Does Covid-19 give a lesson to Agriculture of tomorrow’s thinking?
Food, Energy and Water:
This is what the United Nations refers to as the “nexus” of Sustainable Development. Efforts to meet the world’s growing nutritional needs can occur -and this is the standard in many cases — in harmony with nature, the rural world and public health. Uncontrolled growth must be curtailed, and the proper relationship between nature and society, ecology and the economy must triumph. The global food system is in transition and crises such as the climate and environmental and the recent health one is showing the priorities we should focus.
An important element of differentiation between distribution models is their close relation with the natural resources, since the differentiated, qualitative, and high value-added production is more environmentally friendly than the mass, the “industrial’ production” But the dynamics and likelihood of occurrence of threats in food chain depend on a larger number of risk factors or drivers. You cannot be in a firefighters’ conference, and no one allows to speak about water. So, to running simulations to find the cracks in the system taking in consideration all above factors while an unexpected crisis hits, is not a thinking we can easily sidestep.
A fair, healthy, and environmentally friendly system along the entire value chain, which should be implemented by all of us involved in the sector, should lead to the adoption and implementation of sustainable production approaches such as intelligent agriculture, organic farming, agro-ecology and stricter conditions for food safety, for our health.
These values will be combined with a reduction in the use of fertilizers, plant protection products and antibiotics (more with less principle), different way of acting on different segments such as transport, storage, packaging, food waste, but also backed up with initiatives for the proper consumer information, actions and information regarding their choices and the consequences for the environment, nature protection and nutritional health.
Importance is the tribute to the role of research, knowledge, innovation and digitization of agriculture in order to enhance efficiency in production to cope against the modern environmental and economic challenges. Seems there is no wall high enough that will keep out the next pandemic similar as is the case when we talk about climate change or terror and other global threats. But we should not leave these walls to inhibit us from placing new technologies, promote and finance most of the collective ideas to cooperate closely and efficiently to address and solve these challenges.
By learning to prepare and cooperate we would not only learn to stop the next pandemic, but also to address climate change and other critical threats. Yes, rightly we are pessimists for tomorrow living in this crisis, but today we should forge a sufficient ground of opportunities to become optimist about the day-after-tomorrow. Not only to turn the communities around to heal the gaping wounds that will be left by the crisis but to take the opportunity to flush the inevitable toxins out of the health system.
The day after, to mitigate rather than aggregate any imbalances, this will be a great gain over the incumbent.
