Sometimes, some things are so basic we forget about them - including forgetting to plan to include them in the future. We assume they will always be there. Until, suddenly, they are not.

What if food was like that?

Fear decades, agriculture has been on the back burner of much of the international agenda. Recently, that has changed, as some of my past posts on sustainable development and agriculture have shown.

But of particular concern is the extent to which agriculture has been left out of the climate change debate. In short: it has been left out, and this is really bad. Because we gotta eat. Sustainable development and green economies need to include food security - lest we have riots, or maybe wars, famines, hunger, misery, starvation - all those things that happen to people who don't have enough food and who don't know where or how they are going to get their next meal. But climate change negotiations do not, now, include attention on agriculture.

Which is why Nora Ourabah Haddad of the Internatioanl Federation of Agriculture and representing Farming First (about which I've written other posts) has been paying close attention to the Climate negotiations. I spoke to her right after she had been in Barcelona, trying to support the process of mainstreaming agriculture into the text.

"What we need now is a framework to be able to develop further work programs on agriculture. It is too premature to talk about trade. Most important right now are drawing big lines to recognize the role of agriculture and food security and to do more research on mitigation and funding of adaptation for agriculture. Right now, the less details you give the better."

Unfortunately for sustainable development, she felt that the negotiators are getting caught up in the details, and into many of the controversial issues that come up with agriculture.

"Agriculture is difficult in part because it is unclear what and how you measure things. Agriculture - from forests use to land use to cows to bush fire - puts out a lot of carbon dioxide and methane that are not, strictly speaking, man-made, so it is hard to know how to count it. (Plus), there are many technological solutions, but that raises the issue of technology transfer, which we've yet to solve."

It is also difficult because too much focus on agriculture could lead to a tax on agricultural products - which most in the field want to avoid. And its an inherently multi-disciplinary/multi-sectoral issue, that brings in issues of trade, transportation, energy, livelihoods, and culture, just to name a few, in a world and a climate that does not always know how to handle cross-cutting issues. Which are, for better or for worse, the nature of most of the biggest challenges facing sustainable development.

Difficult, maybe. But necessary.