Shaping the Future
As we move into a new year, the question "What does the future hold?" is on many people's minds. The general optimism exhibited at the Crop Production Week in Saskatoon last week (January 5-12, 2008) provides one indication of what people in the agricultural sector are expecting. Industry analysts, who typically share the optimism of farmers and input suppliers, talk about a new paradigm and predict that high grain and oilseed prices can be expected for at least two years. Some suggest, like the Economist magazine in their December 6, 2007 article Food Prices: Cheap No More, that commodity prices could remain strong for as long as 10 years.
While it is important to try and predict what the future will hold, it is also necessary to do something else, particularly, perhaps, in a period when times are good. Specifically, it is incumbent upon everyone to think about what the future should bring, rather than what it could bring.
In a 2002 article from Industrial and Corporate Change titled "Forecasting the future or shaping it," the Nobel Prize economist Herbert Simon commented that, "In an important sense, predicting the future is not really the task that faces us. After all, we, or at least the younger ones among us, are going to be a part of that future. Our task is not to predict the future; our task is to design a future for a sustainable and acceptable world, and to devote our efforts to bringing that future about. We are not observers of the future; we are actors who, whether we wish to or not, by our actions and our very existence, will determine the future's shape" (p. 601).
The postings to date on the Illative Blog have been mostly about predicting the future - i.e., trying to "see" into the future through the use of inference. While inference can provide critical insights into the way the future will unfold, by its nature inference lacks a sense of new possibilities. Since inference relies on drawing parallels with other times and other places, it is not likely to be the basis for something truly new. Designing the future, as Simon urges, requires something different.
This something different can perhaps be best expressed as imagination. Imagining something new is perhaps easier when the mood is optimistic and possibilities seem to exist; if this is true, then the current period is the time to imagine. As well, buoyant economic conditions, at least for the grain sector, provide the resources that are required to bring about a newly imagined future. Given this background, are we doing the imagining we need to do today to meet the challenge that Simon laid down? Or has the industry become intent on simply trying to catch the next wave?
The forces that are creating the current optimism in agriculture are likely to create a very different world from the one in which we are currently. Have we really imagined what the world will look like when biofuel demand and continued income growth in countries like India and China take full root? Have we really thought about what we need to do to address the environmental degradation that is more and more common in many parts of the world (the areas that come immediately to mind are China and Africa)? Have we begun to imagine how agriculture can position itself not only to adapt to climate change, but also to mediate some of its impacts? Have we tried to conceptualize what is required to produce high quality and safe food for a greater and greater proportion of the earth's population? In short, have we imagined what a revived agriculture really looks like - one that moves food production and land stewardship front and centre in terms of its importance in a globalized world?
Of course, the good times may be shorter than expected - recall the optimism of the late 1970s that was quickly replaced with the harsh reality of the early 1980s. This difficulty in predicting the future is one more reason that we should follow Simon's advice and seek to shape agriculture the way that we want it to be. On this note, it is interesting to ask whether a vision of agriculture being front and centre in a globalized world is still appropriate if the good times only last two years. If the answer is yes, then the steps we should be taking today are much clearer.
Unfortunately the optimism does not pervade the livestock sector