1 min
The actors in the sector understand the importance of a sustainable food system and achieving this has become a collective goal — everyone's responsibility. For the farmers – they are the first point of contact with the produce – they have more responsibilities to play to ensure that the food system remains sustainable in the face of new challenges and realities. Thus, adopting sustainable practices helps to promote an efficient and effective food system. And it starts from understanding that production is not just for economic benefits, but there are environmental and social benefits and the ecosystem needs to be balanced at all times.
Some of these practices include contour ploughing, tree planting, rational farming (less use of synthetic pesticides), use of eco-friendly pesticides, use of well decomposed or green manure, periodic soil testing, mulching, fair wages to the workers, non-discriminatory employment, the use of safety boots amongst other practices. These practices help to improve production and have positive impacts on the environment and social elements, as well as improved income (economic) of the farmers. There is a need for us to discourage unsustainable practices that are currently widespread in our communities, such as bush burning, overuse of synthetic fertilizers, indiscriminate pesticides application, intense cutting down of trees for commercial purpose, discriminatory wages, etc, which destroy the biodiversity elements and expose us to an imbalanced ecosystem, which has a negative impact on our production system.
These unsustainable practices have contributed to loss of biodiversity, less activities of microorganisms and other beneficial insects in the soil which negatively affect the soil structure, harvested produce with less nutrients leading to poor quality products, increased contamination of water bodies causing death of fishes and human beings, harvested products with high chemical residues which could make one ill or lead to serious health implications amongst others. The consequences of unsustainable practices outweigh their benefits because of their long term impacts on the people, planet and profit – making our food system unsustainable. We need to address this issue by educating our farmers on the costs and benefits of adopting sustainable and unsustainable practices, incentivizing the system to encourage adoption of sustainable practices and creating more channels to support farmers who are already practicing sustainable practices to better or premium markets.
Achieving a sustainable food system is a journey that requires all hands on deck. Every stakeholder has a role to play to promote sustainable practices in this sector. We cannot achieve zero hunger if our practices are unsustainable nor can we achieve an efficient and effective food system without adopting sustainable practices. Therefore, we need sustainable practices to be a habit practice by all farmers. Let us build a mind of sustainability in our farmers, that translates into skills, then practice it and it becomes a system that impacts our food. Let the work begin today.
Yours-in-Service
Babatunde
These unsustainable practices have contributed to loss of biodiversity, less activities of microorganisms and other beneficial insects in the soil which negatively affect the soil structure, harvested produce with less nutrients leading to poor quality products, increased contamination of water bodies causing death of fishes and human beings, harvested products with high chemical residues which could make one ill or lead to serious health implications amongst others. The consequences of unsustainable practices outweigh their benefits because of their long term impacts on the people, planet and profit – making our food system unsustainable. We need to address this issue by educating our farmers on the costs and benefits of adopting sustainable and unsustainable practices, incentivizing the system to encourage adoption of sustainable practices and creating more channels to support farmers who are already practicing sustainable practices to better or premium markets.
Achieving a sustainable food system is a journey that requires all hands on deck. Every stakeholder has a role to play to promote sustainable practices in this sector. We cannot achieve zero hunger if our practices are unsustainable nor can we achieve an efficient and effective food system without adopting sustainable practices. Therefore, we need sustainable practices to be a habit practice by all farmers. Let us build a mind of sustainability in our farmers, that translates into skills, then practice it and it becomes a system that impacts our food. Let the work begin today.
Yours-in-Service
Babatunde
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Who knows we can find a project and funding to develop an adapted version for your purposes, think about it and see whether it deserves a follow up
Ron Methorst This looks very good. I have glanced through the websites and read the 16 themes (10 ecological and social themes). Yes, adapted version will be great
Hello Babatunde,
for the purpose of increasing the knowledge and awareness of farmers on how their farm practices relate to the social and ecological context we designed the FarmingTree tool www.farmingtree.org
Perhaps an adapted version would fit for your context?
Ron