The CBD biodiversity report: what do payments to farmers change?

1. Two roles for payments in the CBD assessment

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat formally launched the first global assessment of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework on October 15, 2026. Fewer national targets address harmful incentives than positive incentives. ^[1]

The difference becomes clearer when we consider the choices farmers make after receiving support. An annual income transfer and a discount on an additional purchase of fertilizer can involve the same public expenditure while affecting planting and input use differently. A payment conditional on conservation work instead raises the question of how to fit that work around other farming activities. Giving expenditure an environmental label does not explain these choices.

These distinctions also shape contracts for food buyers, agricultural suppliers and landowners. One farm might continue producing the same crop with less spare cash; another might remove an unprofitable field from production. Their trading partners would experience different effects. The useful starting point for the world economy is to identify the reward attached to the next action, rather than merely add together conservation budgets.

2. Encouraging conservation and changing harmful incentives

Target 18 combines reform of harmful incentives with expansion of positive incentives for conservation. ^[2]

The two directions cannot simply be netted against one another as movements within a single budget. Paying to maintain hedgerows in one place while rewarding additional land expansion elsewhere could undermine the first intervention. Conversely, reducing income support that does not change with current production would not immediately weaken a reward for expanding farmland. The link between the original payment condition and the decision comes first.

Abolition is only one option. Support could remain with the same recipients while losing its connection to input volume, or eligibility could shift toward work that protects soil and waterways. The appropriate choice depends on the original programme’s roles in income security and food supply. Negotiations become more concrete when they separate the purpose worth retaining from the payment conditions that can change, instead of stopping at a general argument for or against support.

3. Separate income, additional production and conservation work

A farmer considering an additional harvest from a field can compare the extra revenue with the extra cost. Output-linked support or an input discount changes one side of that comparison directly. A transfer paid at the same amount regardless of current production changes total income without changing the reward for the additional harvest in the same way. This helps avoid treating every form of support as an identical mechanism for selling crops cheaply.

Fixed support still matters for business decisions. A farmer facing restricted borrowing may use the cash to buy seeds and materials in advance. It can also keep a loss-making business operating. Here, support reaches production through the ability to finance necessary expenditure, rather than through the price of one additional unit of fertilizer. Combining the profitability of additional production and the ability to remain in business would conceal that route.

Conservation payments introduce a further choice. Maintaining a field edge or avoiding work during a particular season requires comparing the payment with the work involved and the income forgone. A higher crop price can increase the opportunity cost of leaving land out of production—the value of the alternative use that is given up. Participation can therefore become more or less attractive even with an unchanged payment rate. Contracts must be read alongside market prices.

4. UK figures illustrate a change in the payment mix

When two series move in opposite directions, it is tempting to assume that support received on unchanged terms has simply moved into environmental programmes. Different recipients, land and contract durations break that one-for-one relationship. A farmer losing an earlier payment may not be the farmer able to undertake the newly funded work. A national aggregate is consequently a poor basis for allocating an individual business’s expected receipts proportionately.

The chart is an entry point to understanding why a reform that reduces some payments and increases others cannot be described solely as budget cutting. Establishing its effects on income or nature requires farm- and land-level comparisons. The figures cover the United Kingdom, whereas the programme conditions discussed next concern England. Separate regional arrangements should not be combined into a single reform; the aggregate movement and the mechanism affecting behaviour need to be connected carefully.

5. What support detached from current production reveals

England’s delinked payments depend on historical receipts, not current farm area, land use or continued farming. SFI26 pays for specified actions, with a 25% area limit for certain action groups. ^[4–5]

It would be wrong to calculate a proportional decline in fertilizer use or planted area from a reduction in such support. When income support is detached from current activity, the profitability of additional production may remain unchanged after a cut. A shortage of annual cash could nevertheless delay equipment replacement or affect a decision to transfer the business. These are different channels, and their relative strength cannot be assumed in advance.

