Getting Real
As the world tilts on its dark side the prospect of our civilisation sliding into a quagmire of deep inequity and injustice is being felt - not just across the great cities of the developed world but in the most remote villages of the Global South.
Envy, greed, hatred, overindulgence to the point of futility, aided and abetted by a generation of morally bankrupt and incompetent leaders, have gained more than a toehold in our dealings with each other. Shadows of the human story now lengthen - growing more sinister by the day. I had never supposed it might end like this.
The flare-up of fanatical terrorism and the untold fear this is causing; the collapse of trust in political institutions; corruption; right-wing militancy; the self-serving, myopic agendas of most large corporations; the widening gulf between the wealthy and the destitute; a lack of adequate laws to protect the environment; and the tedious dictatorial defiance of people like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Kim Jong-un in North Korea and Prayut Chan-o-cha in Thailand have become, or threaten to become, festering sores on the face of humanity.
Moreover the mass movements of people seeking refuge as a result of these intertwined issues is evidence that artificially-contrived borders, once thought to be impervious to unsanctioned forms of migration, are actually highly porous and vulnerable to new, unforeseen pressures.
Fuelled by an unprincipled global finance industry, whose main game is now one of sustaining predatory capitalism, aligned with puppet masters on Wall Street, and those like Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers who reign over the corporatisation of public life and who therefore find it in their best interests to feign outrage at anything pertaining to humanitarian idealism, the response of many state governments has been both extreme and naïve.
Apprehension and confusion in elitist ranks has brought about a schism between power exercised internationally and parochial politics. Inequality is metastatising. The resulting panic has seen increased public surveillance, heavy-handed policing, the metastasis of discrimination, and the methodical withdrawal of freedoms in exchange for questionable upgrades in personal and state security. This is leaving many ordinary people, mere witnesses to such shifts, anxious and perplexed – concerned for the environment, for the disadvantaged, and with what unknown shocks might lie ahead that future generations will need to take care of.
In this context many organisations and institutions are beginning to tremble. But the traditional not-for-profit sector finds itself increasingly isolated – caught between politics and power they are desperate for funds. They are also scrambling to find new meaning in order to maintain their niche in a society seemingly primed to jettison the dispossessed, and almost anyone else seeking sanctuary from the horrors of war, famine and repression, without so much as a backward glance.
In this context some NGOs have been compelled to define their distinctiveness in very parochial terms, often to the point of competing for limited resources with similar-constituted enterprises. Unhappily their ingrained convictions lead them into dilemmas from which they cannot escape. All too often they allow themselves to be guided by too modest an impulse. They then end up treating the more harrowing symptoms of a disease rather than using their resources more wisely to cure the disease itself. But there is a compelling logic even to that.
For example, it is a relatively straightforward decision for an organisation like WWF to put great store in its “adopt an endangered animal” campaigns. This is a proven and highly popular way of attracting donations. But while the organisation continues to spend its time and resources on that particular strategy it probably prevents them from finding an effective way of conserving the world’s biodiversity – which is their espoused mission – in collaboration with other like-minded organisations. In this instance the compassion and pragmatism exhibited by WWF executives acts against their long-term strategic success. But this apparent failure, in terms of the big picture, is also a necessity if they are to endure as an entity. This is why endurance has become a driver in and of itself.
Meanwhile more monolithic organisations, especially unwieldy off-shoots of the United Nations as well as issues-based and charity-driven organisations like World Vision and Greenpeace, for example, who find themselves caught in the clutches of international power plays, increasingly focus on polishing their entitlement attitudes and bureaucratic credentials.
The fact that all kinds of charitable and aid organisations, large and small, have been declining in relevance for at least the past two decades seems to matter little to those in charge – though it is abundantly clear to many of the staff I talk to on a regular basis, who despair that anything is likely to change soon, and that promises being made cannot possibly be kept.
A large part of these problems comes down to a failure of leadership – explicitly the failure of those thrust into positions of authority to recognise and appreciate the need for collaboration at scale if they are going to stand any chance at all of transforming those systems most indispensible to humanity. Sadly such widespread incompetence has also been accompanied by a profound lack of wisdom and of foresight. These disabilities go right to the heart of our lack of proficiency to address the global problematique we so enthusiastically manufactured in previous eras. It also raises a most fundamental question: Are we wise enough to survive our own success?
Illiterate Leaders
At its core is the issue of illiterate leadership - in this case the moral, psychological, cognitive and instrumental incapacity to engage in collaborative system design - set against the mutable cultural morphology of our innately nomadic tendencies. A related problem is the hugely complex nature of metasystemic design and the disparate controls, such as ownership and process variations, for example, embedded within each component of a system.
