Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Innovation along the Value Chain - Mr. Jason Clay, Senior Vice President, Food & Markets, WWF

Published on Nov 18, 2015

https://youtu.be/xfY2fimfJiE

VideonetChannel VideonetChannel Subscribe268 Add to Share More 60 views 1 0 Published on Nov 18, 2015 Innovation along the Value Chain - Mr. Jason Clay, Senior Vice President, Food & Markets, WWF Category People & Blogs License Standard YouTube License SHOW LESS COMMENTS Transcript English (Automatic Captions) 0:00I want to give about a half a dozen examples of innovation very quickly 0:05along the value chain and then I can answer questions or give your contacts 0:11of people who know much more about these things than I do and I want to start 0:16with with mars given that that's what howard would have talked about mars buys 0:23fifteen to twenty percent of the world's cocoa for their chocolate products and 0:29what they've noticed is that about 20% of the trees produce eighty percent of 0:33the crop and in West Africa the average production is about a third of Southeast 0:39Asia and Southeast Asia is about a sixth of what is possible and so they're 0:46trying to figure out how to increase cocoa production in West Africa without 0:50clearing more rain forest and planting new areas so that mapped the genome of 0:57the coca plant they've put it all in the public domain so nobody can own it and 1:02they've begun marker assisted breeding and they now have the potential to 1:07produce ten times as much cocoa as they could in the past and it looks like at 1:13least four times as much kind of with average production in West Africa than 1:18they do today by doing that 1:23identifying those trees and and mapping them there are now able to produce about 1:29three to four times as much cocoa in about 30 percent of the land and they 1:34started thinking about what that actually meant and so they committed to 1:39various certification programs to become more sustainable within the system but 1:44they also notice that their suppliers in West Africa had the exact same 1:50malnutrition rates for their children as people who were not certified 1:57their suppliers had the exact same stunting rates for their children as 2:00producers who were not certified and they said this cannot be we're not gonna 2:05buy certified poverty and so they went back to the drawing board and thought 2:10that whatever was good for Coco must also be good for food crops and so with 2:16world while I found with the Beijing genomics Institute NEPAD in Africa IBM 2:22National Science Foundation in the USA etc they proceeded to develop a strategy 2:31in a platform to identify the hundred most important food crops in Africa that 2:35are actually orphan crops and those food crops then they committed to pain to map 2:43so that they could all increase productivity two three four five times 2:48because none of these crops have actually benefited from even basic plant 2:54breeding that has happened in many other parts of the world so the first 25 of 2:58these crops have been mapped already and the next ones are in line and now India 3:04has approached mars about doing the same thing on the subcontinent with a hundred 3:08most important food crops in India this map shows the relationship of child 3:13mortality and land degradation so one of the things they're also looking at is 3:17how to improve productivity on the lands that are currently used but if you 3:21remember the first map by using thirty to forty percent of the land for cocoa 3:26and thirty forty percent of the land for food production that leaves twenty 3:30percent of the land for nature and it means they can also take out the least 3:34productive land more marginal and and put it back where it can do more good in 3:40terms of my life quarters habitat etcetera 3:44these are some of the orphan crops that are being mapped as a part of this work 3:50and all of that mapping is being put in the public domain and fifty plant 3:54breeders a year are being trained in Africa to actually use marker assisted 3:57breeding to help bring the results of the mapping to feel some farmers 4:06another innovation that I think just shows the types of things that are going 4:11on has happened in alaska of the last forty years or so in 1970 about a third 4:17of the Alaskan Pollock was actually harvested is delay and the rest was 4:22thrown into the ocean by two thousand process he said min invented to lift off 4:33the rest of the flesh off the skeleton so there was nothing left on this on the 4:38carcass and that actually allowed the production of seafood to double without 4:44taking any more fish from the ocean and third part of the fish was then used for 4:50fishmeal and fish awhile which was then used to feed and other animals as part 4:56of their their feed regimes but basically this system just focusing on 5:02processing allowed a doubling of production without taking any more fish 5:07I mentioned Tetra Pak earlier Tetra Pak is interesting because they've started 5:13to look at where the carbon emissions are in their supply chain they realized 5:17they couldn't work on just what they control themselves and so they developed 5:22a program a voluntary program with their largest supplier in Brazil Levine and 5:27they buy tons of pulp and paper and tons of carbon from the same supplier and 5:33eventually if we can see this system going to scale we can begin bring one 5:38externality into pricing carbon bring it back into pricing for tons of Papua iKEA 5:48is the second largest buyer of cotton in the world about two to two and a half 5:54percent of global cotton and they have been concerned about the sustainability 5:57of cotton in trying to figure out how to do continuous improvement programs they 6:02worked with us and a number of other 6:04companies including H&M on the better cotton initiatives in ten-year period 6:11that has developed principles criteria and indicators for improved performance 6:18one point six million producers have been verified against those standards 6:23they represent today about 13 percent of global production and by February March 6:27of next year will be 18 percent in that period of time where it took to invent 6:33the system and and apply it they've already reduced those 1.6 million 6:39producers pesticide