VANCOUVER – Gordon Bacon sees a hybrid car and thinks peas, hears about energy saving light bulbs and thinks lentils, watches the Live Earth climate crisis spectacle on television and thinks chickpeas.
The chief executive officer of Pulse Canada thinks pulse crops are a natural fit with the environmental movement because of their inherent nitrogen-fixing ability, which means less fertilizer use and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
“We have the keys to probably one of the most important social drivers that is on the radar screen today,” he told delegates attending the Canadian Special Crops Association convention in Vancouver.
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Pulse Canada has added the environment to its list of key focus areas, alongside other burning issues such as transportation and market access.
Bacon envisions a future where food companies will be marketing environmentally friendly canned beans and pulse-based pet foods and carrying them out of the store in grocery bags made out of pea starch.
“If consumers and corporations see an environmental contribution as important to what they’re doing, then I think they’ll be interested in looking at the contribution that pulses can provide,” he said.
The challenge will be educating food manufacturers and consumers about why eating pulse crops is good for the environment.
“Consumers perhaps don’t need to understand the details of a symbiotic relationship between rhyzobia and legume roots and the process by which atmospheric nitrogen is converted into a plant available form,” Bacon said.
Perhaps the most effective way to get the message across is by earning a stamp of approval from a high profile environmental group that understands the science of nitrogen fixation.
Bacon said agriculture is responsible for about 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases and the focus is now primarily on the other 90 percent, but the signs have been encouraging that opportunities may soon exist for crops to cash in on the environmental fervour sweeping the world.
Earlier this year he heard a speech by the British environment, food and rural affairs minister who said environmental labelling of food will soon become as important as nutrition labelling. The minister has asked his department to figure out how such labels could be devised.
Canadian politicians are also concerned about the environment but are still trying to devise a strategy for how best to tackle the problem of climate change. Bacon said the pulse industry has a golden opportunity to bend the ear of politicians and attract additional resources to the sector.
“We want to be part of influencing the direction that they take,” he told convention delegates.
