Defining Sustainability

In the next two years, a 58-member committee representing many sectors of the food and agricultural industry will work together to define what sustainable agriculture means and encompasses, in an effort to set a national standard for sustainable agriculture through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

The effort began last year, when Scientific Certification Systems (SCS), a leading third-party provider of certification, auditing and testing services, and standards, wrote the “Sustainable Agriculture Draft Standard for Trial Use.” In the fall of 2007, SCS began holding stakeholder meetings with Leonardo Academy, a non-profit organization facilitating the process as an ANSI-accredited standard developer, to generate awareness and support for writing a national standard.

The original draft standard was controversial and many industry organizations, as well as growers, have been up in arms over its language. USDA questioned the draft standard in a June 6 letter from Deputy Secretary Charles Conner to Michael Arny of Leonardo Academy after a number of producers contacted USDA expressing concern over its potential impact of the draft standard and the exclusion of stakeholders in the process designed to create it.

The documents that follow include the letter from USDA to the Leonardo Academy as well as the academy’s response to USDA.

Also presented here are the procedures for the development of sustainability standards from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ANSI essential requirements.

In addition, AVG’s sustainability coverage includes articles by senior staff writer Laura Drotleff on consumer attitudes as well as the difference between organic and sustainable.

Sustainability: “Beyond Organic?”

Experts help clarify the differences between organic and sustainable agriculture.

by Laura Drotleff
Senior Staff Writer

What is the difference between organic and sustainable agriculture? How are “sustainable” products different from those marketed as “green,” “natural,” or “earth-friendly”? And what does the development of a sustainable agriculture national standard mean for organic growers?
It’s not all the same. In fact, organic production is part of sustainable agriculture, but not the other way around. And while the terms “green,” “natural,” and “earth-friendly” and others along that same path mean well, there’s no concrete system to verify that they are anything more than marketing gimmicks, depending on the company.

“You don’t have to be organic to be sustainable,” says Mike Hogan, coordinator for the Ohio Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program through The Ohio State University Extension. “There are organic systems that aren’t sustainable; just because a grower is organic doesn’t mean that he is sustainable, but committing to organic production is one way to become more sustainable.”

Sustainable agriculture, according to Scott Exo, executive director of Food Alliance, addresses the nation’s ability to produce safe, healthy, affordable food in large enough quantities that will maintain the population “without degrading the productivity of the land, quality of life in our communities, or the resiliency of surrounding ecosystems,” he says.

“Organic ag is about building healthy soil, enhancing biodiversity, minimizing off-farm inputs, and, under the National Organic Program (NOP), avoiding a long list of synthetic materials. As a production system, organic is a very important part of a larger strategy to make ag more sustainable. Sustainable agriculture emphasizes a similar biological approach, but expands the focus to include agriculture’s broader impacts, on things like wildlife habitat, workers, and energy, water, and soil conservation.”

Ag Standard Must Recognize Organic Production
According to Linda Brown, executive vice president for Scientific Certification Systems, the organization that wrote the original sustainable agriculture draft standard, there is a currently movement in the organic industry to consider what its next steps will be to address sustainability. She says there are sustainability certification programs that do not recognize organic practices, which has caused some friction in the agriculture community. As long as organic agriculture is recognized and included within a sustainable agriculture standard’s framework, organic growers will be willing to conform, she says.

“This has been portrayed in the trade media and even in the consumer press, that sustainable agriculture is better than organic,” Brown says. “Organic practices address reducing pesticide use and residue, pest management, soil fertilization, agroecology, crop varieties, no genetically modified organisms, no sewage sludge and all things standardized under the NOP. Those are all advanced practices and to recognize those practices as part of the continuum of sustainability is where we hope the final standard will go, and that makes it clear that organic practices are beneficial, but it’s not the whole picture. There are other aspects of sustainability, as well.”

With the growth in demand for organic products spiraling upward, and supply growing to fill that demand, prices for organic food have become more affordable for consumers, and the once profitable value-added niche organic growers enjoyed is no longer as lucrative. While the marketing opportunities are huge for organic and sustainable growers, a value-added proposition is not necessarily a given, says Brown.

“I’ve sat in on retailer meetings where it has been said that sustainable production is going to become the cost of doing business,” Brown says. “It’s going to be expected, but it depends what retailers - and consumers - include under the term sustainability.”

A Comprehensive Approach
With an organic certification already long in place, is there a need for a sustainability standard and certification? While organic practices, or growing food without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and addressing soil health, are a great improvement over industrialized agriculture, they are not a total solution for all the challenges in agriculture and within the food industry, Exo says.

“Organic is the first and most broadly accepted food eco-label, and the organic community helped start the sustainable agriculture movement,” he says. “But organic production doesn’t guarantee, for example, that workers are treated well, that animals are raised humanely, or that wildlife is protected and enhanced. Many organic farmers are also dissatisfied with the national organic standard and use the term “beyond organic” to describe their individual efforts to address these and other issues.”

As organic production broadens and becomes more common, the limits of the national organic standard are becoming more clear, which is causing a great deal of dissent in the agriculture community, Exo adds.

“Organic started as a philosophy and way of farming espoused primarily by smaller scale farmers who reflected their close and personal relationship to the land,” Exo says. “But under the national standard, as more and larger companies enter the market, organic is in danger of being reduced to a substitution of inputs - natural for synthetic. Some newer, organic farms still operate largely according to conventional, industrial, input-intensive models, using management tools and approaches that cause social and environmental concern. Under these conditions, converting a growing number of acres to organic production will leave many of the problems we currently see in agriculture and the food industry unresolved.”

