 Speech to the FAOThank you, Ambassador Vasquez. I am deeply honored and very pleased to have been asked to speak with you today. It is an honor, as well, to be giving the George S. McGovern Lecture. Perhaps no living person has done more to advocate for the end of hunger in this world, and to explain to us how it can be achieved, than has Ambassador McGovern. We owe him our sincere thanks for his many decades of tireless work. I come to you today, partly as a farmer, to talk about farming and food. Although I now only farm in my leisure time—tending to a few sheep, helping with a dairy and cheese making, baling hay, and making maple syrup—I was for many years a dairy farmer in Henry County, Kentucky, a beautiful, fertile region that has been plowed for more than two hundred years by settlers from the Netherlands and elsewhere, and a region that was prized for game by native peoples for many centuries before that. My grandfather had a little farm but my father was not a farmer so I skipped a generation. I learned much more from my neighbors than when to plow or mow hay. I learned about the spurt of endurance that comes when you think you’re already too exhausted to do any more. I learned that even when I tried as hard as I could, made the very smartest decisions I could come to, I still sometimes faced a crop ruined by weather or my best cows sick with some disease. One learns a curious mixture of working all-out toward a goal and a bit of fatalism from the experience of being not completely in control of the outcome. So there I was, milking cows, raising crops, showing off my farm at field days the county agent would arrange, participating on the board of directors of my local Farm Bureau. And then came the US farm financial crisis of the early 1980s. The commodity bubble of the 70s had burst, prices for farm commodities resumed their historic slide, interest rates doubled and tripled, and farmers faced bankruptcy in record numbers. My farm was financially secure, but I looked around for ways to contribute leadership. Our Farm Bureau organization was stuck in a world view of success through efficiencies. That wasn’t enough. One of my neighbors, a really excellent dairy farmer, had to tell his son one Christmas holiday that the farm wasn’t earning enough for him to go back to college. The son committed suicide the day after Christmas. I began to get more politically active, and have spent much of the past thirty years trying to figure out how fathers wouldn’t have to say things like that to their sons. Interestingly, one of my mentors at that time was a wonderful old man named John Berry. Mr. Berry was Wendell Berry’s father and had helped pioneer the New Deal farm programs of the 1930s and 1940s. When I started to organize a new farm organization in Kentucky, Mr. Berry would call me up every now and then and say, in his deep gravelly voice, “Hal, I want you to come talk with me, young man.” Actually, he wanted me to come listen to him. He loved to talk. One of his stories was from his own youth, when as a young boy his father had come home from having sold their year’s tobacco crop. The whole family was eagerly awaiting a celebration. Tobacco marketing and Christmas have been entwined in that part of the US for decades. Unfortunately, that year the companies wouldn’t pay enough to even cover fees. The father was distraught, and young John Berry pledged that he would try and make sure that fathers didn’t have to come home to their families like that. I learned from Mr. Berry and many of the other pioneers of New Deal farm policy. I joined a movement of farm activists that staked out a position in opposition to big business. I founded a statewide organization and co-led a national policy advocacy organization called the Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture. As environmental impacts of agriculture because increasingly important politically, I helped broker an alliance between farm and environmental interests. The most coherent explanation that seemed easily available to us was an anti-corporate world view. I fully understand why millions of very well-intentioned young people around the world have adopted this world view. We all like simple answers, simple frameworks with bad guys and good guys. And, while I am proud of my colleagues in various social movements, I am here today to talk, in some respects, about how I have learned to see the world in a slightly different way. Corporations compete for survival, which seems to require continual growth, in the same system in which farmers compete for survival. Nobody intends the negative impacts. You and I know the costs we are paying for our food systems as they are now. The economics of farming are leaving millions of global citizens in desperate need. 854 million people are seriously underfed. More than half of those who are poor and hungry work in agriculture itself, earning wages that do not allow them to provide adequately for their families. Many of the rest—displaced by a food system that leaves little room for small farmers—have joined the one billion people now living in urban slums around the world. What we have created is a global food system that excels at producing inexpensive food for the wealthy nations, and very expensive food for poor nations. From the farmer’s point of view, most farm products have been subject to the same destructive pattern over the last half century. Prices fall. To compensate, production grows. So prices drop further. Good farming with conventional methods gets one only so far. So more marginal land goes into production and growing amounts of fossil fuels, water, and chemicals are used. The economic, social, and environmental effects are enormous. The consolidation of our retail systems is further challenging small farms. The consolidation of the food industry into a small number of very large buyers, at both the wholesale and retail levels, has changed the rules of the game. Fewer buyers, of course, means less leverage for the producer. But these large companies have, rightly and justifiably, instituted strict