The Farmer's Role In The Quest For Sustainability

The concept of sustainable development is straightforward: the future should be a better, healthier place than the present. Farmers have a major part to play in forging this future.

Growing up in the Eastern Cape, we knew only one destination for our annual holiday: the beautiful Wild Coast. It was a magical place for children, and we dreaded the day of our homeward journey. As the end of the holiday drew closer, my mother, hoping to ease our pain, would say, : “Remember, all good things must come to an end.”

Many years later, I learnt that it was a proverb dating back some 700 years to the English poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer. Perhaps he, too, was trying to placate his children at the end of a holiday!

Later in life, I worked with a colleague and mentor who, whenever I bemoaned a change I considered regressive, would say with gravity and a twinkle in his eye, “Don’t forget, Peter, nothing lasts forever.”

Subject to these influences in my formative years, I was not well prepared to give a sympathetic reception to ‘sustainability’, especially in a business, which seeks to make ‘all good things last forever’. I simply did not understand it, and soon discovered I wasn’t alone.

THE ESSENCE OF SUSTAINABILITY