Ottawa-While agriculture sustainability has been making progress, work on the sector’s benchmarking index this year and in 2025 will make it a more useful tool for measuring the progress on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute annual conference was told.

Tarra Drevet, the new Executive Director of the National Index on Agri-Food Performance, said progress is needed because disclosures on sustainability measures were done voluntarily in the past. “Now, we’re hitting the point where the must-haves are coming into play.”

The current work will make the Index “a more useful tool for benchmarking standards and metrics in the ESG landscape.” The Index is housed in CAPI’s Centre for Agri-Food Benchmarking and has attracted 151 member organizations from the agrifood sector and governments.

Sustainability standards “have broadened their focus and will soon be mandatory for all Canadian public companies,” Drevet said. All businesses will be required to provide sustainability information according to the role they play in the value chain – as they respond to information requests from investors, financial institutions or regulators.”

Work was started four years ago by a group of 12 associations looking for developments around the world to include in a Canadian sustainability standard. A draft index was published in May 2023. Its pillars are environmental, economic, food integrity as well as labour market attractiveness, inclusivity, food security, soil health, food security and antimicrobial use and resistance.

Now the Centre is conducting three projects that focus on improving the Index by studying Global ESG Reporting, developing a Data Sourcing Protocol and undertaking research to evolve the Index. The Centre is also looking at how to communicate changes in sustainability outcomes, which is widely desired by its’ partners.

When all this is done, companies will be able to rate their sustainability, Drevet said. It is important that sustainability data be actually useful. “We don’t need more data, we need to be more discerning with what we have.”

All of this will take a sustained engagement that the Index’s members will be able to assist in making sure it takes a positive approach. “Sustainability is not an absolute term. It will look at where we are and where are going.

“It’s really important that we don’t get caught up in a game of indicators and reporting that only has relevance in relation to other metrics, standards, and targets. It is important that sustainability information has value in the Canadian context,” Drevet said.

“The information that we use in our Indicators to speak about biodiversity, the performance of agribusiness or the attractiveness of the labour market should mean something on the ground and be deemed evidence-worthy by the people working in the sector.”

As the data for sustainability indicators improves, companies could use them to evaluate their own performance and organizations such as farm groups could employ the Index’s data to speak about sustainability across the Canadian agrifood sector.

ESG reporting is undergoing a state of change on regulatory matters as well as a digital transition that is advancing data literacy, Drevet said. “This marks a shift in our playing field for accounting and reporting – away from the day and age of statistics – where we viewed GDP and labour market numbers in 2D bar charts and graphs. Today, we’re in an age of data. Big Data. Only, because we’re in a transitional period, our mindset and approach to working with data is still informed by the way we pull insights from statistics and newspapers.”

This news item prepared for National Newswatch