use by 50% water use by 40% synthetic fertilizer use by 30% 6:45and increased productivity and profits by 15 to 20% no premium just efficiency 6:52and that's what a lot of these different programs are showing IKEA will at the 6:58end of this next year only health PCI certified cotton in it's a blessing in 7:06the Mesoamerican Reef we noted the decline of reef species and we're very 7:11concerned about what the causes where we really thought it was over fishing it 7:17was tourism it was sewage from urban areas that was going in and what we 7:21later discovered is that it was over ocean from agriculture and pesticide 7:27runoff and so we identified the five most important agricultural crops 7:33accounted for 95% of pesticide use we worked with those companies we showed 7:39them data that we had from two sites thirteen different species the 7:42bioaccumulation of pesticides in the flesh or in the issue of plants and 7:48corals 7:50it was quite shocking to see how much bioaccumulation there had been the 7:55companies agreed to give their data we're talking chiquita dole fifes Del 8:01Monte etcetera to give their data about bananas pineapples palm oil sugar cane 8:08and citrus and over a ten-year period we were able to develop a global protocol 8:14for collecting information for analyzing that the labs we have reduced runoff 8:20into the reef of soil erosion by 60% and pesticides by 50% as measured in 8:27organisms in the reef and the health of that Reid has gone from poor to fair not 8:33as good as we would like to have seen it but it's actually in the right direction 8:35again this just shows how that reef area is that these are larval dispersal then 8:45it shows how is your it's almost like a toilet bowl flushing so you do 8:49everything stays in the reef that goes into the reef and and that's why the 8:53chemicals are so important once they're they're one of the things i wanna talk 8:59about is we have about two hundred and fifty billion dollars worth of raw 9:06materials that are being produced more sustainably at the farm and forest in 9:09the port farmgate prices that adds two to three trillion dollars worth of goods 9:16sold by 2020 we have commitments of four hundred and fifty billion dollars in 9:22purchases we have a two hundred billion dollar gap how we gonna fill it in five 9:26years time and if we don't feel it 9:29which companies are going to walk away from their commitment saying they tried 9:32but it wasn't possible so we're beginning to look at how long term 9:36contracts from those companies willing to buy can be translated into buying 9:41down the risk of people investing in that supply this can be private 9:46investment funds that can be banks who have been or governments who have been 9:50subsidizing agriculture and so we can actually begin to see a way to buy down 9:56the risk without putting a financial committee 9:59up front except a long-term contract with the prices negotiated based on a 10:04formula at the time of sale this is a kind of tree competitive approach where 10:11the market can actually use the markets change the market and that's what we're 10:16looking for in a lot of these these different systems if you want to get 10:22more information I'll be happy to give it to you later 10:25thank you very much detail at the moment but touched upon the cotton issue and 10:42certified cotton but my question is why not 10:48forest-based textile fibers because they are there are actually ways and concepts 10:59to bypass cotton and start from would we organized recently a biorefinery 11:07competition in in Finland and the winner happened to be a spin-off company 11:14research institute in Finland coach Geno and there is a one-step process from 11:21actually textile fibers but ok do we have a question from the audience the 11:31moment there 11:36the microphone ok they are viewers actually we are we are live so you have 11:48to use the mobile introduce yourself and Jarrett bus director Jason what kind of 12:02mechanisms should we have in place we can actually accelerate and scale up all 12:08these various innovations is it about natural capital approaches is it about 12:12the enabling environment is it about projects about shared risk and joined 12:19opportunities or is it a project that we are doing together between I Sandilands 12:24and WWF Netherlands on shared resources during solutions focusing on some 12:29regions probably all those things but I think I think the the innovation in 12:41individual problem solving that that smart people do within institutions is 12:47the germ that from which all this grows and then the question is how do we use 12:52the technology of today to spread information how do we have more open 12:57source databases how do we have how do we connect people who who are innovative 13:03in their own context but don't talk to each other one of the things that we've 13:07found is an organization is that we don't need to do anything anymore we 13:11need to influence those who have impacts that we need to really be able to change 13:16the way governments and companies work I have likened it to being honey bees we 13:21talked to people that don't talk to each other we pollinate cross-pollinate ideas 13:25and and there's a lot of institutions out there that do this and I think this 13:30is a way that we can make change happen faster but that is the question of the 13:35day how do we make this all happen faster because if you look at the 13:38numbers is coming very quickly Edison and why we're planning here the world 13:44was already moved on 13:45any plan around sustainability by the time you've written the plan and started 13:51to implement it it's out of date and it's just we're getting further and 13:55further behind and so we have got to start figuring out how to get ahead of 13:58the game we're putting our our money on identifying evolving issues and trends 14:06or braking issues and trends more quickly because if we can cut the time 14:10to awareness and consensus in half we can double the results at a quarter of 14:14the cost and that's the kind of thinking we need to begin to put in place to 14:19address these issues 14:20all right thank you mr. clay here feeling a bit behind but will give the 14:26next speaker that time that was allocated and then we'll have a short 14:29Q&A session