Transcript What Knowledge for Sustainable Agriculture? What Bio-Economy for Europe? Brussels workshop 8 June 2010

What Knowledge
for Sustainable Agriculture?
What Bio-Economy for Europe?
Brussels workshop
8 June 2010
• Preliminary results from the FP7 project,
‘Co-operative Research on Environmental Problems in Europe’
(CREPE)
• Funded by Science in Society programme, 2008-10.
• Discussion today will inform further development of the
research and report.
Sustaining what development?
• Nowadays most policies and innovations are
promoted as ‘sustainable development’.
• Different accounts of what is to be sustained.
• Tension between the three pillars – social,
economic, and environmental sustainability –
is widely acknowledged.
• But each pillar has multiple interpretations, so
the tension runs more deeply.
• ‘Sustainable development’ has become an
ambiguous concept – even a contested one.
Which Sustainable Agriculture?
• Likewise sustainable agriculture has various accounts.
• As agri-industrial systems have had to address
sustainability challenges, diverse remedies are being
called ‘sustainable agriculture’.
• This encompasses divergent accounts of progress,
innovation and relevant knowledge
• Some accounts prevail over others in policy frameworks.
• In each account, current problems are diagnosed in
ways favouring a specific future Europe as desirable –
or even as necessary.
• Key terms are used in different ways, corresponding to
different paradigms.
Sustainable Agriculture
as Divergent Paradigms
Paradigms
dominant paradigm
alternative paradigms
Marsden et al,
2002
Agri-industrial
development
Globalised production of
standard commodities for
international markets
Agrarian-based rural
development
Relocalisation by
embedding agri-food
chains in notions of
place, nature and quality
Lang &
Heasman,
2004
Life Sciences
Attempts to substitute
capital-intensive
biological inputs, and to
diversify outputs such as
functional foods for health
Ecologically Integrated
Develops agri-ecological
methods to enhance
biodiversity, as means to
improve productivity,
nutritional quality and
resource conservation
Allaire& Wolf,
2004
Decomposability
Identifying single traits or
functional attributes
which can be separated,
decomposed and then
selectively recombined
into novel products
Comprehensive
product identity
Valorising distinctive
qualities which can be
socially validated by
consumers within an
overall product identity
SCAR CEG,
Techno-breakthrough
Forced application of
technology based on
novel technologies
Agro-ecology
Appropriate application
of technology based on
agro-ecology
authors
2008
Questions
• What are various accounts of sustainable
agriculture in the European policy context?
What is to be sustained?
• How do these accounts inform research
priorities and knowledge production?
• How do EC research agendas favour some
accounts of biological resources, knowledge and
economy?
What other knowledges contribute to sustainable
agriculture?
• How can research agendas accommodate or
reconcile divergent accounts?
Sustainable Development Strategy
• For sustainable development, EC policies emphasise
eco-efficient innovation, thus diagnosing inefficiency as
the fundamental problem.
• EU’s renewed Sustainable Development Strategy calls
for ‘Gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage by
improving resource efficiency, inter alia through the
promotion of eco-efficient innovations’.
• Such diagnoses are often turned into expectations for
technological remedies.
• Eco-efficiency perspective also in EU 2020 –
‘a new strategy to make the EU a smarter, greener social market’.
More efficient forms of growth are labelled as ‘green’,
even prospectively, as means to mobilise policy
commitments and financial investment.
European Research Area (ERA)
• As means towards a more sustainable Europe,
the European Research Area (ERA) promotes a
Knowledge-Based Society, especially aiming to enhance
global competitiveness through technoscientific advance.
• Research ministers: ERA should strengthen European
cohesion with a positive vision of the future, shared
among the EU citizens by: strengthening a competitive
economy, in agreement with the European social model,
by creating the Europe of technology’ (EU Council, 2008).
• Lead markets are foreseen to give Europe a global
economic advantage through ‘a more competitive
knowledge-based economy’.
• Bio-based products offer many economic and
environmental benefits, but Europe lags behind the US,
so we must catch up quickly.
• We must anticipate future competition and race ahead.
Indeed, we must ‘catch the future’ before it overtakes us
Imperatives as master narratives
• Such warnings and hopes function as master narratives,
especially by conflating innovation, technoscientific
advance and societal progress.
• Such narratives are founded in collective imaginations
and institutional practices around technoscience.
Future technological innovations are staged as the
solution to a range of social ills, including the problematic
identity of Europe itself.
Technoscientific imaginaries project specific visions of
future Europe (Taking European Knowledge Seriously, 2007).
• To remedy the ‘innovation deficit’, we must create an
‘Innovation Union’, towards ‘a new Renaissance’.
Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy
• EU-level research agendas have combined several
sectors under the novel title,
Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE).
• KBBE = ‘the sustainable, eco-efficient transformation of
renewable biological resources into health, food, energy
and other industrial products’.
• Key terms – knowledge, biological resources and
economy – have many different meanings.
• KBBE vision links agriculture with energy and other
industrial sectors, most prominently through designs for
an integrated biorefinery.
• Agriculture gains greater importance through horizontal
integration linking diverse sectors – e.g. food, feed,
energy and other industrial products.
KBBE as horizontal integration
www.bio-economy.net
Bio-economy as value chains
• ‘Value chains’ concept plays a promissory role.
