White Paper: The New Roadmap for Agribusiness

It is widely acknowledged that production agriculture, such as livestock rearing, crop cultivation, timber production, and ornamental horticulture production, contributes a significant amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. An analysis of the National Inventory Reports (NIR) submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as part of the Kyoto Protocol, indicates that greenhouse gas emissions in production agriculture range from 5 to 25 percent in developed countries and from 20 to 35 percent in large developing nations, like Brazil, China, and India. At the same time, production agriculture also offers a number of opportunities for mitigating GHGs in the form of soil sequestration, biomass energy production, and waste management. The European Climate Change Programme (ECCP) has estimated that agriculture in the EU-15 has an identified GHG mitigation potential of 19 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year.

These figures, while substantial, fail to capture agriculture’s true GHG footprint and thus, understate the industry’s potential for mitigating GHG emissions. Defining agriculture simply in terms of primary (first stage) production overlooks the integrated nature of the industry’s value chain, which consists of production enhancement segments, such as chemical manufacturers, seed and feed companies, and biotechnology firms, and the value-added sector, such as food and beverage manufacturers, processing facilities, pulp and paper mills, cotton and wool mills, and biofuel producers. Separating production agriculture away from the secondary industries also ignores the increasingly global nature of agribusiness, which now consists of an international network of supply chains, producers, processors, distribution networks, and multinational companies. Taking into consideration secondary industries, which, on average, contribute another 5 to 15 percent to GHG emissions in developing and developed nations, agribusiness accounts for approximately 10 to 35 percent of all GHG emissions. The following table summarizes the sources of agribusiness’s GHG emissions.

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