Glacier FarmMedia – Canadians say they care about climate change, but they aren’t willing to pay to address it.
Canada’s food, agriculture and farming industries need to accept that failure as their own, according to the executive chair of Maple Leaf Foods.
“They care, but they’re not motivated by it,” said Michael McCain, whose company announced its carbon neutrality as of 2019.
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Ag sectors across the board are being pushed on sustainability.
McCain pushed for his company to meet that milestone, a change that involved transforming many products and processes. Among other projects, the company retrofit barn lighting to less energy-intensive LEDs and invested in heat recovery technology. It then backed carbon offset projects to move the needle on its remaining emissions.
“The reality is, consumers don’t care quite enough today. Yet,” he said, speaking as part of a panel at the Future of Food conference held in Ottawa Feb. 13.
In surveys, consumers claim to care about sustainability and about combatting climate change, but when it comes to paying more for products, buying different products or changing their consuming habits, most shy away. Without that support, it’s hard to move forward with major changes, McCain said.
“We have to find better ways to convince consumers, to make sure we communicate the needs to society, the impact to them over time,” he said. “Government, business leaders, civil society, farming communities, we need to build a coalition of consumer awareness and trust.
“The climate issues are real, they affect us all in the future in a significant way. It is to everybody’s advantage, economically and otherwise, to solve them, and we need to own the outcomes in a trusting way.”
Maple Leaf has moved aggressively in the past to embrace perceived trends in the market. It was quick to leap into the plant-based protein surge in the late 2010s, but learned that public hunger for meat alternatives wasn’t strong enough to justify all its investment.
It backed away from some of its plant protein initiatives as demand weakness became clear.
It was a similar story for other companies, many of which similarly rushed into the plant protein space only to find they couldn’t sell products to enough people at high enough prices to cover the investment.
Greenwashing
McCain cautioned against “greenwashing,” wherein companies inflate the environmental friendliness of their image, products and services beyond the actual impact of their policies.
“I think we need to really, really step away from that concept … Building trust is avoiding things like greenwashing in our relations, but making sure we are dealing with credible outcomes, credible climate solutions, credible verified solutions.”
– Ed White is a reporter for The Western Producer.