Comparing programmes starts with what makes receipts rise or fall. A programme without an environmental name may have little direct incentive for extra production; a conservation programme may be difficult to join if its conditions do not fit a farm. Before drawing conclusions from a label, compare the choices recipients can change with the conditions under which payment continues.

6. Input support reaches the economics of the next unit

For contrast, consider a hypothetical input subsidy that reduces the cost of buying more material. Scaling it back raises the cost borne by the farmer when deciding whether to use another unit. The response might be to reduce use on less responsive plots and concentrate it where returns are larger. Changing location or application methods can matter as much as an overall reduction.

If lower input use leaves the harvest unchanged, there is room to reduce pressure while preserving output. On land already short of necessary inputs, a reduction in support might instead sharply reduce the harvest. Equipment, knowledge and soil conditions change the response to the same price movement. A uniform national input-reduction target would struggle to distinguish eliminating excess use from undermining productive conditions.

Suppliers also have opportunities to change the work they sell. A business built around volume might move toward diagnosis and better application methods, potentially combining continued customer relationships with lower farm costs. That transition still requires someone to pay for advice. A single decline in purchases cannot establish either an industry-wide loss or a successful technological transition.

7. Transition cash shortages can delay better practices

The first expense a farmer can cut may differ from the expense they would like to reduce over the longer term. Meeting this season’s bills might mean postponing equipment that could lower next season’s input use. Protecting immediate cash can delay savings over several years. To avoid this reversal, policymakers need to examine the sequence of investment, not only annual income, when asking whether farmers can choose the desired practices after a support reduction.

Bridge lending is not an automatic solution. Borrowing for equipment with uncertain future returns introduces another risk. Long-term contracts with processors, shared machinery and staged installation offer different ways to change the initial burden and repayment horizon. Before reaching the input level that a programme designer considers desirable, the farmer must get past the next payment date.

This does not justify retaining every payment to existing farms. Protecting historical recipients alone might prolong difficulties for newcomers trying to obtain land or equipment. Transitional assistance needs to specify whose losses it will temporarily soften and which activities it will no longer support indefinitely. Delaying a reduction and paying for the move to better practices leave different businesses behind when assistance ends.

For cash needed before an investment pays back, see the guide to profit, cash and the three statements.

8. The income forgone by conserving land can change

The relevant alternative to conservation is not simply last year’s revenue from a field. It includes what could be grown there in future, which costs disappear when work stops and whether machinery or labour can be used elsewhere. An unproductive field edge and a well-serviced plot can involve very different forgone profits despite having the same area. Participation conditions vary for reasons beyond differences in farmers’ enthusiasm.

A uniform conservation payment tends to attract land with lower forgone income first. That may secure a large area cheaply without selecting the locations needed to connect habitats. Paying more for environmentally important locations could produce a smaller headline area for the same budget. Maximizing enrolled hectares and restoring ecological functions need not lead to the same choice of land.

Higher food prices can also change the burden of maintaining an unchanged conservation activity. A fixed contract makes the public budget easier to forecast but leaves the farmer exposed to the difference between expected and realized opportunity costs. Annual price linkage may support participation while making expenditure less predictable. Evaluation should examine who bears market risk, alongside the participation rate.

To connect land use with supply, read the guide to grain acreage, yield and inventories.

9. The same area can connect a landscape or leave it fragmented

When conservation cannot be completed within one farm, a neighbour’s land use changes the value of a farmer’s work. Protecting a route used by mobile species may call for a different arrangement than enrolling isolated plots. Figure 4 illustrates the difference between adding disconnected areas and adding a connecting plot. It is a conceptual diagram, not a measured map or a model of effects on a particular species.

This creates a sequencing problem. Starting alone may fail to deliver the expected function if neighbouring participation remains uncertain. Waiting for everyone could prevent the first action from beginning. Joint enrolment by neighbouring farms or an additional reward when connections are established are possible ways to help coordination. Both need safeguards against unfair pressure on landholders who do not participate.

Food buyers face a similar limit when counting certified farms. Even a compliant supplier may depend on surrounding water and land conditions for reliable output. Where cooperation across a landscape is needed, imposing conditions only on one company’s own suppliers leaves gaps. Connecting collective arrangements with individual contracts becomes part of procurement work.