specifications for product quality, traceability, and environmental compliance—specifications that, with the fierce competition to offer the lowest prices, make it increasingly difficult for small producers to find a niche in the marketplace. Our food systems are not environmentally sustainable. We have created, since the Second World War, a food system that is terribly reliant on fossil fuels for production and distribution–-and we live now in an area in which peak oil will change, and climate change requires us to change, the ways we live. We begin this century knowing that our global population will continue to grow and that our food production capacity requires a resource that is causing catastrophic change to our climate and that will, in any event, run out at some point. And, of course, our problems are not only with the soil and the air. Because what must have once seemed unimaginable—that we could wipe out entire fish stocks—has now become a fact of our lifetime. Fishermen and fishing communities have been devastated, fish species have been harvested past the point at which they can regenerate, and the world is in danger of losing an essential source of protein and nutrients. And so, unlike those who farmed ten thousand or five thousand or even one hundred years ago, we have had to learn to see this planet not as one of infinite capacity, but as one that can be exploited, and wounded, past its capacity for self-healing. And, as we look more closely at the predicament we are in, and the things that brought us here, we confront the tragedy of the commons—the fact that, across so many domains, the incentives that drive individual behavior have disastrous effects on our common good. No one fisherman thought his actions would wipe out the cod stocks in Newfoundland. No one grocery chain executive thought her actions would drive small farmers from the marketplace. No one farmer thought his actions would increase the temperature of the planet. No one consumer, in buying the least expensive bag of coffee beans, thought her actions would leave a farm family in desperate poverty. So. How do we turn things around? I believe the answer—the only answer—is that we do it together. I have come to believe that the only way we can tip the balance in time to avert global disaster is to bring all the stakeholders in our global food system to the table in search of common solutions. The hour is too late, and the issues are too complex, for us to be working in opposition to one another. We need everyone at the table: farmers, farm labor, NGOs, government, consumers, small business, big business. And so I want to talk with you today about the work of the Sustainable Food Laboratory. The Sustainable Food Lab had its beginnings about four years ago. Its methods were conceived of by a small group of systems thinkers and change agents: Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, Adam Kahane, Otto Scharmer, and others. These individuals had come to believe that the world had grown so complex that the answers to our questions did not exist, and could not be produced in the usual ways. As Einstein wrote, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." (Of course, Einstein also wrote that, "Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the former." But let’s agree to leave that one aside for the moment.) So this small team invited a group of industry and NGO leaders to a field in Vermont, where they sat under a large tent for several days and admitted—some of them for the first time in front of others—how frustrated by and afraid they were of the global system they participated in. These captains of industry and leaders of some of the most respected NGOs in the world sat together and talked of feeling powerless to effect significant change. Of not knowing how to fix what everyone agreed was broken. And this “not knowing” came to be the heart of our work. Our task was, in some respects, to learn to be comfortable with not knowing at all how to tip the balance toward a saner and more sustainable food system. Rilke called it “loving the questions.” We called it going into the U: letting go of assumptions and conventional wisdom, learning to see the world in new ways, connecting to a deeper and larger source of wisdom, and allowing new ideas and solutions to emerge. So we went on learning journeys in Brazil. And spent time in the Arizona mountains, in groups and in solitary contemplation. And began to convene meetings of people from different backgrounds, places, and types of organizations, to see what we could learn from one another. Always, the goal has been to see with fresh eyes, so we could transcend the limitations of our habitual thinking and allow new solutions to appear. What became clear to us over time was that the Sustainable Food Lab was, first and foremost, a safe place in which players in the food system could talk, and get to know one another, and develop relationships that enabled them to transcend the usual roles and categories we typically assign to others. By coming together we allow our members to see the humanity in the Unilever executive, to see the business acumen of the Oxfam staff member, to see the ingenuity of the farmer. To realize in a profound way that we have a mutual interest in bringing deep change to the ways in which we produce and sell and consume our food. So that tells you something about our process, and our values, and a few years ago I wouldn’t have expected to be saying so much about the importance of relationships and personal journeys into deeper understanding. But I’ve come to see that these things are essential to our work. Now let me tell you more about our more visible work. The mission of the Sustainable Food Laboratory is to accelerate sustainable food from niche to mainstream so that we can preserve life on earth. Believing that we can transform the food system by working together, we have created a global network of change agents who represent businesses, NGOs, governments, farmers, farm laborers, and consumers. The aim is to create a common space in which new