Food production has to get greener, study shows

CAPE TOWN - Big metros could play a key role in facilitating transitions to sustainable farming due to the powerful demand for food generated by large urban populations.

This is the view of Florian Kroll, a food systems researcher and PhD candidate with the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, at the University of the Western Cape, who is also associated with the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security (CoE-FS).

Kroll argues that agroecology, a philosophy of a sustainable farming practice that reimagines the relationship between humans and the environment, faces an uphill struggle in South Africa because of an ambiguous food governance environment.

In his paper, Kroll outlined several food governance hurdles to improved adoption of agroecology in cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg.

These included a complex food system where ‘Big Food’ dominated, supplying a hybrid formal and informal food retail network; fragmented government responsibilities; a policy patchwork that doesn’t always make a whole; fraught departmental power dynamics in government; and ideological tensions in which neoliberalism still looms large.

This created “troubled prospects for agroecological transitions”, Kroll wrote.

“While it appears that the state has means and is developing strategic intent to support agroecological transitions, current configurations of state rationalities and instruments of power reflect primarily neoliberal and reformist transition pathways, perhaps with a few progressive elements,” he said.

What’s required is the will to transform metropolitan food systems, and a strong social movement that will light a fire under the political powers, Kroll said.

The CoE-FS said many of the core industries shaping rural food systems — processors, packaging, distribution, retail, and waste management — were clustered in cities and, therefore, regulated by metropolitan authorities.

“Yes, the principles of agroecology (by that and other names) have become more mainstream. But the concept itself is also under threat of being co‑opted and watered down under the guise of ‘sustainable intensification’ to enable ‘business as usual’ to continue — with a few green tweaks, perhaps. However, insists Kroll, there is general consensus that the industrial food system has spawned a host of ‘environmental, societal, and health crises’,” the CoE-FS said.

In a 1990 paper, one scholar asks if the then‑emerging notion of “sustainable agriculture” was a harbinger of things to come or a mere fad?

That paper also explained that those in favour of such a more sustainable farming model had long been at odds with the agricultural establishment, the former being “contemptuous of the promoters of modern industrial agriculture [the latter], because of the environmental and social disruptions they attributed to it”.

Cape Times