Abstract
As the preceding chapters should make clear, we are still far from anything resembling sustainable production and consumption of agricultural commodities. In spite of the growth of sustainability initiatives and tools such as Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS), and the certification schemes that drive their adoption, grave sustainability problems persist. How can this be? This chapter takes a step back, and asks why our current approaches to sustainability fail to have the impact we might expect—and should demand. It describes the unsustainable nature of our global food system, and how this is a logical outcome of the way this system is organised. A transition towards sustainable agricultural sectors, we argue, can only be successful if initiatives manage to affect the broader forces which shape agricultural sectors. Adopting a more comprehensive approach is the logical next step—and a critical one. Fundamental to this approach is the understanding that there is no single ‘silver bullet’ approach, but that instead the levers for change differ based on the dynamics of a sector, and that these also change based on the progress of the sector as a whole.
This chapter was prepared with support of Matthijs Maas and Niko Wojtynia.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that this definition echoes the most widely used definition of ‘sustainable development’ as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987, p. 41).
- 2.
For a more conservative estimate, see Qian (2015), who registers 3.5 trillion dollars (2009 US$) between 1960 and 2013.
- 3.
At a conservative estimate. In 2016 the UN Forum on Sustainability Standards identified over 400 Voluntary Standards Schemes (UNFSS 2016, p. 5); moreover, as of January 2019 the ITC Standards Map identifies 250 standards (ITC 2019), and Ecolabel Index lists 463 sustainability labels and standards (Ecolabel Index 2019).
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- 6.
NewForesight and CottonConnect analysis of field data; see also Vollaard and van Monsjou (2017).
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ter Haar, G., Simons, L. (2019). Tools of Transformation: From Small Scale Progress to Structural Change. In: Schmidt, M., Giovannucci, D., Palekhov, D., Hansmann, B. (eds) Sustainable Global Value Chains. Natural Resource Management in Transition, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14877-9_11
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