Ninth Working Session of the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils (ITPS), 10 ‐ 12 October 2018, FAO HQ, Rome, Italy

1. Zineb Bazza
GSP Secretariat
Economic Benefits of
Sustainable Soil Management

2. Pillar 1: Assessment of the Economic
benefits of SSM for farmers and
other land users and identifying best
practices that prevent soil
degradation

3. • ITPS tasked at the 5th PA
to develop by 2020
• Concept note prepared
by ITPS working group
led by Mr. Krasilnikov.
• Endorsed by the GSP
Plenary Assembly in
June 2018 (Annex 1) for
2018 – 2019 work plan.
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/GSP/sixth_pl
enary/ENGLISH/GSPPA_VI_2018_2_e.pdf

4. Sustainable Soil Management
“Soil management is sustainable if the supporting,
provisioning, regulating, and cultural services provided
by soil are maintained or enhanced without significantly
impairing the soil functions that enable those services of
biodiversity.”

5. SSM and farmers
• Is it possible to decrease the cost of SSM compared
to that of conventional soil management through
advanced technology application and less input of
agrochemicals?
• Could the cost of SSM implementation be
compensated in the future by higher or more
profitable production?
• Could farmers be compensated by society for public
benefit of SSM implementation?

6. Process
First step: Assessing soil management
practices against the revised WSC and
VGSSM definition and listing a set of
suitable practices.
• A preliminary set of measures was
summarized

7. Sustainable management practices

8. Cost-benefit analysis of SSM
implementation
• Economic parameters will vary by regions,
countries, crops, climate, prices of agricultural
products and the cost of supplies etc.
• Numerous modifications of the practices
• The list of possible practices is not complete and
should be tested against the definition of SSM
If all data is available, can easily be done for an
individual farm. Scaling up is challenging.

9. Ecosystem services?
• Soil-related ecosystem
services have a big
range of variation
depending on the
approach to cost
assessment.
• Farmers have little
interest in the benefits
of ecosystem services
unless they are
economic benefits.

10. Next steps
• Study has to be done by 2020
• Economic assessment of SSM
implementation is possible but
difficult
• How to proceed?

11. Discussion