The Sustainable Rice Platform First Global Sustainable Rice Conference and Exhibition, Incentives track, enabled participants to share experiences of the types of incentives available and currently used to support sustainable rice cultivation, the adoption barriers they supported – and what additional interventions would be needed to maximize the effect of the initiative, how public and private sectors can be coordinated, and the enabling environments used to better support the implementation of incentives. While this forum focused on sustainable rice cultivation, the incentives discussions and issues raised can be used to support next steps for the IES project development in Asia 2018.

Key discussions included:

• Potential to explore the development of other incentives specific to rice cultivation, including carbon offsets in rice systems
• How to use incentives to support farmers overcome adoption barriers to use the known and plentiful technologies and practices to support sustainable rice cultivation.
• Often incentives to support sustainable rice cultivation were one-dimensional and insufficient to address all issues along the value chain or faced by farmers.
• How to link provision of incentives within rice production to the wider landscape and provision of ecosystem services, i.e. looking beyond provision of incentives along the value chain.
• The role of the SRP Standard on Sustainable Rice Cultivation as a potential framework through which an optimal mix of incentives could be implemented to scale up and target multiple issues beyond production systems that could be sustained in the long-term with market forces. i.e. how specific focal points within the standard, such as biodiversity, could be used to target specific incentives that could increase the market value of sustainably produced rice.

Identify and build case studies showing how packages of incentives rae used to support sustainable agriculture and ecosystem services provision, drawing lessons learned from their enabling environment, policy recommendations, opportunities for the private sector, how to link producers to markets to add value to sustainable products, explore new opportunities for incentives or markets for incentives, such as blue carbon, agricultural carbon (rice), etc.

A Regional IES Dialogue will be held in Asia in 2018 to share lessons learned from case studies illustrating the use of integrated incentives. This aims to facilitate discussions across sectors on the implementation of packages of incentives to support more resource-efficient and sustainable practices in agricultural production.

How to get involved:

If you would like to share your case study and example of using integrated incentives that support improved production practices and ecosystem services provision, and present it during the Regional IES Dialogue, please contact the IES team on: [email protected].