10. Place conservation work on the production calendar

The timing of land-management work can change its meaning. Matching an annual number of tasks without considering growth or breeding seasons may miss the purpose. Farmers also work around planting, harvest, machinery availability and labour. An activity that fits a quiet period creates a different burden from one requiring changes during peak production, even if both take the same number of hours.

Changing seasonal conditions can make fixed calendar dates awkward. Flexibility helps adaptation to local circumstances, but vague payment conditions make planning difficult. Specifying the decisions that can be adjusted locally and the records needed afterwards is more useful than arguing about compliance after an unsuccessful season. Flexibility and accountability need not be opposing goals.

Businesses need to compare the season in which farming practices can change with the dates on which raw materials are needed. A processor demanding fixed delivery volumes may restrict a farmer’s ability to delay work for conservation. Alternative sourcing, inventories and agreed quality tolerances can potentially create room. Seasonal analysis puts nature’s calendar and commercial delivery dates on the same timeline.

For the link between timing and markets, explore weather and production-calendar seasonality.

11. Land contracts and recovery can run on different clocks

A farm tenant may not control land for as long as conservation work needs to continue. A short lease can make it difficult for the current farmer to bear initial costs when later benefits are unlikely to be captured. The value accruing to the owner and the value recoverable by the person doing the work may differ. Eligibility assigned only to owners or only to tenants does not automatically secure the cooperation required for delivery.

Longer contracts can help, but they also constrain responses to future crop prices and alternative uses of land. Participation depends on whether obligations can be transferred when circumstances change, survive a sale or adapt when weather makes work impractical. Those seeking durable conservation need not prefer contracts that prohibit every change. Workable adjustment terms may sometimes reduce later withdrawal.

Land investors and lenders need to assess more than the income a conservation contract adds to an asset. Remaining obligations, future restrictions and management expenses belong on the same timeline. If payments end before maintenance costs do, the apparent yield overstates financial room. Environmental investment still requires separate attention to the duration of income and the duration of commitments attached to the land.

12. Paying for practices that would have continued anyway

If increased conservation payments cover only work farmers were already doing, the additional change may be small. Yet paying for established practices is not automatically wasteful. Where worsening commercial conditions would otherwise bring an activity to an end, a payment can preserve it. Asking whether something began recently is different from asking what would have been lost without support.

Rewarding only new participation can disadvantage long-standing conservation or create an incentive to stop work before the next funding round. Design needs to accommodate people beginning desirable practices and people maintaining them. Land conditions and management histories can help recognize earlier effort while encouraging further change. Collecting more paperwork alone, however, does not establish how easy it is to sustain the work.

The evaluation comparison must match this distinction. A participating farm’s change from the previous year mixes weather and prices with policy effects. Comparing apparently similar non-participants can still leave differences in motivation or financing. Examining programme timing, participation timing and land characteristics together helps identify what was added. Where a clean comparison is difficult, the reasons effects might be understated and overstated should both be considered.

13. Moving production abroad can also move environmental pressure

If some domestic farmland moves into conservation while demand stays unchanged, the missing output has to be accommodated somewhere. Inventories can fall, consumption or processing can change, imports can rise, or other land can produce more. Prices matter, but so do transport, quality, seasonality and contracts. An assessment confined to the conservation area misses these adjustments outside it.

Higher imports do not automatically imply nature loss in another country. Improving efficiency on existing land, selling inventories and opening new land have different consequences. Local environmental conditions and management also matter. Imports should prompt a question about the methods and locations producing the additional supply, rather than serve as automatic evidence that domestic conservation has failed.

This provides a reason for international cooperation. If purchasing requirements and producer-support reform remain separate, orders could move from countries reducing pressure toward less restrictive locations. Wider common conditions can help, but identical paperwork for every producer risks excluding smaller suppliers. Aligning environmental expectations is different from forcing diverse local circumstances into one administrative format.

