World Perspectives

Unsustainable Sustainability; Pretend System Crisis

      Unsustainable Sustainability Agricultural producers are readying for the convening of the UN’s Food System Summit later this year. The goal of the Summit is to arrive at a plan for guiding the change in farming around the world to meet the world body’s sustainable development goals. Those goals do not encompass economic viability and so the concern is that they will be Draconian relative to how farming is currently done. For example, UN bureaucrats could recommend provocative policies such as: • reduced use of crop protection chemicals and fertilizer; • eliminating the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture; • limiting the use of biotech crops; and • dietary limits on consumer a...

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From WPI Consulting

Illuminating the value of technical research

On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.

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