Workshop 3: What is sustainability in agriculture and can it be achieved? And the concluding round table, against the backdrop of some of the ongoing threads of the conference

Paul Osborn

The Ongoing Threads
What happens when you put two hundred scientists, plant breeders, biologists, on the spot about world poverty? Even better, when they put themselves on the spot? When they claim that their research carries the essence of solutions, in terms of basics like increased proteins or more stable harvests? And when they then, in the same breath, go on to claim that they do not want to understand the political or social complexities of the problems for which they can only provide the technical solution?

Feeding families from fields, after all
The Global Agriculture 2020 conference, organised by the John Innes Centre in Norwich from 18 to 20 April 2001, was a rare occasion where such questions could be asked, some answers given, others surmised. Perhaps not with the same verbal passion, and surely not so explicit. The straight talking tended to come mainly from the overseas delegates who, through their self-selection in really wanting to come to Norwich in a chilly spring week and mobilising sponsors to pay their way, were often much more familiar than their hosts with the 24/7/365 realities of feeding families from fields that may fail.

It was towards the end of the conference that the divergences, and horrible word that it is, the commonalities, became clear, in a series of workshops and a concluding roundtable. Over three days and evenings, several hundred bioscientists and agriculture and development professionals – including farmers – from the UK, and about twenty other countries from all the continents from Colombia to China, had debated, informed, presented research projects, and exchanged ideas, experiences and (mis)understandings. Most came from the UK scientific community, with the largest number from the host institution on the Norwich Science Park adjoining the University of East Anglia. For the representatives of some of the foreign organisations present, who can count their professional staff on their hands, the size and scope of the host organisation, with some seven hundred was mind-boggling; never in a decade of benign donor grants could they ever hope to emulate such quality or quantities.

Comfortable private-public relationships
Scientists came from the public and private sector alike, and from international and transnational bodies and enterprises. They were joined by scientists from some developing country research institutions, which are mainly public since indigenous private research bodies have barely got off the ground in most developing countries. There seemed to be little problem in the co-existence of the public and private bodies. The debate was not about fundamental issues but about the rules of engagement, about the (often surprising) extent to which private companies and corporations were actually willing to open up to effective partnership with the public sector, and about when they preferred to keep their knowledge to a more restricted circle. It is clear, there are unwritten rules and, increasingly, written rules to regulate these relationships. There, at that level of cooperation between researchers, there was little controversy or misunderstanding.

Getting to know you, grrrr, relationships
Where there was constant, gnawing unease was in the relationship between, on the one hand, the establishment of the scientific communities in its various personifications, and that amorphous ‘space’ so fashionably known as ‘civil society’. The latter is sprinkled with so many different organisations, whose attitudes to science often appear to be sadly under-informed. From the perspective of many scientists, their claims about ‘genetic manipulation’ are often harsh and off-the-point, and they are often delivered with great conviction but little evidence of representing a tangibly significant constituency.

As a result, most encounters which set out to have a representation of many viewpoints on an issue such as “Global agriculture 2020: which way forward” are hampered by the undefined, perhaps indefinable, nature of civil society. The issue here is about representativity: a corporate spokesperson can rightly claim to represent a corporation and its shareholders; a governmental spokesperson, or one from the opposition, has her or his place defined usually by democratic processes. A scientist in the public or private sector can derive much legitimacy from the representativity of the relevant body. But how much legitimacy can we ascribe to a civil society organisation?

Workshop 3: “What is sustainability in agriculture?”
In a conference such as the Norwich encounters, what is the relative importance to be given to each of the actors and their opinions and inputs? This was one of the underlying questions of the entire conference – particularly in the workshop dealing with sustainability - and it remained one of the unanswered ones.

Not that everything was left open-ended. Some things were well shared in Norwich: the goal, for example. As defined by a brave host organisation, which deliberately sought to encourage a richly diverse content from which both it and the broader community could learn and benefit, it was “to evaluate current and projected demands on global agriculture, and to identify opportunities and priorities in biosciences research strategy for maximising agriculture’s contribution to global food security, industry and economic development”.

The organisers did well to leave out the word ‘sustainable’ from the stated objectives since the term has been much eroded by overuse. For a process affecting global concerns, such as ‘projected demands on agriculture’, it is obvious that sustainability is a criterion. It is also better often left unsaid because of the diverse, diverging opinions associated with it.

Yet the organisers did manage to include the term ‘sustainable’ in a workshop theme: Workshop 3, getting squashed up against the impending close of three days intense conferencing, had to deal with the question: “What is sustainability in agriculture, and can it be achieved?” It all depends on the starting point, and diverse they were on the workshop’s panel.

Earning agriculture
For the representative of an eastern African national agricultural research organisation, the single option is simple: agriculture has to become ‘earning agriculture’. In the African context, where most farming is small-scale farming the immediate issues are to raise productivity, to improve competitiveness and to use farming to generate income; such is the basis for a sustainable agricultural system. A panel member with her feet firmly on British ground starts with the same type of generalised good will: sustainability has to be based on basic needs – except those needs are somewhat different 6,000 km north of the equator. Agriculture is seen not in terms of more food on plates today, but as an actor in the rural environment, with impacts on wildlife and vegetation. “Agriculture is the environment” she concludes. A shame that these two speakers did not launch into a dialogue about the notion, practised for thousands of years but rarely verbalised, that the farmer is a steward of the land, tending it for future generation’s needs.

