A key challenge for the agricultural sector over the coming years is to provide adequate healthy and nutritious food to feed an increasing population within the earth's planetary boundaries while responding to the rapidly changing diet of a growing middle class. Achieving this will only be possible if economic, trade, and investment policies provide the right incentives and if governments cooperate across borders and supply chains. In this context, government subsidies to agriculture are a critical topic for attention given their influence on international production and consumption patterns and their impacts on all three dimensions of sustainable development—environmental, economic, and social.
International Expert Group on Environmentally Harmful Agricultural Subsidies
Publication Date
04 June 2025
As a contribution to efforts currently underway in different fora, TESS convened an international group of world leading experts on sustainable agriculture from academia, think tanks, and intergovernmental and stakeholder organizations representing a diversity of geographical origin and perspectives. The group was asked to contribute to building shared understandings of what constitutes environmentally harmful agricultural subsidies to inform ongoing discussions at the international level in the WTO, OECD, FAO, UNEP, and World Bank and in the context of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
This report reflects that collective effort among the expert group members. It starts by reviewing the current state of knowledge on agricultural subsidies and their impacts on the environment and discusses trade-offs across different policy objectives. It then suggests possible approaches and pathways to building shared understandings of what could be defined as environmentally harmful agricultural subsidies as well as options for collaborative approaches to address them.
The objective is that dialogue around the findings of the report can serve as a basis to promote possible cooperative action in this area, where possibilities for discussion include new international disciplines with appropriate flexibilities, soft law outcomes in the form of guidance for the design of subsidies, pledges or voluntary commitments, or enhanced transparency mechanisms.
While achieving more sustainable agricultural systems will ultimately require approaches that go beyond subsidies, reforming environmentally harmful subsidies is a necessary first step in this transition process.
Out of the almost $540 billion spent annually on net support to individual producers in 88 countries between 2013 and 2018, the FAO estimates that two-thirds can be considered price distorting and potentially harmful to the environment.
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Recommended citation: International Expert Group on Environmentally Harmful Agricultural Subsidies. (2025). Identifying environmentally harmful agricultural subsidies at the international level. Forum on Trade, Environment, & the SDGs (TESS).
Listen to a podcast about the report
This podcast was generated using NotebookLM, an online tool developed by Google Labs that uses artificial intelligence to create conversations. TESS has reviewed the content of the podcast. It provides a solid and engaging overview of the report's main points but remains incomplete and does not delve into the detailed findings. The podcast does not substitute for reading the full expert group report.
