New report: time to ‘rethink’ agricultural sustainability

Everybody talks about ‘sustainability’ these days. But what does sustainability actually mean? New report by Sustain member Beyond GM dives in.

. Copyright: Beyond GM. Copyright: Beyond GM

News Sustain

Published: Tuesday 8 October 2024

A new report from Beyond GM’s A Bigger Conversation initiative – Rethinking Sustainability – Life-centric Agriculture in a Techno-centric World – argues that far too often, when we talk about sustainability it is framed as ‘green markets’, ‘green growth’, limited technofixes and business-more-or-less-as-usual. 

The failure to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, alongside the increasing failure of the world to live within planetary boundaries, demonstrates how unsustainable and unfit for purpose this market/business/economy-centric approach to sustainability is.

Rethinking Sustainability reviews the history of sustainable thinking and the missteps and short-termism that define a technocapitalist approach to sustainability and calls for a radical shift away from this path to a life-centric approach that is, first and foremost, grounded in sustaining life. 

It proposes four key pillars of sustainability: Boundaries and limits, A duty of care, Sufficiency and Equity and democracy.

These pillars align with decades of sustainability thinking and provide a framework for operating within clear ecological boundaries. They address the social and democratic aspects of sustainability, challenge existing power structures and economic models and promote diversity in agricultural practices and decision-making. They also provide a framework for considering the sustainability claims for new technologies, such as gene editing, in a more wholistic light.

In a rich and deep dive into sustainability narratives and thought, it also presents several criteria and examples for how this framework might work including an appendix of positive actions which fit within these pillars.

Read full report and executive summary.


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