To examine where a shortfall is accommodated, read commodity supply, use and inventory balances.

14. Taking the food-security objection seriously

The objection that support reform can destabilize food supply deserves serious consideration. If farms with little financial room exit abruptly and imports cannot expand readily, consumers and processors can bear costs alongside farmers. Reliable access to food has social value, so conservation benefits alone cannot settle the question. The issue is which payment conditions best protect that value.

A programme that rewards every increment of output may help supply in normal times without being the best way to maintain productive capacity where it will be needed. Raising short-term harvests while degrading soil or water could weaken future supply. Conversely, abruptly changing production conditions in the name of conservation without alternative technology or markets could destroy business capacity before recovery occurs. Both time lags need comparison.

Transition speed is not a simple ranking of policy ambition. Reform can begin with inputs that are easier to adjust, prioritize particularly damaging locations or phase burdens as alternative supply and technology develop. Whether the objection warrants stopping reform or redesigning it depends on the vulnerable part of supply. Treating farmers and consumers as one undifferentiated side conceals their different costs and makes agreement harder.

15. Inventories and contracts stand between reform and food prices

A straight line from a reform announcement to crop prices is difficult to draw. A change in input costs cannot immediately alter a crop that has already been planted. If shipments decline, usable stocks or harvests elsewhere may accommodate buyers. Conversely, a small volume change can affect procurement prices when few suppliers meet a particular quality or delivery date. Total global farmland is too broad a unit for analysing these effects.

A farmer selling under a fixed-price contract may not immediately receive more cash when market prices rise. Buyers also cannot necessarily reset input purchases and product sales on the same day. Farms, collectors, processors and retailers absorb price movements in different sequences. Following the costs of reform means examining which contract can be revised at which stage and date.

Investors explaining short-term movements must distinguish policy expectations from actual supply adjustment. A price increase anticipating future scarcity does not establish a current harvest loss. Stable prices may conversely conceal adjustment through declining inventories. Comparing prices, contracts, usable stocks and production plans for the same crop and period provides a stronger basis for analysing profitability.

16. Buyer requirements can shape conservation participation

Food companies asking for conservation can also examine their purchasing terms. Rejecting every crop outside a narrow specification may encourage extra input use to protect contracted deliveries. Severe shortage penalties can similarly reward precautionary overproduction. Praising conservation while allowing no corresponding flexibility in supply contracts sends conflicting demands to the farm.

This is not an argument for relaxing food safety or essential quality requirements. Buyers can separate those requirements from customary appearance and volume terms to identify room for adjustment. Pooling supply, allowing delivery windows or developing alternative outlets can reduce the cost of an unsuccessful harvest. The test is whether changing terms actually expands workable options.

Longer purchasing agreements can give farmers more time to recover the cost of changed practices. Dependence on one buyer can also weaken their position in the next price negotiation. Environmental cooperation that ties trading partners together needs provisions for repricing and transferring commitments. Durable cooperation requires attention both to continuity of supply and to the farmer’s ability to choose another customer.

17. Can smaller farms participate?

The same conservation requirement can impose a different administrative burden on a farm with dedicated staff and a family doing every task themselves. Reading guidance, dividing fields for records and applying for support involve fixed work whose burden per unit of land can be larger for small farms. Looking only at payment rates misses obstacles arising before conservation work begins.

Shared advice and tools available to several farms can spread that burden. An organization handling applications could also create unsuitable commitments if it effectively takes over the farmer’s choices. Preparing records and deciding how to use land are distinct responsibilities. Farmers need a comprehensible account of conditions and rewards. The aim is more workable commitments, not just more applications.

Employment effects also resist a simple increase-or-decrease description. Lower input sales might accompany new demand for soil assessment, shared land management and contracted conservation work. Skills, travel distances and seasonal workloads mean old jobs do not automatically become new ones. Whether local businesses can meet the new demand affects transition costs.

18. SG Group View: follow the change in the decision

SG Group favours examining the recipient, the payment condition and the additional decision together. Begin by identifying income support, a reward for extra inputs or output, or payment for conservation work. Then list the choices a farmer can change when that condition changes. Finally, follow where production and land use move. This sequence limits the leap from a spending label to an assumed result.

