With the emphasis so often on metrics, data analysis and attaining new standards, the bigger picture of why genuine sustainability matters can be somewhat lost.
In September, atmospheric carbon dioxide passed the average monthly threshold of 400 parts per million for the first time, while this year global temperatures increased to a level not seen for 115,000 years. It should be evident by now that climate change is the greatest challenge facing our world, and our world’s agricultural systems.
Sustainability certification standards such as GlobalGAP offer benchmarks and targets, but they are not enough. How can growers and farmers be encouraged to prioritise reducing their carbon emissions, when their primary concern is always the price and market for their product?
A Costa Rican banana grower at the GlobalGAP Summit held last week in Amsterdam, summed up this dilemma: “We are GlobalGAP certified, we meet all the standards. But last week we didn’t sell two containers of bananas,” he said. “Will meeting new standards, such as GRASP [social standards audit], mean retailers buy our produce?”
Selling produce is of course the greatest concern for producers, and so Simon Miller, general manager of Cool Farm Alliance, said reducing carbon emissions must be led by buyers and retailers. “Farmers aren’t directly affected by carbon emissions at the moment. Where we’ve seen success is through partnerships with their customers. Once farmers have done it they see the economic benefit,” he said.
The Cool Farm Tool offers a free online calculator for growers to monitor their carbon footprint, and Miller says food giant PepsiCo was able to reduce carbon emissions in its potato supply chain by 40 per cent, after encouraging uptake among its growers.
Raphael Schilling, project manager for sustainability at Coop Switzerland, said: “How can we as a retailer help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our supply chain? One measure we can do is introduce sustainable sourcing guidelines, for example we can stipulate that glasshouses must be heated using renewable sources, or we can promote agroforestry systems in our cocoa plantations in west Africa.”
One way retailers could make a real difference would be to incentivise sustainability through higher prices – something that sparked debate among speakers. “The big question is how to engage the farmers. The price that retailers pay to farmers should be higher to reward sustainability efforts, and to incentivise,” said Raphael Fink, of Friends of the Earth Austria.
But asking retailers to pay more is arguably like getting blood from a stone, and as Tanja Havemann from Swiss hedge fund Clarmondial put it, it could well be more useful to look at how to reduce capital costs for renewables.
Havemann said Clarmondial investors are actively searching for sustainable schemes to invest in, but they are few and far between. “There is a complete explosion in interest in green and sustainable bonds,” she said. “This is a way of taking sustainability schemes off balance sheets and into new structures, and distribute them to investors.”
Financial institutions might seem a world away from the average farmer in a field, but according to experts such as Havemann, there is a huge pool of money earmarked for investment in sustainable agriculture.
Perhaps a bit closer to home than financial markets is agroforestry, which also offers farmers a way of reducing carbon emissions, according to Patrick Worms, of the World Agroforestry Centre. “When you let trees grow back through agroforestry you are locking carbon up. Agroforestry is the future – it needs less inputs, and will also give you timber and other wood products,” he said, challenging the Summit to “find a way of certifying these extraordinarily diverse systems”.
Duplication of audits, audit fatigue and not least, certification costs, are now common problems for growers across the world, leading one speaker to suggest that retailers should accept a “basket of audits”, rather than a tick box approach stipulating only one or two.
It was perhaps the most logical suggestion of the two-day Summit, and one that would no doubt offer welcome relief to both producers and retailers alike – though it would perhaps be less popular with the fiercely competitive audit and certification providers themselves.
The goal is blindingly clear, and there shouldn’t be paperwork in the way of that.
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