliance with commitments made at the Hangzhou Summit would help fill in the picture of the impact of ministers on achieving the goal — shared by the leaders if not consistently addressed by them — of avoiding the conflict catalyzed by instability in food prices, caused in turn by various factors, not least climate change.

Berlin, January 2017: Linking to Climate Change, Water, Migration, Security

The Ministers

In Berlin in 2017, G20 agriculture ministers made 29 commitments. Attention to increasing food production, sustainability and climate change remained and were advanced, and the new issues of water security and migration arose.

The UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement had priority placement in the communiqué, which made a strong connection between agriculture and climate change. The ministers stated: "We aim to raise awareness of the vulnerability of the agricultural sector to the impacts of climate change." Two key events helped G20 members make this connection. The first was political. The Paris Agreement had come into force on November 4, 2016. The second was both ecological and anthropological. The effects of the 2015/16 El Niño were now known. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that El Niño affected over 60 million people, predominantly those who were already poor. This figure included 50.2 million food-insecure people in Eastern and Southern Africa (regions of interest at China's G20 2016 summit), who continue to be in a state of emergency.

After the preamble of the ministers' communiqué, the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development received a stand-alone paragraph while the UN's Paris Agreement received two. The issue of agricultural trade and investment was moved to the bottom and replaced by a nine-paragraph stand-alone section on water. Worry over conflict arising from water scarcity was captured in the ministers' statement that "climate change and rising competition for water will further increase pressure on water resources in many regions and have a negative impact on vulnerable rural populations." The communiqué acknowledged that competition over scarce water resources poses a threat to agriculture, food security and nutrition, and that it "can contribute to political and social instability and to large-scale migration." The ministers also released the G20 Agriculture Ministers' Action Plan 2017: Towards Food and Water Security: Fostering Sustainability, Advancing Innovation. They thus initiated their own agenda while building on previous work done by both the ministers and the leaders, including building on Hangzhou's "agri-tech" ambitions.

The Leaders

At Hamburg in July 2017, G20 leaders made 22 food and agriculture commitments. Four commitments were in the leaders' declaration and all four were on food security. Three of these addressed the ongoing famine and risk of famine in Africa and Yemen. Four of the 22 commitments were made in the G20's Initiative for Rural Youth Employment, and the remaining 14 were on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Here several issues were addressed including the traditional ones of increasing agricultural productivity, and the more recent ones of the threat of climate change to agriculture and employment, as well as the integration of agriculture into the digital economy. No commitments from the Hamburg Summit have been assessed for compliance.

Impact

Of the 22 food and agriculture commitments made by the leaders at Hamburg, 12 had a predecessor at the ministerial level. Of these, five were a full match and seven were a partial match. The remaining 11 did not match, and largely related to economic and job growth, investment and financing, issues that were not priorities at the ministerial level. The ministers instead focused on climate-related risks, including by implementing the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, on water security and antimicrobial resistance. In 2017, there was thus a discrepancy between the agriculture ministers' priorities and those of the leaders, with just over a 50% match.

Conclusion

The eight of the 12 G20 summits for which no agriculture ministerial meetings were held made an average of 2.6 commitments. With the three commitments assessed from these eight summits, compliance was 73% (see Appendix B). In sharp contrast, the four summits with an agriculture ministerial meeting made an average of 23 commitments, or almost 10 times as many as those with no set-up ministerial. From these four summits three commitments were also assessed, with average compliance a little lower at 67%. A pre-summit agriculture ministers' meeting thus coincides with high summit commitments from the leaders in the same year. The relationship with compliance requires more research for confident conclusions to be made.

To identify the causes of G20 summit commitments and compliance on agriculture, the broader context must be considered. Shock-activated vulnerability seems most significant (Kirton 2013; Kirton and Kokotsis 2015).

