The aims of TEEBAgriFood are bold and ambitious: to contribute a framework approach for better understanding and managing the impacts and externalities of agriculture and food value chains, and to bring together a global network of scholars and decision-makers dedicated to disclosing and valuing those impacts.
As expressed by our Steering Committee in the foreword to our TEEBAgriFood synthesis report “Without a doubt, the complexity is daunting as we embrace, holistically, the interconnectedness of agriculture and food production issues with which we must grapple. Yet we choose not to simplify our study, rejecting from the onset the reductionist, silo-oriented impulse that has dominated much of modern agricultural thought and action. Instead our collective effort to understand the true cost of food has left us energized, as we are certain that this is an essential step forward toward the kind of new policies, practices, science, and community engagement necessary to achieve our goals, particularly in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals.
In the synthesis report, you will find comprehensive, systems thinking approaches to evaluating ’eco-agri food systems’, an innovative Framework along with methodologies and tools to support robust evaluation of current production practices, and a theory of change describing how this all fits into the bigger picture.
We invite you to join us and invest in the collective effort to raise awareness of our dependency on the invisible benefits provided by natural, human, and social capital as well as the hidden costs that undergird our ‘eco-agri-food systems’. We must alter our current course and design better agriculture and food value chains and policies that support healthy people and a healthy planet. We must bring everyone to the same table to use a common approach that supports the change we seek. This is what TEEBAgriFood offers.”