Friday, May 9, 2008

What Exactly is Sustainable?

As discussions on sustainable production escalate in the face of a food crisis, sustainable development ends up meaning a whole lot of different things for different people with different agendas.

By: Peter Mann, World Hunger Year

The global food crisis has ignited a new urgency at ongoing UN (CSD) meetings. Food riots, rising prices, and increasing hunger are in the headlines and on the minds of delegates. There is a much greater focus on what is really happening in agriculture today, on the pressures facing small–scale farmers and especially women farmers. Innovative approaches to rural development as well as highly relevant case studies are being presented.  Sustainable or sustainable?

This is encouraging for NGOs, and shows the relevance of their work, but all of us are aware of the warning that if we forget our history, we will be fated to repeat it. With that in mind, NGOs see a contradiction in the way the same words – sustainable development, sustainable agriculture – are being used in these meetings to describe vastly different realities. Sustainability, with its threefold aspects of a productive economy, social equity, and ecological balance, is being used to describe not only regenerative agriculture and agroecology but also industrial and chemical agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is sustainable because it is based on the principles of ecological science: it builds healthy soil and plants and landscapes and is highly productive. Industrial-scale agriculture is an extractive force: it produces lots of food but leaves behind topsoil loss, polluted water, and damaged landscapes. 

Root causes

An example of this forgetting of root causes was heard in the excellent presentation on US agroforestry and its ability to rebuild landscapes through “working trees,” alley cropping, windbreaks, and riparian forest buffers. Yet it seemed that these damaged landscapes just happened in and of themselves: they had no root causes. The reality is that highly intensive agricultural monocropping and the spread of factory farms, create dead zones, polluted water and unhealthy soils. If we avoid these root causes, these examples of renewable agroforestry will be threatened in the future.

Silently starving

The global food crisis is in the headlines because it is threatening lower middle class urban dwellers who have some political power. One speaker suggested that if the crisis continues at some length it could eventually affect 100 million people. Yet I found a reminder from another speaker not to forget “the silent hungry” even more striking, These are the 800 million people who have been silently starving for decades. Meanwhile  three world food summits have come and gone and the goal of ending hunger recedes ever further into the distance. We hear many reasons for the immediate food crisis – climate change, peak oil, agrofuels, rising prices, hoarding, the shift of investors into commodities. What is the root cause of the silent ongoing hunger? Is it the economy of corporate agribusiness which extracts wealth from rural economies, leaving rural communities ever more vulnerable and marginal?  Real sustainable development must also find solutions for this long-term hunger.

Technological fixes

In the plenaries we heard several references to the benefits of a New Green Revolution for Africa, and it seemed to go through without any strong opposition. NGOs, small-scale farmers, and indigenous peoples, however, have not forgotten some of the problems of the first Green Revolution, its ecological and social devastation despite its high productivity. Is the new version not another technological fix from outside, beginning with what Africa lacks rather than the many resources Africa possesses? A fraction of the resources being spent on these new technologies could greatly benefit African agriculture and rural development if it were focused on appropriate technologies and traditional as well as scientific knowledge.

Finally, NGOs ask that governments and UN agencies work not only with business and industry but also with indigenous peoples, trade unions, women, and the many social movements that are fighting for food and energy sovereignty, for water as a common good and not a private commodity, for traditional seeds, and land reform. Only through these kinds of partnerships will we be able to meet future challenges.

Peter Mann is co-director of WHY’s Global Movements program.