Two Huge Words

Creativity and sustainability: Two huge words we love using in our every-day corporate, organizational and educational jargon. We do not always stop and think how both connect and how both might define the future of our existence.

Sustainability is a word that says it all. It relates to the ability to support oneself and our environment through a period of time. Isn’t then sustainability a synonim for survival? The beauty is that sustainability is a sustained survival: It’s about keeping us and our surroundings alive at a long-term basis.

We exist because we have adapted, evolved and became creative. Creation is what has kept us alive until now and is what brought agriculture (greatly supported by women) to our evolutionary trackrecord and to our history books. If we’ve done all this in the past and the world keeps transforming, then why bring it up now?

Because somewhere along the way we lost our North and need to find it back. News last week hit us with the Earth Over Shoot day or the use of our year resources in less than 8 months. We find that the poorest people are producing our food while enduring the worst consequences of climate change. Future production is at a risk and if we are not carefull enough, we might face a world disaster in a not so far away future.

So, where is our North? How do we work to change our future and improve the lives of producers, those people who endure the worst and work the hardest to provide food for the planet? We would think we should not only start pointing at ourselves, but at big corporations and organizations who could make big impact.

This is the reason why public, private partnerships are now trending: they are collective commitments to make sure we will have enough production in the hands of happy, resilient and climate-smart producers. In the case of SAFE, more than 16 partners have joined forces to make a real impact in the future of Latin America’s agriculture and to find out how we can learn from this impact.

We are almost at the verge of closing our first call for proposal in which partners participated with project submissions to reach our goal. It is clear that our platform is a coalition of willingness, with experienced, enthusiastic partners that wish to create solutions and improve the lives of smallholder farmers of the region.

Do we know for sure that Latin America’s agriculture will be transformed because of this program? We don’t, but we will do our best to make sure this happens. Our routes are creativity and sustainability, our contribution is experience and a learning attitude. Our dream? to live in a safe planet. Stay tuned!