Abstract
Stable societies depend upon sustainable food supplies for their very existence. However, very few food sources or food supply chains have been independently certified as truly sustainable. As world food demand goes up and supply goes down, sustainable food supply is a myth for both the poor and the rich. Instead, there is widespread ignorance regarding the dangers of the present ‘profit-only’ driven world food supply system. These dangers are concealed behind a confusing array of mostly unreliable and misleading green claims and green labels. In the transition to a sustainable future, there is an urgent need for world food business to change from a competitive corporate paradigm to a sustainable stewardship paradigm. There is also an urgent need for an independent, incorruptible, and universal green label that can authenticate, on one consistent and reliable platform, all types of truly sustainable foods and food supply chains world-wide. This chapter will discuss these issues, how paradigm change might occur, and how the brand family of Green Tick® ‘Sustainable’, ‘Natural’, ‘Organic’, ‘Carbon Neutral’, ‘Carbon Negative’, ‘GE-Free’ and ‘Fair Trader’ meet the need for an incorruptible and universal ‘green’ label for food and food supply chains.
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Notes
- 1.
Before Present.
- 2.
Source: Wikipedia and Economy Watch websites accessed 21 April 2014.
- 3.
Professor John Crawford at http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/
- 4.
Global Reporting Initiative.
- 5.
Not substantially criticised or discredited to date.
- 6.
All of these are industry controlled.
- 7.
TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
- 8.
TransPacific Partnership.
- 9.
- 10.
http://www.sustainabilityconference.ch/archive/materials/Speech-Brundtland.pdf, used by permission.
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Acknowledgement
The support of family, friends, and business colleagues who donated their time and encouragement so that I could focus on the researching and authoring of this chapter is gratefully acknowledged.
Declaration of Interest
The author is the Principal Scientist and a shareholder of global sustainability certification company Green Tick® Certification Limited.
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Harris, S.M. (2015). The Myth of Sustainable Food Supply and the Urgent Need for Radical Change from Competitive Corporatism to Sustainable Stewardship. In: Schwarz-Herion, O., Omran, A. (eds) Strategies Towards the New Sustainability Paradigm. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14699-7_12
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