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This storytelling series features six case studies of fisher communities organizing for justice and food sovereignty across land and water. These stories surface strategies of resistance, resilience, and survival in the face of systemic injustice and extractive economies. We begin with two stories from Uganda and South Africa.
The True Cost Accounting: Implementation Guidance and Inventory provides a practical, step-by-step framework for evaluating the full environmental, social, health, and economic impacts of food systems. Backed by a robust inventory of tools and case studies, it empowers decision-makers—from policymakers to farmers—to transform food systems by making hidden costs and benefits visible.
True Cost Accounting
|True Cost Accounting is a systemic approach to measure and value the positive and negative environmental, social, health and economic costs and benefits. It can inform policymaking as well as business and investment decisions. The TEEBAgriFood Evaluation Framework: Overarching Implementation Guidance is a step-by-step guide to assess how food systems impact people, society, the environment, and natural resources. It enables users to identify a range of actions that can transform how food systems operate and, simultaneously, helps to create a practical roadmap for action on food systems sustainability.
Changing the tools used to assess food systems is an immediate way to take action that promotes human, animal, and planetary health. Simplistic economic productivity metrics like ‘yield-per-hectare’ mean that negative externalities — habitat destruction, soil erosion, water contamination, displacement of Indigenous Peoples, diabetes, and more — go unaccounted for in the final price of food, in policy documents, and on balance sheets (but the price is still paid). This also means that positive impacts — carbon sequestration, insect pollination, resilience to natural disasters, and vibrant communities — are hidden and can’t be enhanced.
I am often asked by people interested in true cost accounting: ‘where do I start?’ I now have the answer. Authored by some of the great thought-leaders in food and agricultural systems, these new materials are a user-friendly and accessible resource for the community.
Dr. Salman Hussain, Coordinator, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, United Nations Environment Program
The TEEBAgriFood Framework (“The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity”) is already being used by policymakers, investors, and farmers around the world to comprehensively evaluate their work, fill in the gaps, and make better decisions about the future. For example, a CONABIO valuation of maize production systems found that the lack of genetic diversity in corn grown in the USA and Canada — which makes them more vulnerable to pests and disease — resulted in yield losses of $27,403,616,604 between 2012-2015. Genetically diverse crop species are more resistant and not subject to the same type of losses.
Discover a collection of methodologies, case studies, and valuation approaches for true cost accounting efforts.
