Policy, Transparency, and Independent Media: Food’s New 3-Legged Stool
In agriculture and bought-media everywhere, advertisers have different things to say than what stakeholders need to hear, in order to best prepare for change.
This year’s explosion of wildfires, storms and flooding has turned a spotlight on modern agriculture. From consumer-facing food giants like Pepsi, to some of the worst polluters like Nutrien, global corporations are scrambling to figure out what’s actually happening throughout their supply chains, and to appease investors.
People outside of agriculture are sensing that Scope 3 greenhouse gas pollution by agribusiness is more serious than the companies are letting on. Facing an imminent ramping up of reporting and compliance requirements, investors are scrambling to right-size their portfolios and to manage financial risk.
Good Food’s 3-Legged Stool
Today it is investor capital pushing hardest for cleaner food and agriculture, in response to new requirements from organizations like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Policies are also helping to reduce false claims, i.e. ‘greenwashing’ by corporate brands.
To make it cheaper and easier to prove, new technology platforms like FoodViiision offer fully validated source data throughout commodity supply chains. This data can then be scored, and minimum improvements imposed, hopefully putting an end to false claims for good.
In a nutshell, food and agriculture is moving from a highly-opaque source-to-consumer state, towards tech-enabled full transparency. This makes integrity in reporting critical to properly inform stakeholders as financial systems adjust.
Yet the media looks like the weakest leg of the stool right now. One need to look no further than the share prices of plant-based meat companies to see the potential financial fallout from making investment and food choices based on environmental hype.
Resetting Expectations from Media Sources
In a panel discussion on Scope 3 reporting hosted by Canada’s Globe & Mail last week, Nutrien acknowledged that nitrous oxide is a highly potent source of global warming, and that much of it escapes from the farmland their products are applied on. However, the only strategy mentioned for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that result from fertilizer sales, was combining it with more product sales (nitrogen release inhibitors).
Meanwhile, there are more effective strategies for raising crops and cutting back on nitrogen fertilizer, like switching to foliar-applied combined with biological alternatives like compost. Sources that understand this are miniscule compared to the giant corporations, but they have more advanced information about the possibilities to reduce pollution in farming.
For this reason, Prairie Routes has launched a new Speaker Bureau made up of independent experts across the spectrum of food and agriculture, including:
Agriculture and Scope 3 Emissions
Food Systems and ESG Reporting
Commodity Supply Chain Pricing
Branding, Storytelling and Validation
Regulating Emotions in the Trenches of Climate Change
Data-Driven Product Development
The reason for choosing non-corporate sources to inform media messaging is because it’s simply not business-aligned for fertilizer manufacturers, for example, to promote reducing the sales of their products. There is no easy solution for a company like Nutrien to report on Scope 3 emissions and maintain investor confidence, but spinning it as a high priority isn’t helpful and downplays the progress being made by others.
Summary
Investors and governments alike rely on the media to dig into the truth behind corporations’ environmental claims, and that requires multiple sources from differing backgrounds to tell the whole story. As Christopher Schroeder writes in this excellent article on journalistic integrity, “The rush to land a story might feel good, but risks the very reason journalism exists: to get it right.”
The world’s farm media have a critical role to play in assisting society to understand pollution in agriculture. Covering it up sacrifices economic growth.
The companies and farmers moving the fastest towards ecological improvements aren’t generally the ones with the best PR. Yet policies are changing anyway, most quickly in Europe, definitively in Canada, and with considerable fanfare in the U.S.
Media need to highlight more often where the greatest ecological milestones have been reached, and amplify that work. Creating hope for the public and safety for investors could be just the thing to turn around the tide of society’s current sentiment against corporate agriculture.