All human-made systems are impeccably designed to produce the results they get.[1] If we become dissatisfied with the outputs, for any reason, or they do not meet their expectations, then the only real option we have is to reconfigure those components (commonly referred to constraints) that cause the system to act in a dysfunctional manner.
It is a fact that none of the systems human beings have devised are inherently generative. Unlike natural ecosystems they lack the capacity to evolve in alignment with fluctuating conditions. This was never a problem until we irretrievably (albeit unconsciously) altered just one of those critical conditions - becoming so fecund that human numbers swelled to well over 7 billion – 5 billion of those in the past 70 years.
The correlation between population size and a system’s performance, you see, is not as trivial as you might think. For example, a welfare system designed as a safety net for one million citizens, subsidised by taxing the income of 80 per cent of those same citizens, will simply collapse if the population doubles without a subsequent increase in the numbers of tax payers, the amount of tax levied, or innovations that significantly lower the cost of health care and unemployment. This is simple mathematics. Yet it has hardly ever been taken into account as a vital element in whole-system planning and design, except in hindsight.
If present demographic trends continue our planet will be home to 8 billion people by 2025 and 9.6 billion by 2050. So this is a statistic we can no longer afford to ignore.
We are now witnessing natural ecosystems that are critical for our survival - such as rivers, soil, the oceans and the biosphere – under extreme duress, while those we invented over the course of centuries – systems that were never intended to meet even the most rudimentary needs of such a vast population, are breaking down in front of our eyes.
Furthermore the systems we have invented, again unlike natural ecosystems are, for the most part, hugely wasteful and inefficient. One of these is the hugely intricate network of units assembled to investigate, grow, process, distribute, regulate, market, retail and consume food – a system which then has to deal with the loss and wastage, currently estimated as up to half of all food produced.
The modern industrial food chain is an immensely complex organism of interdependent (often conflicting) motives, exchange and distribution mechanisms, relationships and interactions. It touches every aspect of society - from economics, commerce, culture and politics, to science, technology and the environment. It is also wasteful and increasingly toxic to humans.
In order to improve the quality, integrity and security of the food chain we must first study the interdependencies within the entire system. Reducing loss and waste, for example, will surface other “indirect” factors that need modification or elimination altogether. For example, genetically engineered varieties of strawberry could be farmed to grow quickly all year round and with less likelihood of perishing within a few days of being picked. This innovation could eradicate the need for chemical additives that are currently used to preserve non-seasonal fruit and vegetables, in some cases for months, until they arrive on the supermarket shelves. On the other hand waste would be far less of an issue if fresh berries could be bought directly from the farm or from local farmers’ markets. In that case transport costs would be minimal and no preservatives would be needed to keep the fruit garden-fresh.
The issue of toxicity, not just to human health but also to the land, is much more apparent in the case of fast-food outlets. The most pervasive ingredient of a McDonald's meal, for example, is corn-derived carbon and corn starch. All the chicken and beef at McDonald's is produced from corn in the form of feedlots, while the soda also contains high-fructose corn syrup. Nutritionally speaking this monoculture on a plate is extremely unhealthy. It is also a fundamental absurdity.
Seventy per cent of the grain grown in the US, for example, goes to feed livestock. Most of this livestock is cattle, which are uniquely suited to eating grass, not corn. To help them tolerate corn, antibiotics are pumped into the cattle. And because the corn diet leads to pathogens, we must then irradiate their meat to make it safe for humans to eat. Feeding so much corn to cattle thus creates new and entirely preventable public health problems. It contributes to soil erosion, pollution, food poisoning - and obesity.
Corn also happens to be a greedy crop, which is probably why it is so heavily subsidised. It takes two litres of fossil fuel and 15,000 litres of water to produce 25 kilograms (or a bushel) of corn. Growing corn as an intensive monoculture requires more pesticide and more fertiliser than almost any other crop. As the soil degrades immense amounts of nitrogen fertiliser must be used to keep the land arable. Furthermore, when the run-off from the fertiliser leaches into ditches, streams and rivers, the nitrogen stimulates growth of phytoplankton and algae that starve the area of oxygen, to the extent that fish are unable to live in it. These polluted “dead zones” have not received much attention in the popular press compared to carbon in the atmosphere. But in terms of the sheer scale of human interference in one of the planet’s most critical natural cycles, the impact from nitrogen is possibly even more dramatic.
The task for studying these and related matters falls to the various agricultural research institutes around the world and global partnerships like CGIAR. These are relatively small players within a colossal system. As already pointed out many of these NGOs are under-funded and scrambling to retain their relevance in a world turned upside-down. By focusing particularly on their funding and investment patterns we may be able to discover some clues as to how we can approach the redesign of the global food system, including what strategies can be used to leverage constructive change.
