Guest Editorial: Peter-Erik Ywema
Fostering Diversity And Reconnection In our hemisphere, harvest time is over. The fields are empty. The first autumn storms have touched down. All but a few grapes remain in the garden greenhouse, and my wife Karin is spending her day off work preparing our kitchen garden for a winter cover crop. But what is our hemisphere? You might well be reading this in Brazil, South Africa or New Zealand, where the crops are just coming up and spring is in the air? Let me introduce myself. I am Peter-Erik Ywema and I live in the Netherlands behind the dyke of the Rhine river. I’m married with three kids, two of whom have left home to study, and I have worked my whole career in ‘sustainability’. I’m pleased to say that even after more than 20 years, it’s still a topic which fascinates me. A diamond that reveals a different facet every time you look at it.
I am pleased to be the guest editor of this issue of 2050, an issue dedicated to the multi- facetted topic of food and how best we can rise to the challenges of sustainably feeding an expanding global population. And no, I don’t agree with all views expressed, but I am pleased to see the diversity of views. Diversity being the key word when it comes to sustainable food and agriculture: diversity in crops, in our cooking and in our diets. I disagree for example that monoculture is universally regarded as being ‘good for business’ as Max Horstink suggests in our lead article, ‘The Devil is in the Chickpea’. I personally believe that today’s farmers already know that one of the best ways to increase yields year after year, is to adopt the crop rotation methods. Having said that, the interesting concept of agroecology that Max highlights comes very close to what I would call sustainable farming. Applicable as it is on both large and small scales and for its ability to enhance biodiversity and nutrient cycles while reducing our dependency on fossil inputs.
Diversity being the key word when Before the 1990’s, sustainability was mainly about chemicals and it comes to sustainable food and the need to reduce the waste and pollution of traditional production methods. To do this we studied the agriculture: diversity in crops, in our life cycles of our raw materials, cooking and in our diets. and discovered a decidedly linear Although I’m not so sure I agree that it approach. A linear approach which could result in 10 to 20 fold increases saw valuable resources being in yields, simply because such good results would have been dug from the ground, processed into a smorgasboard of copied long ago. Views and facts are difficult to judge, but disposable forms, and then fed to unwitting consumers. With your food is important enough to do some thinking, as Max no real plan for getting those valuable raw materials back to did. the beginning of the process. To counter this, we began developing process-integrated solutions and are still working our way towards truly sustainable, circular production methods. That experience got me thinking about agriculture and food and eventually led me to one of my most exciting undertakings to date, leading the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform. This platform brings together the world’s main food and drinks companies in a joint effort to promote understanding of the main issues, while at the same time giving their suppliers / farmers the tools they need to be more sustainable. Those companies do this, not out of a sense of corporate social responsibility, but because they know that stable supply chains are vital to the success of their businesses.
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Agriculture and food are different from any other subject because we are so dependant on food, not only in a calorific or nutrient sense, but culturally as well. That sets food apart from smartphones, electric cars and computers. Food is both daily and holy. Food has the ability to create communities by bringing people together at the table. More than anything, food brings daily pleasure and joy. Growing and consuming food connects the world, farmers and consumers in a really unique way. But we, again mostly in my northern hemisphere, take food for granted, eat without attention, become obese from empty eating; whereas others still don’t have a decent meal. Sustainable food is about reconnecting the broken chain, more than anything else.