models for change can emerge, be tested, and be shared. We define a sustainable food system as one in which farmers, farm workers, and all other actors in value chains have livable incomes; the fertility of our soil is maintained and improved; the availability and quality of water are protected and enhanced; our biodiversity is protected; the food we eat promotes our health; fisheries are protected; and the flow of energy and the discharge of waste, including greenhouse gas emissions, are within the capacity of the earth to sustain forever. That’s a pretty tall order. But we have some pretty impressive partners. NGOs such as Oxfam and the World Wildlife Fund. Companies such as Unilever, Carrefour, SYSCO, and US Foodservice. Leaders from a number of domains who share the belief that we can, and must, create the future we intend to inhabit. Right now, our work focuses on Central America as a producing region and on North America and Europe as consuming regions. But our partners have developed projects in Africa and Asia as well, and next year we will embark on a learning journey to China to learn from and with colleagues there. We are a little more than two years old. But, already, we are seeing some remarkable developments that attest to the power of bringing together people and institutions that have not collaborated much together in the past. So let me tell you about some of our goals and pilot projects. The Food Lab’s approach has been to recognize the economic power of the world’s largest food companies, and to provide a space in which these companies can dialogue with others about how to use this power to transform the mainstream marketplace. Our core hypothesis is that the highest leverage for food system sustainability is in the buying practices of large buyers. When retail, food service and large manufacturers create sustainability specifications with their suppliers, change will drive through the whole system. Everything begins with supply chains, and a great deal of our work focuses on enhancing the social, economic, and environmental benefits of well-planned and well-integrated supply chains. SYSCO, the large food service supplier, has focused its recent work on incorporating environmental standards into its buying practices. SYSCO and the IPM Institute have developed integrated pest management and sustainable agriculture standards with SYSCO’s suppliers that have, in the first year, reduced pesticide use on 375,000 acres by a total of 300,000 pounds of active ingredient. The implementation of these standards has also resulted in dramatic reduction of other materials like oil, cardboard, plastic, and steel products. That is one company, partnering with an NGO, raising the bar for dozens of suppliers and hundreds of farmers. Other companies, meanwhile, are measuring and improving the social and economic impacts of supply chains on farm families in Central America and elsewhere. Costco, one of the largest US retailers, set out to assess the social impacts of their sourcing practices. To do so, they partnered with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and Counterpart International to survey farm communities and stakeholders along one supply chain in Guatemala. Costco is working with the wholesaler and farmer cooperative in this chain to identify improved livelihood opportunities through a process based in financial transparency in the supply chain. What Costco and its partners learn will be shared with the other members of the Sustainable Food Lab, so others can carry out similar projects more easily. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, a company that now supplies coffee for McDonald’s restaurants in the Northeast US, set out to assess the impact of their procurement practices on poverty and hunger in the supplier countries. With the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Green Mountain Coffee is measuring the impacts on poverty and hunger in five supply chains in Guatemala and Mexico with a goal of developing indicators that can improve global procurement practices. They meet in Vermont next week to review the findings of this study and begin to develop a response to what it reveals. Again: this is a project undertaken by one company, allied with NGO researchers, but one with the potential to have a significant, positive impact on the lives of a significant number of coffee-growing families and, perhaps, to raise the bar for others in the industry. Our members are also looking at fishing, not only at the disastrous consequences of over-fishing, but at the lives of those in developing nations who supply fish for northern markets. Carrefour, the world’s second-largest food retailer, set out to improve the lives of those who catch the Nile Perch from Lake Victoria for the European market. In partnership with the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation and community-based organizations in the countries around the lake, they have created fish procurement standards that place a premium on sustainably harvested fish. That premium is being invested in a community foundation that strengthens these fishing communities. As each of these companies and many more are innovating in specific supply chains, the coalition of business members are creating a continuous improvement program with each committing to measure progress toward the overall mission. Their draft goals are quite simple and straightforward:
