Agriculture Myth Busting
You read correctly: Agriculture Myth Busting has returned! To match some of the in-office conversations we’ve been having about its increasing generality and meaninglessness, I thought this season should be themed around sustainability. I believe there are aspects of the concept that are unintentionally missed in agricultural discussions, business planning, consumption, and policy. Therefore, my goal with the 2024/2025 AMB series is to trim some of the abstract away from the sustainability skeleton, and hopefully provide you with a better foundation of agricultural sustainability.
Between the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Canada’s own federal initiatives to address these concerns, sustainability has been on the forefront of international discussions. Despite the term’s commonplace in government and business, not enough progress has been made to address holistic sustainability, as best evidenced in the preferred short-term politicization of sustainability and the weakening skills and public knowledge for what is required to improve. Surely, after overcoming apathy, Canada will be sustainable.
It’s easy to confuse sustainability as an achievable future state since, fundamentally, the term refers to our ability to live and produce in the long-term. This differs from the frequently substituted sustainable development, which better reflects how society, the environment, and the economy should continue to be able to produce. Hence the number of SDGs, as our ability to meet the needs of the future is a multi-faceted concept informed by a wide variety of strengths and weaknesses that can be independently altered and feed back to the other. By considering sustainability to be an achievable state, we fall into the trap of believing that eventually, our work will be done. Benson and Craig (2014) caution against this “have it all” mindset that is implicitly tied to sustainability for a preferred trade-off approach, which better considers the limitations of each supply chain player and the environments in which they work.
Table 1. Potential sustainability shortfalls amongst different levels of the agri-food supply chain, and specific examples of how to address those weaknesses
Level | Potential Action | Specific Examples |
|---|---|---|
Industry | Reduce waste; demand forecasting | Label standardization; (diversion) infrastructure creation; production limits; research & development |
Farm | Resource optimization; technology adoption | Precision farming; low-impact farming techniques; labour/skills development |
Retail/ Processing | Reduce (food) waste | Food recovery; 'ugly' food standards; energy efficiency; packaging limitations |
Consumer | Conscious shopping; product use optimization | Meal planning; low-carbon food products; food sharing |
Nonlinearity in Sustainability
I want to challenge you to think of sustainability as a constantly moving target that we can both get closer to and move further away from but will unlikely ever hit. I don’t say this to encourage a pessimistic outlook rather to express the necessitation of systems approaches and the realism that, in a world of billions of people living amongst hundreds of different social norms, legal systems, cultures, market structures, and technological capabilities, the planet is not in a position to collectively improve together. That does not mean inaction, it means recognising there is no single way to approach sustainable development and that our plans must be accommodating of the multitude of players affecting environmental, societal, and economical states.
For the resource-intensive nature of agriculture, it is often recommended a circular economy approach be considered for sustainable development as it encourages end-of-life planning and resource recycling in planning, an indirect advantage of long-term considerations and future instability. A circular economy also considers the never-ending nature of sustainability; standards will change with the state of the world but the necessity to limit waste, promote environmental prosperity, and morally stabilize production will remain. The concept melds well with the agricultural trends promoting regenerative agriculture and bioeconomic innovation, all three of which are required to begin normalizing agricultural sustainability (Figure 1) and already separately employed in Canadian agriculture.
Reconsidering the ‘when’ of sustainability perhaps seems counterintuitive when 75% of Canada’s sustainability targets are set to expire before 2030. Time-sensitivity in this case was not established to create a definitive timeline for when Canada should be sustainable, it was likely done in attempt to force action. As researchers, we may disagree about how and why sustainability timelines are created, even whether they are effective and enforceable policy mechanisms. However, creating actionable opportunities for stakeholders independent of what is comfortable or currently happening or already classified as a ‘sustainable practice’ is vital to improving Canada’s sustainability position. Change is the result of increasing discomfort with the status quo and responding to global uncertainty; adding deadlines to sustainability targets may create the necessary discomfort for change. The increasingly popularity of artificial intelligence in the last few years is a great example of how societal standards, norms, and capabilities are evolving, as well as how new technologies are emerging that could speed up our response to sustainability efforts. Working remotely is another example of an increasingly popular facet of business which, until the COVID-19 pandemic, was not included in sustainability planning.
The Missing Piece
Despite the increasing intensity of global climate events and economic uncertainty, there is a severe “lack of urgency” in Canada. This perhaps works against my challenge to consider sustainability as unbound by time constraints. However, it speaks to Canada’s apathy: the combination of believing it is enough for someone else to improve sustainability on behalf of all of us and the procrastination mindset of eventually I will do my part but it’s not yet mandatory. Businesses who once promoted their sustainability efforts (particularly their environmental initiatives) are now lowering how loud their message is in favour of more traditional market (economic) benefits.
Focusing on one pillar of sustainable development pushes the necessity of geological, biological, socioeconomic, and technology spaces working together and adequately responding to each other further away. Reichstein et al. (2021) argue that by forming rigid development planning informed by the current state of living, nations are at risk of succumbing to future consequences from unpredictable events where securities are not present. Unfortunately, with this kind of planning, it often requires a negative experience before individuals feel necessitated to act.
Sustainability and development planning are vital components for effective environmental, economical, and social management. Combining the impacts of improvements in planning can benefit the ways in which we respond to events outside of our control and Canada can begin using sustainable production as the marketable advantage it should be. However, these plans are often missing a crucial component: resilience. Resilience is our ability to survive and recover and its role in planning is to consider targeted risk uncertainty or, more specifically, the lack of perfection regardless of decision. (Unattainable perfection, in this case, would be perfect sustainability – external production impacts are minimal, nothing leaves production, and production continues forever.) Although there are combinations of policy types and mechanisms that can be used to encourage whole supply chain sustainability, they appear to be underutilised in Canada. Similarly, the absence of stakeholder connectivity and the inability to efficiently communicate actor needs and concerns with other players (especially within the agriculture sector) limits our systems’ access to available support policies.
Concluding Remarks
In order to change the marketplace and our associated social norms, it is said that leadership and capacity must work harmoniously in favour of societal benefit. Unfortunately, it is a reality of all landscapes, especially the sustainability field, that leaders frequently misunderstand the information provided to them by experts, and the field professionals are unable to effectively step up into the kinds of leadership roles that can inform mass change. The broadness of sustainability suggests all of us play a role in improving the resiliency of the food and production systems we live in although with limitations, as our local and individual capital, knowledge, technology, and infrastructure accessibility can become barriers to progress. It is this evolving space of capabilities that makes sustainability a way of life rather than a time-constrained end point; given current standards, we can always be ‘more sustainable’ somewhere.
