Time to ‘Rethink’ Agricultural Sustainability
Everybody talks about ‘sustainability’ these days. But what does sustainability actually mean?
The new Labour government claims it’s on a mission for change. But its commitment to sustainable and nature-friendly farming has been the subject of fierce debate. A much clearer commitment to continued economic growth and the creation of new markets, which has been a large part of the post-election narrative, suggests business-more-or-less-as-usual thinking at a time when we need more radical thinking and action around sustainability, both in agriculture and the wider environment.
A new report from A Bigger Conversation – Rethinking Sustainability – Life-centric Agriculture in a Techno-centric World – argues that, today, the concept of ‘sustainability’ has become over-focussed on political expediency, corporate interests and market creation (including “green growth”).
The failure to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, alongside the increasing failure of the world to live within planetary boundaries, demonstrates how unsustainable and unfit for purpose this market/business/economy-centric approach to sustainability is.
The report reviews the history of sustainable thinking and the missteps and short-termism that define a technocapitalist approach to sustainability and calls for a radical shift away from this path to a life-centric approach that is, first and foremost, grounded in sustaining life.
Focussing on what the authors conclude are the four key pillars of sustainability – Boundaries and limits, A duty of care, Sufficiency and Equity and democracy – the recommendations in the report align with decades of sustainability thinking and provides a framework for operating within clear ecological boundaries, addressing social and democratic aspects of sustainability, challenging existing power structures and economic models and promoting diversity in agricultural practices and decision-making.
As a case study exercise, the report also considers gene editing against its life-centric perspective and framework for sustainability and finds evidence for the technology’s often audacious sustainability claims to be lacking. The authors judge gene editing to be a limited and incremental intervention, rather than a whole-system approach to agriculture, and one that doesn’t align with a life-centric, whole-system approach to sustainability.
Pat Thomas, director of A Bigger Conversation, notes: “Historical warnings about how unchecked economic growth is fundamentally at odds with sustainability have been ignored for decades in favour of a technocapitalist approach that values markets over ecosystems. There is an urgent need to rethink our approach and to prioritise systemic changes that sustain life and not just markets.”
- Read the news article
- Download the full report Rethinking Sustainability – Life-centric Agriculture in a Techno-centric World
- Download the Executive Summary of Rethinking Sustainability – Life-centric Agriculture in a Techno-centric World