Jeff Dlott, president and CEO of SureHarvest, agrees, adding that the organic standard was not designed to answer certain questions that are becoming more pertinent and important to consumers, such as a product’s carbon footprint or the assurance of cleaner soil or water.

“If we’re marketing this stuff as organic, what are we telling consumers they’re buying? What do you buy when you buy organic? It’s a perception,” he says. “You do know that certain products were not used but are you buying a product grown without pesticides? No, because there are a lot of organic pesticides. Are you buying a product with a reduced energy or carbon footprint? Not necessarily because there are no standards for how much fuel you burn or how much soil erosion might result. The system wasn’t designed for that. What consumers get for the organic label is an assumption of core health or some larger societal benefit, and at this point, we don’t know either one.”

What is needed, Exo says, is a more comprehensive approach, including standards that include a broader range of social and environmental concerns and evolving management strategies, which will help ensure the food system is sustained.

“Rather than focusing largely on inputs, we must look more holistically at farming systems and management practices designed to deliver best possible social and environmental outcomes,” he says.

Direct comments or questions about this article to avg.edit@meistermedia.com.

What Consumers Want

In times of economic crisis, are consumers still seeking out sustainable food options? A new survey’s results are revealing.

The produce industry is deeply examining its direction for the future to address the demand for more responsibly and sustainably grown crops. While experts agree, it’s important for growers to take the necessary steps now to begin on a path toward becoming environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable, growers may wonder how all of this effort plays out in consumers’ minds. It’s understood that the consumer media, including books by Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), combined with the explosion of farmers’ markets across the country, and other factors, are causing consumers to ask more questions about their food and how it’s produced. But aside from all of that, what are consumers’ true priorities when it comes to shopping for their fruits and vegetables and, as the economy rises and falls, how do their priorities change?

A recent nationwide survey conducted by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, based at Iowa State University, has found that today’s rising fuel and food prices, coupled with increased concern about environmental impacts and food safety, are changing American consumers’ perceptions.

The survey, released Sept. 29, showed that consumers:

• are reassessing their shopping and eating habits to cut fuel use;
• would consider carbon food labels as long as their costs do not increase;
• are worried more about natural habitat loss than greenhouse gas emissions;
• and were much more likely to view local food as having traveled 100 miles or less from the farm to point of sale than coming from their state or region.

These are the views of a representative, nationwide sample of more than 750 consumers who participated in a web-based survey conducted by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in August 2008. Their responses are summarized in a new Leopold Center report, “Food, Fuel and the Future: Consumer perceptions of local food, food safety, and climate change in the context of rising prices.” The paper was written by Rich Pirog, who leads the Center’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative, and Iowa State University graduate student Becky Rasmussen.

Consumer Research, Broken Down
Objectives of the study were to gauge consumer perceptions about:

• Food purchases and transportation use in response to higher food and fuel prices;
• Food safety, within the context of where their food comes from and how it is grown;
• Impact that various scales and production methods of the food system have on greenhouse gas emissions;
• Willingness to pay for a food system that achieves a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; and
• Meaning of local food in terms of distance and location.

Survey respondents were more likely to respond to rising food and fuel prices by taking fewer vacations, buying more food items on sale, eating out less, and purchasing fewer desserts, compared to other food categories. Only 17% of respondents were very likely to cope with rising prices by increasing their purchases at farmers’ markets or by canning or freezing more fruits and vegetables.

Pirog said that while 55% of the respondents perceived the U.S. food system to be safe, that number had dropped from 70% in a similar Leopold Center survey conducted in July 2007. There was clear concern with a global food supply chain system — only 15% of respondents viewed such a system as safe, compared to 74% for a local system and 73% for a regional system.

“The respondents believed that a food safety seal or inspection certification, along with more information about who has handled and produced the food, along with country of origin, would increase their confidence in the food supply,” Pirog said.

Respondents also were asked a series of questions about their perceptions of greenhouse gases in food supply chains, including labels that showed a food’s carbon footprint (amount of greenhouse gas emissions), and how greenhouse gas emissions and climate change compared with other environmental problems. More than 50% of respondents saw value in retailers putting carbon labels on their food products, with the majority only willing to encourage the labels if their costs did not increase. Fifty percent of respondents perceived the loss of natural habitat as more important an environmental issue than climate change, with more than 40% viewing water pollution as more important.

How far can food travel and still be considered “local?” The survey offered respondents a menu of options from which to select their definition of locally grown. More than two-thirds said that local food traveled 100 miles or less from the farm to point of purchase, while one third viewed the definition as grown in their state or region. Respondents from larger western states were less likely to choose the option “25 miles or less” and more likely to choose “grown within their state” as their definition of local than respondents across the rest of the country.

Pirog noted that “as the demand for local food products increases, it is critical that retailers, distributors, and farmers develop clear and authentic messages about these products to maintain consumer confidence and trust.”

In 2001, Pirog led some of the first research in the United States on the concept of food miles. He also has investigated consumer perceptions of local, place-based, and organic foods.

The 47-page report is available on the Leopold Center Web site, www.leopold.iastate.edu/pubs/staff/consumer2/report.html.