What Sustainable Agribusiness Is Missing Isn’t Talent, It’s Translation
By Cynthia M. Cominesi, Brazilian agronomist, author, consultant, professor and senior manager (October 27, 2026)
Agribusiness is being asked to respond to increasingly complex expectations around traceability, climate resilience, responsible sourcing, labor conditions, biodiversity, and market access. Meeting these expectations requires technical knowledge, but it also depends on people who can connect field realities with business decisions. Many experienced women already have that ability. What they often lack is not competence, but a clear bridge between the expertise they have built and the influence the sector needs from them.
This gap matters because sustainable agribusiness is not a single technical discipline. It operates across production, procurement, finance, law, communications, human resources, risk management, and community relations. A woman may have spent 15 years negotiating contracts, managing suppliers, leading teams or interpreting regulation without ever holding a role with sustainability or ESG in the title. Her experience is still relevant. The challenge is to make that relevance visible, specific and credible.
Technical Competence Must Be Translated into Decisions
In my work with agricultural certification, traceability, and responsible supply chains in Brazil, I learned that knowing a standard is only the beginning. The real work is understanding what the requirement is intended to protect, how it affects producers and buyers, what evidence is available, and which operational change is realistic. A technically correct recommendation that cannot be understood by decision makers, implemented in the field, or sustained within a budget will remain on paper.
Experienced women frequently underestimate this translation capacity because it feels ordinary to them. A procurement professional who can introduce socioenvironmental criteria without destabilizing a supplier base is contributing to sustainability. A lawyer who interprets new market requirements and turns them into a workable compliance process is doing the same. So is a communications leader who can distinguish a substantiated environmental claim from a reputational risk. Their prior experience is not a detour from sustainable agribusiness. It can be the foundation for it.
The first practical step is therefore not to collect every new credential. It is to identify a specific sustainability problem and connect it to evidence from previous work. What problem did you solve? Who was affected? What decision did your analysis support? What changed because of your contribution? These questions convert a broad claim such as "I am passionate about sustainability" into a professional case that an organization can evaluate.
Visibility is Part of Professional Responsibility
Many technically accomplished women have been taught to let the work speak for itself. In complex organizations, however, the success of a work endeavor is rarely received correctly without succinct explanation. Leaders make decisions with incomplete information and limited attention. If expertise is not translated into a concise narrative, the person closest to the proven results may remain outside the room where priorities and resources are defined.
Professional visibility should not require exaggeration or personal branding disconnected from substance. It can begin with a clear sentence that links experience, context, and contribution. Instead of presenting herself as a generic sustainability specialist, a professional might explain that she applies supplier-management experience to responsible sourcing and traceability. This is both more detailed and more useful. It helps colleagues, recruiters, and partners understand when to involve her.
Visibility also grows through demonstrated work. A short analysis of a public sustainability report, a pilot project, a supplier-risk map, a training session, or a well-documented improvement can become proof of success. Small tests are especially valuable for women moving into the field because they reduce the pressure to abandon a current role before a new direction has been validated.
Influence is Built Through Relationships Across the System
Sustainability in agriculture is relational by nature. It connects producers and buyers, companies and communities, technical teams and executives, voluntary commitments and regulatory requirements. No individual, however qualified, can see the entire system alone. Influence comes from being able to listen across these boundaries, ask better questions and build enough trust for difficult information to move.
This is why professional networks should not be treated as a contest in visibility. The strongest networks are working relationships formed around shared problems. In Brazil, some of the most important learning in sustainable agriculture happens in field visits, technical working groups, and conversations among people who hold different pieces of the same challenge. Women need access to these spaces, and they also need permission to contribute before they feel they have mastered every term in the sustainability vocabulary.
Organizations can help by creating cross-functional projects, sponsorship relationships, and opportunities for experienced women to lead well-defined sustainability assignments. A procurement manager can join a traceability initiative. A human resources leader can help define credible social indicators. A communications professional can work with technical teams before claims are published. These assignments build organizational capacity while allowing women to develop relevant evidence without side-stepping their existing careers.
Organizations must examine how expertise becomes authority
The responsibility cannot rest only on individual women. Companies should examine who is invited to strategic conversations, whose operational knowledge is translated into policy, and what kinds of experience are recognized in hiring and promotion. If sustainability roles are designed so narrowly that only candidates with a smiliar job title qualify, organizations may overlook people who already understand the business, the territory, and the relationships needed for implementation.
Managers can make a difference by defining the actual problem before defining the ideal profile. They can distinguish essential technical knowledge from knowledge that can be developed on the job. They can evaluate evidence of judgment, negotiation, implementation, and learning, rather than relying only on familiarity with current terminology. They can also make commitment to the new role better understood and attainable by assigning visible responsibilities, giving useful feedback, and ensuring that contributions are clearly recognized.
A Stronger Path into Sustainable Agribusiness
The sector does not need experienced women to start over. It needs them to recognize what is transferable, close the gaps that genuinely matter, and highlight their contributions to make them visible to others. For women, that means choosing a defined problem, documenting evidence, building relationships, and testing a direction through practice. For organizations, it means widening the routes through which proven professionals can enter sustainability work and advance into positions of influence.
Sustainable agribusiness will not advance through technical expertise alone, nor through visibility without substance. Progress depends on people who can connect knowledge to decisions and decisions to conditions on the ground. Many experienced women have already spent years developing that capacity. The opportunity now is to ensure that the sector is aware of that ability, has seen it successfully practiced, and will provide the opportunity for women to lead with this knowledge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cynthia M. Cominesi is a Brazilian agronomist, author, consultant, professor and senior manager in an international organization. She has more than twenty years of experience at the intersection of sustainability, agribusiness, supply chains, certification and territorial development. Her work focuses on translating complex sustainability requirements into practical decisions, stronger professional pathways and credible implementation. LinkedIn