G20 action on food and agriculture first arose in response to a global crisis already in motion. In 2011 as the world's citizens demanded fair food prices, G20 agriculture ministers and leaders responded with the Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture. When food prices began to fall in 2012-2014, feeding the world became less urgent and the G20 could instead give full attention to containing the Ebola outbreak and coping with another crisis coming from Russia with its infringement on Ukrainian sovereignty. However, although the G20 in 2011 effectively responded to the crisis, acknowledging that restricted food exports in times of short supply fuelled conflict and hunger, it did not address the root cause that led to the initial restrictions of wheat exports — more severe and simultaneous droughts and floods from Russia to Canada. Thus, the G20 successfully responded to the price spike in food in 2011 but the problem of food insecurity did not disappear, with climate-related risks growing during the G20's absence on agricultural governance in 2013 and 2014.

In 2015, the international community put climate change at the forefront and signed the historic, but inadequate, Paris Agreement. In addition to seeking to keep global temperatures to below 2°C, it recognized food security as a "fundamental priority." Moreover, anticipation of an unusually severe El Niño's impact on agricultural productivity may have encouraged the G20 to take preventive measures by way of a new action plan on food security and sustainable food systems. Actual and anticipated shock-activated vulnerability seems to be a potent cause of G20 ministerial and leaders' matched decisional performance in quantity, if not in content (see section on Berlin 2017).

It is unclear why such peripheral attention was given to the issue in 2016, especially considering host China's interest in Africa, the region whose agricultural production was most affected by El Niño. One possibility is that China views agriculture through a technological lens. China's emphasis on innovation, with 47 commitments made at Hangzhou on this issue alone, suggests that it considers technology to be key to solving the world's challenges. Both China's commitments and its actions show it envisions a solution to food security via facilitation of the new industrial economy. Two of the three food and agriculture commitments made at Hangzhou were crafted in the framework of science and technology, and less than a month after the summit China announced a $450 billion investment to modernize agriculture and signed an agreement with the Agricultural Development Bank of China to "protect national food security." Thus among the causes of G20 summit commitment and compliance, the relative power and preferences of the host seem to matter too (Kirton 2016).

Argentina, 2018

Argentinian president Mauricio Macri has identified three priorities for the G20 leaders' summit he will host in Buenos Aires on November 30-December 1, 2018. One of these is a sustainable food future. Argentina's vision of a sustainable food future is "to improve soil productivity by sustainable means." The 2018 presidency highlights that healthy soil is "necessary for food security and human health" and that soil preservation "is crucial for sustainable development and life on our planet," without which some 10 million hectares of cropland will continue to be lost annually, but does not define the means to achieve such a future. Argentina will, however, focus on fostering a discussion on how the G20 can encourage the international community to engage in public-private collaboration between key stakeholders, identified as industry, government, international agencies, farmers' associations and civil society. To be successful in this collaboration, Argentina must also advance the debate on what sustainable agricultural development is.

The G20 has committed to the so-called sustainable development of agriculture, but it is also committed to increasing agricultural production via intensification. Although a rapidly growing global population necessitates more food rapidly growing, leaders should be cautious as intensification brings with it more than more crops. Indeed, the agriculture industry, especially the breeding of animals for food and the growing of crops for them, is a leading cause of climate change, second only to the fossil fuel industry. Agriculture is the leading cause of multiple environmental problems the international community is working to correct — deforestation, ocean dead zones and biodiversity loss. Moreover, the well-documented unsanitary and inhumane conditions in which intensively bred farmed animals are kept have led to a looming global public health crisis of antimicrobial resistance (Food and Agriculture Organization undated). Increasing the intensity of agricultural production, if not done thoughtfully, will only worsen public health, environmental destruction and global warming, which in turn will continue to affect crop production, food prices and conflict.

The G20 should thus consider critically the current debates over how to feed the world's growing population — organic versus chemicals, vertical farming versus horizontal farming, monocrops versus diversification, and so on. Moreover, the G20 should include in its conversation and coordination of a sustainable food future the growing body of evidence showing the benefits of a plant-based diet for human, animal and environmental health, and as an accessible and affordable means by which to keep global temperatures from rising to uninhabitable levels (see, for example, The Lancet 2015; International Agency for Research on Cancer and World Health Organization 2015; Erb, Lauk, Kastner et al. 2016; Satija, Bhupathiraju, Spiegelman et al., 2017; Poor and Nemecek 2018; Beck 2018; Webber 2018).

