FAO showcases policy optimization tool developed by the MAFAP programme at Global Environment Facility's technical advisory meetings

FAO’s Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme engaged in top advisory meetings at the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Washington, DC, highlighting how smarter public spending and better policy coherence can transform agrifood systems in ways that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, protect biodiversity, and maximize impact for people and the planet by making every dollar count.

Marco V. Sánchez, Deputy Director of FAO’s Agrifood Economics and Policy Division (ESA) and Officer in Charge of the MAFAP programme, presented the policy optimization tool (PolOpT) during a series of Technical Advisory Group (TAG) meetings at the GEF to set the direction for the Facility’s next funding cycle, GEF-9, emphasizing the tool’s potential to not only help countries to  repurpose public budget allocations for the agrifood sector but also to play a part in environmental policy.

During one of his presentations, Sánchez also highlighted that “An optimized public budget that is validated with stakeholders could serve as a metric for monitoring using official data and as a mechanism to prioritize commodities for integrated programmes.”

Discussions during the TAG meetings, including a high-level meeting with GEF CEO Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, highlighted the tool’s planned expansion to incorporate climate and biodiversity objectives this year. This enhancement positions PolOpT as a FAO promising resource for countries implementing GEF projects, among others, to find ways to optimize budgets and policy support in the food and agriculture sector. in ways that also allow for good climate and biodiversity outcomes, helping them meet both national and global climate and biodiversity goals.

So far, PolOpT has been tested in 6 sub-Saharan African countries, where the MAFAP programme has been working side-by-side with government policymakers to develop spending scenarios to make healthy diets more affordable for more people, create more off-farm jobs, reduce poverty, and boost agrifood GDP – all in an effort to make government spending more coherent and reflect policy objetives. A recent test is showing the power of the tool in finding compromises between the socioeconomic gains and reduction of GHG emissions from agrifood production. A team is in place now incorporating targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Calling for greater policy coherence in global environmental goals, Rodriguez said, “Progress towards global goals requires nature-positive governance that will generate policy coherence. This is the underlying, necessary condition for the needed systems transformation towards a nature-positive planet”.

Photo from the main plenary of the GEF-9 TAG meeting in Washington, DC. Photo credit: Riccardo Savi for the World Bank.