Food is ultimately, of course, for eating—and some of our members are looking closely at the impact of global food systems on consumers, particularly schoolchildren and hospital patients who rely on institutional food services. School officials in Rome have revolutionized their food service program in just a few years, and through the Food Lab have been sharing what they have learned with their counterparts in New York City and other parts of Europe. Next month, a group of American and European food service professionals will come to Rome to see first-hand how a large city can create a system that provides healthy, delicious, and nutritious meals that include large amounts of organic and local food. One of our members—Emory University and Hospital, in Atlanta, Georgia—has set an extremely ambitious goal of procuring 75% of its food from local and sustainable sources within ten years. We are documenting their work so it can be shared with universities and hospitals across, and beyond, the US. We are all well aware of the interest in bio-fuels as a replacement for fossil fuels. Yet, too little attention has been paid to what happens when we convert farmland from food to fuel production—and what that will do to our ability to feed the nine billion people who will be on our planet by mid-century. And so a remarkably talented group of individuals has come together through the Food Lab to look at this issue. This team—which includes leaders from Unilever, JP Morgan, Adeco, Soros Investment, Shell Oil, World Wildlife Fund, and the Rocky Mountain Institute—will apply an earlier developed benchmarking tool and develop standards recommendations for policy makers and investors in bio-fuels. Finally, let me touch on consumer behavior. We know that a growing number of consumers in the world’s wealthiest nations are paying more attention to where their food comes from, what it contains, how it is packaged, and so on. Consumers, at least some consumers, care about sustainability. We put great stock in the potential of businesses to transform the marketplace. We believe that, in some cases—particularly with commons such as fisheries, where individual incentives collide with the common good—we must have stronger public policy to regulate behavior. Consumers have enormous potential to change the world. We need, as one of our members put it, a critical mass of benevolent, ethical consumers. Consumers who will pay a few pennies more for green beans, knowing that more money is going right into the pockets of the families who grew them. Consumers who will vote with their pocketbooks for food that provides social, environmental, and health benefits to all actors in the food system. With the support of the Kellogg Foundation and the King Baoudoin Foundation, we have commissioned research in both the United States and Europe into how people think about sustainability and food systems. The findings will help us develop a more informed and motivated consumer population, one that looks beyond price. Or, rather, one that sees price in a broader context, that understands that the real price of food includes soil degradation, water use, poverty and hunger in food-producing countries, and so much more. I am encouraged by this work. I take great pleasure in seeing new alliances form, in seeing the Food Lab serve as a safe space in which its members can talk, argue, sit a bit with their frustration at not knowing all the answers, and then allow new possibilities to emerge. We have not tipped the balance yet, nor would we have expected to so soon. What we do have is a map, an increasingly clear idea of how to get where we need to go. And it includes some of the following stopping points. 1. Turning individual business behavior into new shared standards. Agricultural production practices, processing, packaging, and distribution practices along supply chains are all business decisions, influenced by both regulations and customer demand. The Sustainable Food Lab, with the participation of major food companies, is positioned to exert great influence on the food and agriculture system by providing a resource and implementation “community of practice.” Our great potential is in supporting businesses interested in developing a set of shared standards for procurement that will promote the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental profit. Perhaps nothing would be so instrumental in tipping the balance in the right direction. 2. Sharing innovations widely. Our role is not only to broker relationships and support innovation, but also to share what our members learn with as many audiences as we can. Through our meetings, web site, learning journeys, and written case studies, we will be looking closely at which strategies work, and why, and at how these strategies can be replicated elsewhere. We will also, of course, examine the strategies that turn out not to work very well. 3. Developing ways to measure our progress. When of our biggest challenges is going to be how to identify which interventions are most effective at leveraging change. Ultimately, we will want to measure the change in the number of producers, for example, who are supplying sustainable commodities. We’ll want to look at the growth in the percentage of food dollars spent on sustainable food, and at the market share these foods comprise. And we will want to track the change in consumer awareness an behavior. We will surely need help in developing these metrics, and I invite your suggestions and participation in this work, as I do your participation in every aspect of our work. You know this work. It is likely that I have told you nothing you don’t already know. But let me continue on just a bit and tell you some of the principles we are seeing emerge as fundamental to any success we might achieve.
The Sustainable Food Lab is young, and while we have more than 80 members, some of them quite large, we are not ourselves a large organization. Our staff is small. Our resources are limited. Our role is to convene and facilitate, to measure and to document the innovations that emerge, to support the coming together of partnerships and alliances. But to the extent that we can, we are willing and able to work with each of you to advance our common interest in growing and distributing food in ways that feed our bodies, strengthen our global community, and nurture our soil. We stand here at a critical moment, in a decade that may well determine our ability to feed people on this planet through the rest of the century. Let’s determine that we will work together in new ways, ways we cannot now even imagine, to turn the crises before us into new opportunities. Thank you very much. |
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