Should eco-advocates engage agri-biz on getting to sustainability?

No, or yes (conditionally), say organic community leaders looking for fundamental, systemic changes in farming, farm policy and the behavior of ag chemical and food corporations.

By Greg Bowman

Everybody is for “sustainability” these days. That should be good news for proponents of organic agriculture, but, weirdly, it’s also the bad news, and the reason for much pitched debate and strategic soul-searching within the organic and food security communities. These are the people who understand how unsustainable our current industrial food system is, and know the depth and breadth of the profound changes needed.

Some leaders doubt whether it’s possible or even worth the effort to talk to the designated speakers for Dole, Syngenta and Unilever—and the smaller global entities of their type—about sustainability. From talking-head discussions to structured negotiations aimed at creating globally binding protocol, sustainability is being deconstructed and dissected so it can be defined by those doing the discussing.

Jeff Moyer, chair of the USDA National Organic Standards Board and farm director at the Rodale Institute, wrestled long and hard with the question in 2008 before deciding to join the formal process being led by the Leonardo Academy to develop a Sustainable Agriculture Practice Standard. This non-profit “Think and Do Tank” is working on behalf of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), a non-profit association representing many sectors, including 125,000 companies and 3.5 million professionals.

Leonardo overcame a formal challenge by the USDA to its status last month in a ruling from the ANSI executive standards council. Leonardo, which has and is working on other sustainability standards, is continuing to move forward with the process to deliver the agricultural standard sometime after 2010, a previous deadline that has been rescinded. The next benchmark is reporting by six task forces to the full standards committee for this effort in May.

Broad sector participation

The sustainable agriculture standards committee set up by Leonardo included members from across the farming and food spectrum: government regulators, commodity groups, corporations, organic companies, distributors, processors and more. Leonardo later expanded the group from its usual maximum of 40 to 58 participants to accommodate the broad scope of interests wishing to be involved, finally including 12 seats in each of the producer, user, and environmentalist categories and 22 in the general interest category. Moyer is participating as an environmentalist. (See sidebar Diversity Reigns for membership lists of the committee and observers.)

To get a grasp of why the process itself may seem overwhelming, check here for 28 pages of Q&A on all aspects of Leonardo’s history, plans, challenges and engagement with various standards groups on this particular initiative. Many questions target the organic-friendly provisions of the original draft standard presented to the Standards Committee at its initial meeting in September 2008.

Reading through the questions, it’s clear that creating a paradigm-shifting standard that will fundamentally change corporate behavior will take some transformative leadership breakthroughs. Lots of things are in flux as businesses contract and the marketplace convulses, and perhaps what could have been a grinding process in gamesmanship could be, well, something much different.

At their first Leonardo standards committee meeting last fall, Moyer reports there was unexpected agreement to disagree with the draft by individuals holding widely divergent perspectives. Finding itself in unknown procedural territory, the freshly formed committee agreed to set aside the draft, designating it as one of several reference documents.

“When the organic advocates and the Farm Bureau found ourselves objecting to some of the same things, for fairly different reasons, I knew we had a different kind of process,” said Moyer.

What’s the need?

The Leonardo Academy said ANSI launched the daunting process because:

“…there is considerable confusion over, and disagreement about, the relationship between “sustainable,” “organic,” “locally grown,” “IPM” and “food miles… This national standardization initiative has been launched to provide a forum for vetting these differences and capturing the collective wisdom of those individuals and organizations that have been leading the way in defining and establishing sustainable practices.”

Ideally, the principal questions for parties seeking greater accountability as they make progress toward a firmly shared goal would be:

• What standard of behavior do we want to accomplish?
• What changes will be required?
• What yardsticks will we use to measure these changes?
• What will cause people to meet the higher standards?

It’s taken the organic community about 20 years to get to the quantifiably better, but unsatisfactory, place we are today with a federally sanctioned, standards-based, marketable label. The National Organic Program is a bottom-line protocol with little regulatory incentive for farmers to improve once they reach compliance. Label-wise, there is no way within the NOP program to show whether a farm is just getting by or vastly going beyond the minimal requirements.

Growers who improve on listed soil health and biodiversity criteria, or who work at improving their performance in areas not even covered by the NOP—such as farmworker equity, climate change mitigation or energy efficiency—need to find other marketing handles to document the embedded values of their products and processes.

Of two minds

Moyer and Mark Lipson, policy director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF), are champions of agriculture that is ecologically sound, socially just, carbon sequestering and economically viable. Yet the two men disagree on the strategic value of entering into a formal process to develop standards used to market sustainability, as do members within the food justice/food security community.

To be clear, Moyer and Lipson share the same ultimate goal of a really, truly, regenerative agriculture embodying the idealized organic system that the current USDA program only aims toward. Their organizations both use research to help existing organic farmers improve their techniques and to develop policies encouraging new farmers to convert to the organic way. And they would agree that the U.S. organic program is the best model going.

They diverge, however, on the best way to promote change toward, and beyond, current organic standards in the rest of agriculture.

The nub of the resistance is the same in the organic and food-security communities: the holistic set of values needed to cherish land, honor natural limits and build truly just community is so alien to corporate management mandates to produce shareholder profit that talking about sustainability is just greenwashing, or, at best, will do too little in relation to the time and effort expended.

