To start the next agricultural revolution, put environmental labels on food.

Résumé

Environmental labelling has substantially reduced environmental impacts in multiple sectors of the economy. While many think of labelling as a tool to change consumer behaviour, its major successes have been changing producer behaviour and supporting effective policy. However, in food, a sector where we urgently need transformative change, we have a proliferation of minimally adopted labels that have delivered little change globally. In this Lecture, I will present the case for introducing a redesigned and harmonized label, which reports multiple environmental outcomes and crucially, productivity too. A requirement to quantify environmental outcomes would require that producers monitor their inputs, outputs, and practices, and impacts, which is only possible at scale with digital tools. Labelling could therefore trigger the widespread digitalisation of agriculture and the knowledge sharing this would enable: the basis for another agricultural revolution.