Sustainability for organic producers

Sustainability is a term that conjures up a range of meanings, dependent on one’s perspective. Gordon Conway makes this point in ‘The Doubly Green Revolution’, which considers the political and practical dimensions of international food production and distribution. While his text does not address the perspective of the organic sector in general or the organic agriculturalist in particular, it would be reasonable to consider these fitting within both the environmental and socially responsible categories.

For the majority of cases, organic growers perceive sustainability as an approach which enables sufficient food production without degrading the fertility and integrity of natural resources. At the same time sustainability is linked to the promise of minimal disruption to traditional (social) values and institutions. While these examples are evidently well intentioned, there are some failings in practical application, particularly when organic systems are applied to subsistence and developing economies.

Conway describes sustainability as one of the four principal indicators of performance for agroecosystems. The remaining three are productivity, stability, and equitability. Because of their complex interrelationship, it is beneficial to consider their effects for communities involved in organic production.

Productivity is perhaps the easiest yet most deceptive component to evaluate. It is described as the output of product per unit of resource input. The optimum productivity goal for any organic farming system is to establish a sufficient harvest with minimal dependence on external resources. In addition to the financial cost, a high dependence on external resources tends to threaten the natural stability of ecosystems along with social and political institutions. The history of industrial development in the west can be described as a continuous drive to obtain external resources. On the broadest scale, productivity has increased through colonisation and hegemony, often at the expense of environmental and social cohesion.

Stability of an agricultural system is a measure of consistency. In most agricultural environments there is an expectation that variable factors contribute to the growth or decline of productive resources. These include changes in climate, soil fertility, insect populations, and the level of technical applications. Most organic farming systems aim to accommodate some of the variability which is inevitable and important for natural ecosystems.

Equitability refers to the fairness of resource distribution. It is largely dependent on social and political systems which determine ownership and access to natural resources. In many instances, organic agricultural systems promote equitability through positive practices like resource stewardship, knowledge dissemination and the promotion of social capital and fair trade associations.

According to Conway, sustainability is the ability of an agricultural system to maintain productivity when subject to a stress or shock. This clear and specific definition at first appears tangential to the commonly perceived definition of producing enough food without hurting the environment. Conway’s sustainability is closer to our understanding of resilience, or an ability to recover from various types of adversity. Within a typical agricultural system examples of adversity might include the arrival of new species of insect pest or the introduction of disease pathogens.

Under ideal circumstances, the development of organic agricultural systems offers an increased level of environmental resource protection and integrity. Intuitively, this leads to the conclusion that organic agriculture promotes higher levels of resilience compared to conventional agricultural methods. In practice, there are however sufficient examples of organic agriculture with inherently low resilience and sustainability. Many of these will be associated with subsistence and developing economies, usually within the poorest regions of the world.

For the economically disadvantaged, there are numerous reasons why organic agriculture might suffer from low sustainability. Consider, for example, the rice grower who makes a decision to raise crops without the assistance of chemical treatment. Unlike the organic grower in developed nations, the third world farmer has fewer options to establish a zone of protection surrounding the crop. This introduces levels of external vulnerability, which are rarely encountered or tolerated in developed nations. Even when behaving correctly from the perspective of sound organic agricultural practices, the inherent sustainability will often depend upon factors beyond immediate control or influence. These might include widespread water contamination or failure to identify and control the regional spread of recently introduced disease and pest species.

Similar arguments apply to the other properties used to describe an agricultural system although these are less likely to be obscured by any descriptive association with organic farming.