Security and Sustainability
Climate Compatible Development and Its "Triple Wins" in Agriculture and Food Security
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stephen Chitengi Sakapaji
Today the need for a sustainable agriculture sector and clear pathways to cost-effective and quality food remains top of our concerns. Agriculture today remains one of the key sectors for most of the greenhouse gas emissions globally that are causing global warming and climate change. This fact has led to the need to have policies that simultaneously address climate change and sustainable development that ensures food accessibility, quality, and food security are achieved through a sustainable agriculture sector. Hence the birth of Climate Compatible Development (CCD) which is “development that minimizes the harm caused by climate impacts while maximizing the many human development opportunities presented by a low emission, more resilient, future.” The main goal of this research was to assess whether CCD as a model for policymakers in developing countries has the potential to develop a sustainable agriculture sector with co-benefits whereby food availability, quality, and security is ensured and at the same time climate change impacts are reduced or minimized. This research concluded that CCD is a unique model in combating climate change and ensuring to it that food quality, access, and food security is ensured, however, this particular model has a lot of challenges in delivering a triple win opportunity in Bangladesh. The findings were that, while the idea of an integral approach (CCD) in the fight against climate change and pursuit for a sustainable agriculture system that ensures food quality, availability and food security is attained, this model remains very highly context-specific, sector-specific and highly debatable.
Planning for Agricultural Futures: Solitary Visions in Diverse Landscapes
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Colin Dring
This paper explores how agricultural planning practice engages specific visions of agricultural futures. In Canadian agriculture, there are widespread differences in farming as seen in the diversity of farm practices, farm sizes, market orientations, institutions, and ideologies and values. Employing a case study approach to two regions in South Western British Columbia, this paper attempts to answer how agricultural planning practice addresses these differences and how planning instruments are employed to legitimize certain types of farms while silencing or rendering invisible others. Interviews with farmers, municipal and regional planners and decision-makers, and non-profit/industry association staff were triangulated with a comprehensive document analysis of agricultural plans and strategies and their orientation to the future. Data were analyzed through an agonistic planning theory approach to explore how depoliticizing practices are used to subvert and render invisible different conceptions and visions of agricultural futures. Implications are suggested for practitioners and stakeholders regarding the current capacity of agricultural planning to address contemporary and future food system issues. Additionally, I offer principles and practices for actors to broaden their capacity to address conflict and heterogeneity within agricultural planning systems.