On July 27-28, 2018, G20 agriculture ministers will meet for the fifth time. How strongly will they support and focus on President Macri's goal to advance collaboration between the public and private sector via key stakeholders? They will likely address this issue. But, given current global environmental trends and the impact of climate change on crops, and vice versa, already being felt, the ministers will also, as they did in 2017, likely focus on water security and climate-related risks — with or without U.S. president Donald Trump's stamp of approval.

Thus, the upcoming agriculture ministerial meeting should positively affect the leaders' decisional performance at Buenos Aires, given past trends, but in terms of content there may be a division of labour. Nonetheless, to achieve a sustainable food future, G20 leaders' must consider the non-financial aspects of food security and the impacts of agricultural production on areas beyond the economy. Whether they do will determine the G20's role as a crisis-response forum, a crisis-prevention forum or a crisis-creating forum.

References

Erb, Karl-Heinz, Christian Lauk, Thomas Kastner et al. (2016). "Exploring the Biophysical Option Space for Feeding the World Without Deforestation," Nature Communications 7(11382). doi: 10.1038/ncomms11382.

International Agency for Research on Cancer and World Health Organization (2015). "IARC Monographs Evaluate Consumption of Red Meat and Processed Meat," International Agency for Research on Cancer, World Health Organization, October 26. https://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2015/pdfs/pr240_E.pdf.

Kirton, John and Ella Kokotsis (2015). The Global Governance of Climate Change: G7, G20 and UN Leadership (Farnham: Ashgate)

Kirton, John (2018). "Strengthening Global Governance through Accountability." In John Kirton and Marina Larionova, eds., Accountability for Effectiveness in Global Governance (Abingdon: Routledge)

Poor, Joseph and Thomas Nemecek (2018). "Reducing Food's Environmental Impacts Through Producers and Consumers," Science 360(6392): pp. 987-992. doi: 10.1126/science.aaq0216.

Satija, Ambika, Shilpa Bhupathiraju, Donna Spiegelman et al. (2017). "Healthful and Unhealthful Plant-Based Diets and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in U.S. Adults," Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 70(4). https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.05.047.

Appendix A: List of all G20 Summits and Ministerial Meetings, 2008-2018 ↩

Ministers meetings = meetings held at the ministerial or vice-ministerial level.

*Vice-ministerial meeting included for reference, but does not count as a ministerial meeting; total number of agriculture ministerial meetings is four.

Appendix B: Ministerial-Leaders' Matched Commitments and Compliance ↩

Match: 2012 Los Cabos and 2013 St. Petersburg are matched with the 2011 ministerial meeting.

This Information System is provided by the University of Toronto Library
and the G20 Research Group at the University of Toronto.

Please send comments to: g20@utoronto.ca
This page was last updated August 15, 2024 .

Summit	Ministerial commitments	Leaders' commitments	Match of leaders to ministers	Leaders' compliance matched
Summit	Ministerial commitments	Leaders' commitments	Match of leaders to ministers	Average	Number assessed
2008 Washington	0	0	-	-	-
2009 London	0	0	-	-	-
2009 Pittsburgh	0	3	-	-	-
2010 Toronto	0	2	-	+0.20 (60%)	1
2010 Seoul	0	2	-
2011 Cannes	29	36	100%	+0.55 (78%)	2
2012 Los Cabos*	0	4	75%	+0.35 (68%)	1
2013 St. Petersburg	0	11	82%	+0.80 (90%)	1
2014 Brisbane	0	0	-	-	-
2015 Antalya	16	31	87%	−0.10 (45%)	1
2016 Hangzhou	47	3	67%	n/a	n/a
2017 Hamburg	29	22	55%	n/a	n/a
Total/Average	121	114	-	+0.39 (70%)	6

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