b'UNDERSTANDING THE LONG-TERM IMPACT OF HUMAN ACTIONSSUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE IN THE EU - PART 1.BY: MARCEL BRUINSA lmost 50% of the EU territory is covered by farmland (both arable land and permanent grassland) leaving a key role for agriculture to play in land management and bestowing it a big responsibility in the preservation of natural resources. The EU Commission calls the desired relationship between agri-culture and the environment "sustainable agriculture" and calls for management of natural resources in a way which ensures that their benefits are also available for the future. European Seed took a deep dive into sustainable agriculture and sat down with Marc Cornelissen, Sustainability Lead for Seeds and Traits at BASF, and President of the European Technology Platform (ETP) "Plants for the Future" to get his take on the topic.This is the first article on the two-part series in Sustainable Agriculture in Europe. Part 2 will appear in a subsequent issue of European Seed.EUROPEAN SEED (ES): MARC, IN A NUTSHELL, WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE?MARC CORNELISSEN (MC):I guess you are raising immediatelyMarc Cornelissenthe key question. The term sustainable agriculture has been defined by multiple parties across the globe and consequently is differently understood in the details. The different definitions do share however the vision that agriculture should have a long term environmental and economic viability and deliver to todays society and its future generations the necessary output in diver-sity, quantity and quality. Such vision does breathe the importance of meeting societal demand, economic requirements, and environmental targets with a long-term perspective, and immediately highlights the issue that depending on where you are on our planet, the as is situ-ation will be quite unique and will show different shortcomings. Ideally, the sector, policy makers and society advance their common understanding on what the desired embodiment of sustainable agriculture is, and, equally important, how it relates to influential themes like climate change mitigation,Figure 1. Migration to sustainable agriculture will take place in a setting with energy transition, healthy diet, business continuity, digitaliza- a multitude of change drivers and will get headwinds and backwinds that will tion and big data, robotization, and social services. It is in thisdiffer between world regions.40IEUROPEAN SEEDIEUROPEAN-SEED.COM'