Transcript Sustainability: The Intensive View

Sustainability: The Intensive
View
CAES Concurrent Session:
Sustainability in Agriculture:
Addressing the Coming Crunch
18 June 2012, 3:15-4:45
2012 CAES Annual Meeting, Niagara Falls
Sustainability
• "Sustainable development is development that
meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs".
– Gro Harlem Brundtland, The Brundtland Commission
• Raises fundamental conflicts about:
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Current and future use of resources
What resources, and their global distribution
Time value of resources: market, social and political
How do we value both positive and negative and externalities?
• Internally in Canada, or globally
• Combination of market and non-market efforts needed to achieve
sustainability
Demand Growth
• Demand growth for food:
Δ demand = Δ population + Δ Income * εI
• By 2050, increase in demand for food is estimated at
70 percent, but we need to add non-food use
Δ demand = Δ population + Δ Income * εI + (Current uset * (1+r)38 – Current uset)
• About 100 percent increase including non-food uses
of agricultural feedstocks
• Current productivity growth well below rates
required to meet demands at stable prices
• Major pressure on resources
Resource Base
• Land base: very limited potential growth … without
significant environmental damage
– Limited margins between forest, natural savannah,
improved grassland and annually arable soils
• Water: very unevenly shared globally
– Water use in agriculture rarely market-priced
– Shadow price on water and land in commodity trade?
– Conflicting demands across agriculture, industry, urban
and recreational uses for land, water, landscape
• Climate: changing climate can sharply alter sustainable
land and water use, changes disease and pest regimes,
season length, water availability
The Intensive View
• Significant productivity gains can and must be made
• These gains must increase output with the same or
fewer resources: increased resource intensity
• Major attention to environmental impacts on land, air
and water use needed
• This is not strictly another “green revolution”
– Science must be more broadly-based than earlier to
include more emphasis on:
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Environment impacts
Greater quality, safety, taste segmentation by consumer demand
Traceability
Markets
The Intensive View
• Productivity, both factor productivity (land,
capital and labour) and multifactor
productivity rates must rise
– The alternative is soil and water degradation,
deforestation, natural savannah land broken
• Crowding the margins of forest, savannah and
improved pasture land to expand arable land
• Climate change increasing the difficulty of
achieving productivity gains
Research Investment
• Major decline in research investment on
productivity increases in productivity research
for 20-30 years, relatively flat in past 5-8 years
– World-wide as well as in Canada and USA
– Rates of return to research
• See: Alston, Andersen, James and Pardey, 2011. AJAE,
October 2011, Vol. 93 No. 5, pp.1257-1276
– Rates of productivity growth for crops in private
sector higher than for self-pollinated crops
Research Investment
• Agricultural productivity gains are “different”
– New varieties and their traits have a limited life span
– Diseases and pests eventually overcome virtually all
varieties; speed and virulence vary
– Zoonotics also mutate with time
• Major investments needed to simply maintain
crop and animal yields
• Only investments in addition to maintenance
offer potential gains in productivity
• “Different” because once a space arm, for
example, is developed, it stays developed!
Managing Sustainability
Best management practices (BMPs)
Codes of Conduct
Regulatory measures
Vegetated buffer strips (VBS)
Large-scale livestock operations placement
Berms
Animal disease reporting and management
Conservation tillage
Antibiotic use
Manure handling, applications and
treatment
Genetically modified plants and animals
Crop rotations
Storage and handling of crops and animals
Slow release fertilizers
Handling of straw, haulms, and stover
Pesticide selection and frequency of
application
Terracing; managing soils on slopes
Timing of pesticide and fertilizer
applications
Limiting soil compaction
Transportation infrastructure use
Occupational health and safety
Grazing limits
Do We Know Enough?
• Apart from increasing productivity of plants and
animals…
– Need to include some or all of BMPs, CoC and
regulatory systems in research
– In many cases, two to five years of research is not
enough to determine effects on resource
sustainability
• Long gestation periods for increases in
productivity alone
• Longer periods for verification and application of
sustainable practices
Do We Know Enough?