Lipson was part of a January Eco-Farm Conference forum on the topic. He later refined his thinking and published his thoughts. Yes, he says, there are good people with good intentions who want to engage industrial ag leaders and the farm groups they rely on. As a strategy to change corporate behavior, however, he feels the effort is fatally flawed. The main points of his “Eight (Sustainable) Objections:”

• “Sustainable agriculture” is meaningful only over time, and cannot be measured or verified at any point in time;
• The term, now that it is claimed by everyone, has been too diluted to foster change;
• Inevitable default is to the “Common Easiest Achievables”;
• The marketplace is not all that effective in incentivizing change on the ground, based on the organic farming experience;
• Compliance costs will be considerable and prone to failure;
• Sustainability is a systemic attribute, and not described by “reductive linear measurements;”
• Carefully negotiated linear measurement criteria will inevitably lag behind evolving understandings of the whole system;
• The opportunity cost in time and resources is too high at a time when other activities are more promising in leveraging more systemic change.

Lipson knows organic politics and economics as well as anybody in the country. He says he is not trying to protect the organic label from competition, and freely admits it has its own deficiencies. One of his tactical objections is important reading:

No. 4 – “The Market” is Not as Powerful as You Might Think

Consumers are fickle, retailers are opportunistic, producers are fragile and they can’t always respond to the indirect proddings of market signals. The lesson we need to realize from the organic saga is how limited the market-place “carrot” really is for changing agriculture on the ground.

Thirty years of massive effort to cobble together a still-incomplete organic certification system, covering only about one-half of one percent of US agricultural lands, (even then with a lot of low-grade organic in arrested transition) should be suggesting that “the market” is actually an insufficient tool for widespread significant change in the food system.

We lack strong research and development, we lack sane regulation of toxic assault, and we lack structural social supports for real stewardship of our resources. Changing those conditions is what we need to concentrate on.

New USDA data updates organic acres with 2007 figures, but the numbers are still small (see sidebar box).

Opting in—for now

Moyer agrees with about everything Lipson says—except on the pivotal choice to work with the reigning titans of agriculture and food processing to define a sustainability standard. Lipson emphasizes that he’s not against dialogue—“I'm willing to (and do) talk with everyone and anyone.”—but he is unwilling to work at sustainability standards that can be used in marketing outside the organic sphere.

Moyer has been interacting with conventional farmers for 30 years, often the first openly organic farmer some farm groups have ever seen up close and personal. His Pennsylvania Dutch penchant for plain talk and practicality serve him well in these “how does organic work” exchanges. He’s also part researcher, however, and has spoken in many countries and testified before many government groups to explain the system-wide workings and benefits of organic farming systems.

The Leonardo process—with the potential to set a standard with global impact—raises the stakes to a new level for a committed organic leader. Moyer’s participation with the initiative is conditional upon an open-ended goal tied to continuous improvement, recognizing that sustainability is a direction—not a destination—given the tenuous nature of our grasp on what kind of agriculture will ultimately be climate neutral or even regenerative in rebuilding what has been lost.

“If they decide to work for a seal, it will be a waste of time,” he says, seeing the limitations of that approach to expand use of the organic farming ideals promoted for more than 60 years by the Rodale Institute and J.I. Rodale’s early efforts.

“What I like is a different concept, one that opens the door as wide as possible to anyone who wants to come into a stream that is heading only one way,” Moyer explains. “That way needs to be intensely focused on a system of farming and food production that includes, but broadens organic standards and requires continuous improvement.”

Seeking a breakthrough

He, too, cites the relatively low number of organic farmers, and feels compelled to try something new to activate and support millions of farmers to embark on soil-building, carbon-sequestering farming.

While he is not in favor of genetic modification, he wants farmers using GM crops and the companies that make them engaged in moving toward sustainability. In this case, that would be a transparent process seeking the best ecological outcome for raising crops.

“If you eliminate GM-crop farmers from even starting on the path toward sustainability, you are eliminating 98 percent of the farmers in America. As a country, we can’t afford to cut people out of being part of the solution.”

For his part in the Leonardo sustainable ag dialogue, he plans to push hard to:

• Give farmers an a la carte menu to choose from to get them started.
• Help farmers to start using entry-level soil-building practices that will give them the soil-quality benefits to make other changes more easily.

Moyer has seen many farmers “make the switch” to a new way of farming. Given the growing consensus of the need to cut soil losses and ag-based pollution, he’s confident that if more conventional farmers start to use cover crops, they will find that more complex crop rotations come more easily. Once they are rotating and using cover crops, cutting back on fertilizer, then herbicides, then pesticides, will become more achievable steps toward sustainability.

“But first they have to get ‘on the road.’” Moyer says. “There needs to be an across-the-board shift in conventional agriculture away from the current combination of volume production with no reward for crop quality and no rewards for toxic reduction, sequestering soil carbon or ecological services.”

Follow the carbon

The goal is a farming spproach that demonstrably functions as a whole natural system. Experience shows that progress toward the goal—even for organic farmers—is usually in steps. Given the Rodale Institute focus on building healthy soil through organic systems, Moyer wants to see any sustainability model factor in what really happens on the ground. This would include robust life-cycle accounting for the net carbon impact of a farm—measuring carbon lost through purchased materials, energy, cropping practices and off-farm sale, balanced by what is sequestered in soil and forests—that could guide ecological progress while impacting many farm decisions.

“I believe in organic agriculture more than about anyone else, but it isn’t the route that most farmers in the U.S. have chosen take. So what other way is there to break things loose?

“Going organic all at once is too big a step for most producers and ranchers. They—we—are risk-averse by nature, avoiding change until something big changes—they see the light or a spouse gets Parkinson’s disease.”

“I say we build a super-highway going one direction, with lots of on-ramps and no fixed end-point,” Moyer said.

“We can’t scope the whole thing out at the start, because we’ll have to build more road once we get to the end and see what sustainability looks like from there.”

Greg Bowman is communications manager of the Rodale Institute.