• Helps to mobilise various investments for converting
biological resources into commercially valuable products.
• Some priorities are called ‘pre-competitive’ research –
generic knowledge helpful for eventually commercialising
products, especially proprietary knowledge. .
• Research agendas have rival priorities for value chains.
• Efficient conversion has proven technically more difficult
than some anticipated, especially for next-generation
biofuels and valuable co-products.
• Necessary to realise the EU goal of significantly reducing
GHG emissions from transport fuel by 2020:
needs 8bn Euros over the next decade?
Biomass factory?
• KBBE vision changes the meaning of agriculture.
• Future farm is imagined as a factory for biomass.
• Its components are to be identified, mined, decomposed
and recomposed in new ways.
• Converging technologies become essential for
identifying and validating characteristics of components.
• Farms become ‘oil wells of the 21st century’.
• Some organic residues are essential for maintaining soil
fertility, so studies also attempt to identify how much.
• Biorefineries and related processes are being designed
to recycle waste, but technological designs expand the
definition of ‘waste’ and could even generate extra waste
for new industrial processes.
Rebound effect?
• Efficient techno-fixes have a long history of similar
promises to minimise resource usage
• Yet such expectations often have been contradicted in
practice.
• Greater resource usage is a predictable consequence of
financial incentives to supply expanding markets.
Economists have theorised the ‘rebound effect’, whereby
more efficient or higher-quality energy production has
often stimulated greater usage.
• Despite that long historical experience, EU policy makes
optimistic assumptions about techno-fixes conserving
resources.
• Some innovations are promoted for sustainably
increasing resource availability and economic growth –
most recently ‘green growth’.
• Innovations are rarely held accountable for sustainability
promises.
European Technology Platforms: Harvesting the Potential
Stakeholder involvement
• Such agendas have been strongly shaped by European
Technology Platforms (ETPs).
• EC had originally invited industry to establish ETPs as
means to involve ‘all relevant stakeholders’ in developing
a common vision for future Europe & research priorities.
• Responsibility for stakeholder involvement is effectively
outsourced to ETPs, which are not held accountable for
how they play that role.
• Stakeholders’ relevance is defined by their prospective
contributions to future value chains, e.g. in linking the
agri-input supply industry with commercial outputs.
• CSOs have a marginal role, as in FP7 overall.
Indicates differences in future visions, not simply a
procedural problem.
Alternative diagnoses
• DG Research hosts EU Standing Committee on
Agricultural Research (SCAR), representing member
states. Appointed expert group to carry out foresight exercises.
• Problem: member states have been dismantling the
institutional basis for disinterested science, public good
training and agricultural extension services, thus
undermining farmers’ knowledge and disconnecting it
from agricultural research.
• Solutions: agroecological approaches, in situ genetic
diversity, producer-consumer links, etc.
Farmers’ knowledge of biodiverse resources for reducing
vulnerability and increasing resilience.
• 2008 report questioned remedies based on lab science,
e.g. agbiotech and genomics.
Agricultural Knowledge Systems
• SCAR report proposed to expand networks called Agricultural
Knowledge Systems (AKS).
•
‘AKS for instance would focus on ways to reduce the length of food chains,
encourage local and regional markets, give more scope for development
and marketing of seeds of indigenous crop varieties and foodstuffs, and
restore the diversity of within-field genetic material, as well as of farming
systems and landscape mosaics’.
‘Resilient agri-food systems rely on ecosystem services that are generally
public goods produced and reproduced jointly in the course of economic
activity’ (SCAR CEG, 2008).
• SCAR proposals have been taken up by the KBBE programme, e.g.
‘Knowledge systems for farming in the context of sustainable rural
development’, and a working group on Agriculture Knowledge and
Innovation Systems (AKIS).
• Short food-supply chains can enhance and spread farmers’
knowledge about reducing environmental impacts of agricultural
practices. Such improvements could be implemented quickly.
Conclusion: dominant paradigm
• Sustainable agriculture has divergent accounts, each
inspired by narratives of progress for a future Europe.
• In the context of KBBE, they also have divergent
accounts of biological resources, economic relations,
knowledge and research priorities.
• Different accounts borrow and use similar terms – each
in its own image – corresponding to distinct paradigms.
• EU-level research agenda largely follows dominant
paradigm – e.g. framing sustainability problems as
inefficiency to be remedied through lab knowledge and
efficient techno-fixes.
• Little scope for farmers’ knowledge, agroecology and
relevant CSOs – which have potential contributions to
research agendas.
Ways forward?
• According to research ministers, the ERA should
‘democratise decision making, for a Science operating
as a service to Society’ (EU Council, 2008).
• To fulfil that promise, the EU system would need different
procedures and imaginations.
• Agricultural Knowledge Systems (AKS) provide a basis
for promoting and linking plural forms of knowledge.
• Co-research relation among all knowledge-producers,
including farmers, towards experimenting sustainable
agriculture in its diverse forms.
• AKS may also provide a common space for interchanges
between conflicting paradigms.
Questions:
• In various accounts of sustainable agriculture,
what is to be sustained?
• How can research agendas accommodate
divergent accounts of sustainable agriculture?
• Do research agendas have a governance
problem? If so, then for whom?
What would be means for improvement?