• Many farming practices proven over
generations
• New technology presents challenges regarding
our knowledge of sustainability
• Climate change alters what we know about
sustainable practices
• Early BMPs or regulation may be intuitive only,
and incomplete in assessment
• Compliance versus Sustainability
Case Study
• Conservation/low/no tillage
– Seen very positively as BMP
– Lower production costs, lower GHGs
– Lower soil compaction
– Greater flexibility and scale in planting
– Potentially higher yields (under some conditions)
• Vegetative Buffer Strips
– Positively viewed, increased habitat
– Protects water courses from nutrient run-off
Case Study
• Experimentation began in 1993, final results
published 2011 (17 years of research effort)
– Manitoba flat land location, Assiniboine basin
– Phosphorus run-off 12-42 percent higher with low/no
tillage compared to traditional tillage
– Buffer strips minimal net effect on P run-off,
sometimes higher, sometimes lower
• Not intuitively obvious
• Results specific to the flat areas, may not apply to
hilly or sloped land
Sources
Steve Sheppard, Armand Belanger, Colleen Cuvelier, Cliff Greenfield, Stephen Carlyle,
Rachel Evans, David Lobb and Don Flaten, 2011. “Investigation and Evaluation of
Vegetated Buffer Strips within Manitoba Landscapes”. Final report 28 October 2011.
K.H.D. Tiessen, J.A. Elliott, J. Yarotski, D.A. Lobb and D.N. Flaten, and N.E. Glozier, 2010.
“Conventional and Conservation Tillage: Influence on Seasonal Runoff, Sediment, and
Nutrient Losses in the Canadian Prairies”, Journal of Environmental Quality. 39:964–
980.
S. C. Sheppard, M. I. Sheppard, J. Long, B. Sanipelli, and J. Tait, 2006. “Runoff
phosphorus retention in vegetated field margins on flat landscapes”, Canadian Journal
of Soil Science. 86(5): 871- 884.
Importance
• Sustainability is a long term endeavour
– Often slow emergence of impacts of change
– Long term sustained funding needed to provide
evidence on which to base recommendations
– Very wide set of metrics need to be used in
evaluation: economic, social, environmental
– Multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional approach
needed
– Combines government, private sector, universities,
producers, local municipalities
Our Research System
• Mostly project based, 2-5 years, not long term
program-based funding
• NSERC:
• Governing Council
• Standing Committee on Grants and Scholarships (COGS)
• Committee on Research Partnerships
– Only one member with disciplinary background in
agriculture, food and/or veterinary medicine
• Public-private linkages mostly short term
problem-based: e.g., clusters, WGRF, commodity
check-offs
Our Research System
• Stylized as:
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Researchers publish project results in Journals
Other researchers may build on it
In hopes that private sector interests will see it
Large gap between research and moving to precommercial applications
• Academic freedom/tenure trumps the research needed to
move closer to pre-commercial applications
• “Valley of death” for innovation
• Productivity growth and sustainability cannot be
separated
Our Research System
• Many obstacles:
– Governments fear that the private sector will make
money from promising public research results
– Corporations hesitate to collaborate with competitors
– Publicly funded and publicly available innovations
often ignored: private sector cannot recoup design
and marketing expenditures based on innovations
available to all
Source: Harvey Drucker, Technology Transfer: A View from the Trenches. Proceedings
from the conference ``Maximizing the Return From Genome Research,'' held 23-24
July 1993.
What do we need?
• Long-term program/problem-based research
and innovation with a funding platform
– Multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional
– Public-private partnerships:
• To define 5-15 year problem areas
• Start with initial science to show promise
• Establish joint efforts between basic and applied
research with public and private sector partners willing
to innovate and contribute throughout the
development stages
• Build evidence-based BMPs and regulatory systems
• Without greater productivity investment in
research and commercial use, sustainability at
serious risk
• BMPs, CoC, regulations may lack evidencebased approach
• Increased social, economic and political costs,
particularly in the developing world
– Local hunger, refugees, food aid, health risks
Thank you