One easily overstated expectation is that more spending on nature automatically changes land management. Payments covering unchanged practices, poorly located activities or changes blocked by buyer contracts can weaken the link with additional action. A less visible source of change is redesign outside explicit environmental expenditure: detaching a payment from production can alter the reward for additional activity.

This interpretation would weaken if evidence repeatedly showed similar changes in production and land use regardless of payment conditions. Technology, buyer requirements, weather or farmers’ values might then be the stronger constraints. Conditions are an important explanatory factor, not the only cause of behaviour. The framework should be used as a hypothesis connecting design with observed local choices.

19. Three paths call for different business responses

In a coordinated transition, payment conditions change alongside workable technology and marketing options. Prioritizing land where lower input use can preserve output, while connecting suitable conservation locations, could reduce pressure without imposing the same burden on food supply. Businesses would have reasons to cooperate with adaptable suppliers instead of assuming a uniform increase in prices.

In an income adjustment that comes first, receipts decline while incentives for extra production and buyers’ requirements remain unchanged. Farms may economize and postpone improvements. Unchanged near-term shipments would not establish a smooth transition: later changes in equipment renewal, farm transfers or borrowing terms could affect supply.

In a transition led by relocation, conservation grows in the target area while production moves elsewhere to meet demand. Using existing capacity at the destination differs from opening new land. Buyers need to examine how suppliers meet additional orders, not only how much their own business purchases. These paths can occur simultaneously in different places, so one national average should not be forced to describe them all.

20. What remains unknown beyond the payment

The major gap between a global assessment and an individual farm is knowing which payment conditions changed, by how much, and where actual choices responded. Inclusion in a national target still leaves work before recipients face comprehensible conditions. Separating legislation, budgets, enrolment, contracts, activities and land conditions makes progress a concrete question.

Ecosystem change also resists compression into one short-period measure. Enrolled area means different things if a programme selected already healthy land or prevented deterioration at vulnerable sites. Recovery of one species alongside decline in another can make an aggregate ambiguous. Observation needs to match the function or species a programme seeks to protect, at an appropriate place and time.

On the economic side, a fall in farm receipts is not identical to an increase in social cost. Public spending, input costs, additional work, food bills and future land values can all move. They should not be added into a single loss with overlapping components. Choosing whose position and which alternative to compare helps separate income transfers caused by price changes from changes in real work and resources, and clarifies ways to soften burdens.

21. The next evidence should connect conditions with places

As discussion of global objectives proceeds, announced policies should be matched with the conditions changing in individual programmes. A newly named fund alone does not reveal who gains a new choice. Identifying the basis for payment, location and timing of changes would make implications more concrete for farms and their trading partners.

Useful business evidence connects planting plans, input use, conservation contracts and farm transfers within the affected area. A decline in farm income needs to be separated into support, selling prices, harvests and costs. Increased conservation participation calls for attention to location and continuity. Reading becomes more focused when each document is linked to the part of the hypothesis it could change.

Collecting attractive success stories alone cannot provide a serious challenge to an interpretation. Compare places where changed conditions failed to change work, where greater participation did not connect necessary habitats, and where modest payments prompted substantial changes. These comparisons can reveal whether price response, spatial coordination or contract duration was binding. Evidence linking conditions with choices matters more for the next judgment than an additional count of targets.

22. Connect conservation with choices farmers can make

Delivering reform requires translating conservation into choices a business can understand and make. Is the aim to change the reward for extra production, support income during transition or sustain land-management work? Each requires different conditions. Combining every purpose in one payment obscures what the programme is meant to preserve and what it should change.

For farmers, the focus is the options left after a payment disappears and the income retained through a new activity. Food companies need contracts that accommodate both raw-material requirements and conservation work. Investors reading policy can ask where planting, input demand or land use changes first. Connecting those questions within the same geography and timeline offers a practical way to bring the CBD assessment into economic decisions.