Oecd Food And Agricultural Reviews Innovation Agricultural Productivity And Sustainability In The United States

The US food and agriculture sector is innovative, competitive and export-oriented. Maintaining high productivity growth in light of changes in national and global demand, while improving the sustainable use of resources, will nonetheless require further innovation.

In Japan, agriculture has been treated differently from other parts of the national economy.

- Foreword - Acronyms - Executive summary - Overall assessment and recommendations - Context and challenges facing the Swedish food and agriculture sector - The economic and institutional environment for entrepreneurship and investment in Sweden - Capacity building and public services in Sweden - Agricultural policy in Sweden - The Swedish agricultural innovation system

Agriculture and the agro-processing sector in Brazil have shown impressive growth over the past two decades. This has largely been driven by productivity improvements and structural adjustment resulting from broad economic reforms, as well as new technologies developed by agricultural science.

Estonian agriculture has undergone significant growth and structural change since the 1990s in a policy and regulatory environment that has been mostly supportive of investment. The implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy has contributed to the modernisation of the country's agriculture.

Australia’s agriculture and food industries are well placed to contribute to the economy’s future growth given the robust prospects of global food demand and the continuing high international competitiveness of these sectors.

Productivity growth in the Turkish agricultural sector is supported today by better technologies, crop varieties and animal breeds. Yet improvements have slowed since the late 2000s, and the productivity gap between agriculture and the rest of the economy remains large.

The Canadian food and agriculture sector is for the most part competitive and export-oriented: although challenges and opportunities vary significantly between regions, primary agriculture benefits from an abundance of natural resources and faces limited environmental constraints.

Markets that function well within a stable regulatory and policy environment are key to improving the productivity and sustainability of the food and agriculture sector. This report contains the main findings and policy lessons gained from a series of wide-ranging country reviews on how government policies can improve sectoral productivity and sustainability through their impact on innovation, structural change, natural resource use, and climate change. Improving the policy environment would require rolling back those policies that distort markets the most and retain farmers in uncompetitive and low-income activities, harm the environment, stifle innovation, slow structural and generational change, and weaken resilience. Agriculture policy should focus instead on measures that facilitate the uptake of technologies and practices that use resources more efficiently and sustainably, and which contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Of equal importance are: a more collaborative approach, more effective governance systems, the development of long-term strategies, strengthened linkages between national and international actors, and comprehensive and coherent evaluation procedures. Public funding of food and agricultural research is also crucial, and private efforts need to be strengthened, including through public-private partnerships. Finally, improving overall policy coherence would contribute to building trust, and to increasing policy effectiveness at each step of the food and agriculture chain.