Before starting with its lecture, the official explained that the OECD’s role: “we intend to provide advisory services to governments to examine their agricultural potential in a global context, provide them with a largest picture. Anyway, we don’t finance or give money to countries.”
Then Ash stated that the global agriculture and food sector is going to continue its growth, “we expect a growing demand, strong prices, investment and trade growth”, and remarked that the sector is going to do all these “with less water, no more land available, with the climate-change problem upon us, and a constantly increasing population.” Thus, the OECD Trade and Agriculture Director explained that “we want to improve productivity growth but without having to use more land, water or any other natural resources, but by promoting a higher investment in technology, education and training so that farmers and nations can reduce their yield gaps.
To end, Mr. Ash addressed what he considers the constraints of subsidy policies as he explained that "the levels of agricultural support in some countries are close to 50 percent of a dollar. Nevertheless, we have noticed that the most productive countries in terms of agriculture, are the ones that get the lesser support. In OECD countries policies are less invasive than in the rest of the world as we reduced the policy-induced gross farm receipts from 37% to 16% of a dollar. High levels of subsidies to agriculture is a practice we should terminate as in many cases it leads to a bad use or waste of natural resources. Plus, those are practices in which the governments dictate farmers what to farm instead of giving them freedom to farm.
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