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Fruit lo gística
A long path towards Sustainable agriculture Francisco García Verde. Head of Sustainable Agriculture at Syngenta. Fruits and vegetables pioneered the implementation of the concept of sustainability as defined by the Commission. New technologies, national and European regulations, and quality protocols first included wellbeing and safety, gradually introducing environmental aspects. The results are high productivity adapted to the needs of European consumers, which enabled to maintain producers’ profitability with maximum safety for users, consumers, and the environment. Keeping balanced a sector of economy is complex, moreover in such a scenario as the present one, with market globalisation and growing demand of foodstuff worldwide resulting in new challenges for the sector. Not forgetting the risks of prompting unbalances in sustainability. And there lie the challenges to face in the forthcoming years: 1. Improving safety of food supply for a constantly growing population. The best predictions point that the Earth’s number of inhabitants will grow by one third in 40 years’ time. 2. Maintaining producers’ earnings. This is the key for rural development. Growers’ earnings have been falling since 2003, being now at the same levels they were in the nineties. 3. Preserving the environment, where agriculture takes place. In Spain, to grow the same amount of produce, less and less water and energy are consumed, smaller soil losses occur, and smaller volumes of gases are dumped into the atmosphere. These challenges are affected by the opening of new markets and safety of supply, which prompt situations that may directly affect the foundations of sustainability. It may seem boring, but producing more without causing collateral damage depends again on how much we wanted to invest in research and development of new technologies. Research enables currently, and I would say it has been doing it for some time now, to get closer to any of the thousands of existing definitions of sustainability. From the new varieties that optimise the use of natural resources (energy, water, soil), inputs optimisation, improvements of efficiency of production processes, solutions to crop stress, etc. These are just a few examples but, actually, the classic European definition I mentioned before doesn’t talk about sustainability but sustainable development.
Fruit logística ’14
In recent years, a word is being used constantly, for everything: sustainability, an adjective that often defines with ambiguity some activities or situations. In an economic situation like the present one, headlines in all kind of media feature this word. The main consequence of it is a widespread confusion regarding its meaning and the loss of the concept itself. If focus on a sector like agriculture, this confusion turns into a major problem: the European Union decided, nothing less than 13 years ago, to impregnate its agricultural policies with the principle of sustainability. For that reason, I consider important starting this article by considering what we understand as sustainability. According to the classic definition, ‘sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ This definition was used by the EU in the European Strategy for Sustainable Development, adopted in 2001. Better or worse, this definition is clear and concise and nowadays we can say it outlines a long term strategy. Following that concept, the Union has tried to build sustainable development policies from an environmental, economic, and social viewpoint, always aiming at the laudable goal of sustainably improving wellbeing and life conditions of present and future generations. And so has been for every Community Agricultural Policy, which has been better than their predecessors. It is therefore true that understanding such a wide concept and finding an appropriate definition is complex. But it is also true that our sector of agriculture has a course set in Europe by a strategic policy of proven success. With its advantages and disadvantages, European agriculture is now seen in the rest of the world as the paradigm of sustainability. The sector of agriculture has walked a long path, firstly earning the same respect for this economic activity like for any other, and later on introducing social and environmental aspects. The efforts made to achieve that turned European agriculture into maybe the most balanced worldwide.