Needs differ, clearly. In the UK and other industrialised countries, so it would seem from the panel, the need is for a managed and pleasant environment which contributes to the citizen’s quality of life – agriculture can help here in the management issue, with farmers becoming paid rural wardens, and, often, by reducing its over-intensive footprint and decreasing production. In any case, it was actively asserted and said between the lines, the industrial farming systems are not providing us with the exotic, varied and cheap diets we all aspire to, so we shall import them. An unwise strategy, it was implied, because while we should not deplete resources (including the energy for transporting our exotica from afar?) we should be at pains to maintain our “production potential”, for a rainy day as it were.
 

Maintain production potential
Elsewhere, in parts of the world without the relative luxury of deciding to farm or not, the issue was more about increasing both productivity and production. It has to be recognised that there is not one single farming system; indeed, earlier on in the conference, one participant had suggested that the dual paths of food production and of agriculture may be diverging. There would thus be a need for diverse systems that are adapted to local conditions and needs. Some of the discussion on this point was at pains about being ‘global’ and avoiding taking isolated, unilateral decisions – no matter what was decided at local level, care should be taken not to impinge on the resources available to communities elsewhere. The essence, against a backdrop of increasingly stressed resources, was to maintain ‘production potential’.

So, what sort, what sorts, of agriculture? A general explicit agreement emerged on the need for a variety of methods; for providing farmers with exit strategies from dead-end over-intensive methods; for remembering that, despite their greenhouse gas emissions and being ‘no-no’ in vegetarian terms of healthy diets, animals represent wealth and security for many rural people and will therefore remain as a key part of any agricultural equation; for accepting the strong need for fertilisers, albeit more benign and efficient; for focussing on increased yields rather simply increasing production on more land and, Africa speaking again, for heightening the involvement of farmers in agricultural strategies.

Less explicit, but equally unchallenged, was the alternative route proposed in moving on from the somewhat artificial and forced debate about ‘GM versus organic’, in avoiding the route towards the third generation of genetic modification and instead moving onwards to the development and application of genomics. Another shame here, a shame that this issue did not emerge earlier in the three days: it has the feel of a paradigm shift in how we deal with the imperative that the workshop never mentioned: more food, otherwise distributed, for the two billion more people expected on the planet by 2020.

Concluding round table
That imperative - will there be enough food? – was the upfront question for the panel of the concluding round table. The prospect of (fuel) restrictions on transport, which had been simmering in earlier round tables, raised its head and lent an added urgency to insisting that food security should be based on strengthening local food production, in often increasingly hostile environments. The prospect of water stress and drought, and the associated issues of salinity and depletion of aquifers, gave a renewed focus on the need for development of more drought-resistant crops, and for switching, for example, rice from paddy to dryland cultivation. Given, the chair suggested, that social scientists and politicians are not too gifted at finding solutions to such global problems, we are now at a stage where scientists are being driven to offer solutions.

Ample challenge here for the biosciences community to contribute to food security through enhancing food production. Another challenge was named, in terms of non-food agriculture which could have a significant impact on income-generation, in particular in pharmaceutical crops. Yet another challenge, in response to the chair’s presentation of biodiversity being an unnecessary luxury, where he dismissed it in the same breath as the mysticism and religion which pervades some farming systems, was to maintain biodiversity. “The biosphere is home not only to humans” retorted an irritated bioscientist. Clear enough, and backed up by several people’s calls for more, clearer, better communication.

Time was rushing by, and the time came for the panel’s shopping list: more training for developing country scientists, more sensitive information systems and institution building, and more respect for the cultural processes of local communities when developing technologies. Consensuality had regained the upper hand in the dynamics of the panel’s and the public’s interventions. The scene was set, just in time, for the organising chairman, Chris Lamb, Director of the John Innes Centre, to let everyone feel that we were all, as it were, in a train that was firmly on the tracks, and even if we faced various ways in our seats and saw differences out of the windows, we were heading in the same direction.

What had we all learned (or at least been reminded of)? Returning to what is seemingly the leitmotif of the zeal that drives the Centre – “we need to grow a lot of food” – Chris Lamb set one of the most succinct yet inclusive agendas to emerge from recent encounters such as the Norwich conference: industrialised agriculture is not the only answer; the need for global food security demands that we should not tolerate the complacency which seems to pervade the agricultural systems of the US and UK; we have to raise productivity – which bioscientists can, must, help the world to achieve, and we have to deal with the issues of food (mal-)distribution – which it is unfair to expect bioscientists to work on. That said, we have to find ways to achieve hi-yield low-input sustainable agriculture, and develop new varieties. The clearly needed, and highly viable, new forms of partnerships between different styles of organisations will have to find ways to ensure the open and rapid availability of platforms for technologies, genomics research and research and development.

He did not say as much, but there is, you could just feel it emanate from his broad shoulders, a job to be done, one heck of a job, and we are all a bit better equipped to do it than we were way back last Wednesday morning.