Bottom-Up Agriculture: How Market Mechanisms Can Revolutionize the Food System

​Food production generates the largest environmental impact of any human activity, threatening long-term food security in the face of climate change. Voluntary environmental standards can help, but they generally reward better-performing farms rather than targeting those that cause the biggest harm. These worst performers represent the majority of impacts but a tiny portion of production. It is only by helping them improve can we make food production more sustainable and resilient.

​Codex Planetarius is a system of minimum environmental performance standards to make globally traded food more resilient by raising the floor of production. The 1% Fund is an associated initiative that also uses market mechanisms to generate the financing needed to do this. The funds would be invested to address structural problems including compliance and to maintain productivity in the face of climate change, ensuring that food exports maintain or improve the natural resource base of exporting countries for future generations.