Sustainability and Agriculture: Innovations from the Field and Beyond

On Tuesday, 16 August 2022, WOMAG welcomed 51 people to our in-person learning and networking session on 'Sustainability and Agriculture: Innovations from the Field and Beyond'. During this session – co-organized by WISE (Women in Sustainability and Environment) and hosted by Syngenta in their Asia Pacific Office - we learned about and demystified hot (and sometimes opaque) topics like regenerative agriculture, carbon farming and green financing.

This piece highlights some of the many insights our moderator, Michelle Cheo, CEO of Mewah Group and Board Member of WISE, expertly drew out from our esteemed panelists:  Chris Argent (Head of Business Sustainability, APAC, Syngenta), Jacelyn Tan (Managing Consultant, South Pole), and Harjan Kuiper (CEO, Singapore, Rabobank).

The main objective of our discussion was to draw out the critical linkages between agriculture and sustainability and highlight how organizations across the value chain are promoting more sustainable practices in our sector. One common theme was the centrality of multi-stakeholder partnerships - how all parties (from agribusinesses to the public sector, financial institutions to logistics providers) need to work together to support the adoption of more responsible and sustainable practices. This includes ensuring that it makes business sense for the smallholder farmers at the centre of Southeast Asia’s food system to adopt such practices. Ninety percent of the 608 million farms in the world are family farms, operating 70–80% of farmland and producing approximately 80% of the world’s food, according to new research by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Chris Argent, Head of Business Sustainability, Asia Pacific, Syngenta, spoke about how Syngenta is working with growers to promote better soil health while minimizing the agriculture sector’s footprint. This includes training to reduce over-usage of fertilizers, but also the adoption of practices like low or no tillage, the use of cover crops, and crop rotation – all of which have proven effective.

Jacelyn Tan, Managing Consultant, South Pole, then spoke about the concept of carbon farming and carbon markets. Carbon farming involves adapting agricultural and other land management practices to increase the amount of carbon stored in soil and vegetation (sequestration) or to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and at same time improving soil management to increase plant biomass and reduce soil disturbance. Jacelyn highlighted that carbon sequestration has the potential to not just minimize climate change, but support soil health and act as an additional income stream for farmers and other actors along the value chain. What’s critical in this process, however, is effective verification.

Harjan Kuiper, CEO, Singapore, Rabobank, outlined that while Rabobank does not work directly with smallholder farmers, it does support large food and agriculture businesses on their work around sustainable agriculture. In particular, Harjan highlighted Project Acorn (Agroforestry CRUs for the Organic Restoration of Nature) - an initiative by Rabobank that uses satellite sensing and AI to increase the accessibility of the international carbon market for smallholder farmers. Through Project Acorn, Rabobank and their partners work together with smallholders to further carbon reductions and implement sustainable agroforestry practices.

All panelists concluded that collaboration, at the field-, national-, and global-level, is the key to making farming more productive, inclusive, resilient and sustainable. The challenges (and opportunities) are too large for a single entity to tackle (or seize), particularly if we want to see change at scale.