Perfection in Mind
The food system as currently configured is regulated by a comparatively small number of positive feedback loops. These are intentionally designed to advantage big business, mostly in the form of financial incentives and earnings that can then be used to generate shareholder wealth. Thus this system has descended into an econocentric monoculture, reliant on fossil fuels for its continuation and fixated on the notion of scarcity. This should have been apparent from the examples outlined above regarding the intensive nature of growing corn for the fast-food market, and its unintended consequences.
It is possible to argue that the industrial food chain is highly efficient - but only from the point of view of profit maximisation for a relatively small cadre of corporations and their investors. This might be reasonable if it were not for the fact that the system is deliberately biased against other stakeholders - particularly those who are socially or economically vulnerable. Most other parties have become subordinate to the strategic intentions of big business and are held captive by these dynamics. This is not a predicament unique to food. It actually reflects a universal trend, starting immediately after the 2nd World War, embracing the financialisation of every aspect of our lives.
Some of the largest and most powerful industrial agribusiness companies in the world, including Monsanto, Nestle and Cargill, for example, have taken advantage of this situation by controlling every aspect of the upstream value chain - from the farm to the supermarket. Other large players, such as farm machinery manufacturers John Deere and large retail food chains such as Tesco, Wal-Mart and Woolworths, hold sway over the downstream.
Alarmingly, the downstream landscape features increasingly dubious, often openly disreputable practices - marketing chemically saturated foods thought to be causing diabetes, malnutrition and obesity. Today more and more people are claiming with greater certitude that processed food presents a serious factor in terms of human morbidity.
The organisations to whom I have alluded also benefit in other more subtle ways. By maintaining the status quo they effectively quarantine the food system from badly needed reform. They shape government food policies to reflect their particular needs. They send small producers to the wall. And by prolonging energy-intensive industrial agriculture they create a scheme of production and distribution that is increasingly unsustainable.
Fortunately there are already encouraging signs this cannot go on for much longer. Developments in renewable energy, agroecology, and blockchain governance technologies, for example, indicate we may be entering a period where innovation increases and prices keep dropping, yet production continues to rise. Many economists find this hard to accept as this logic runs counter to orthodox economic theory. But, if true, it could mean that small-scale local production will get a serious boost and large corporations may find themselves needing to down-scale and localise activities to a far greater extent. This could precipitate a new shift in the relationship between governments and the private sector while redefining what we mean by the term globalisation.
The impulse of the large agribusiness companies to maintain the status quo as a pre-requisite for creating shareholder wealth differs significantly from the moral imperative of national and state governments to take care of their citizens. To my amazement the United Nations declaration that access to food and water is a human right is still not a view commonly shared by the private sector. Indeed there are often basic discrepancies between private and public sector enterprises aims when it comes to food.
While corporations take care of their investors, governments are more concerned with the public good. This remains the current theory at least. In practice the ties that link big business interests to government policy often end up in knots that are difficult to untangle. Thus while such inherent conflicts of interest might be casually acknowledged, the unintended effects flowing from such inconsistencies are routinely ignored – glossed over for fear of causing some slight offence that could inadvertently damage mutually beneficial (usually financial) relationships.
So we increasingly see slick marketing campaigns from major industrial suppliers projecting false impressions of unity, solidarity, and alignment with the public good. The resulting narratives are a fiction - but states do not call the lie, preferring silence or obfuscation. The reasons are obvious. Both parties hope to convince us they are intent on pursuing identical aims. While that may be true at a certain level, it is certainly far from clear that this is the case in every situation. Nor would such a close symbiotic relationship necessarily be in the best interests of the public.
Because of this willful deception, some governments - predominantly those who are financially impoverished and are also subject to ballooning public debt – see agribusiness companies pouring billions of dollars into research projects with explicitly grandiose outcomes, such as an ambition to feed the world, for example, which is actually about capturing a larger market for their goods, and then use that in justifying their reluctance to spend taxpayers’ money, duplicating what they perceive to be the same ends.
This is a dual deceit. A game that means most investment in agriculture today is channeled into a one-dimensional quest to produce more food or increase yields. Research in alternative agrarian technologies, agroecology, and poverty-reducing forms of agriculture receive only token funds from the agribusiness industry for one very simple reason: the results would potentially weaken the industry’s supremacy by constraining corporate profits and freeing communities from a yoke of serfdom. Nor is the agricultural research community likely to get adequate government funding while research goals mimic or pretend to be identical to those being pursued by the private sector.
In order to win the future agricultural investment game, the high level goals and outcomes of the non-aligned research community must be significantly different from those of the major corporate players and must be seen to produce different and better results. This would generate far greater viability for the food system but is a hazardous playground politically speaking.
Research organisations must be able to point to inherent differences between their clients’ needs and the self-serving goals of the agribusiness conglomerates - with whom they might still enjoy mutually-beneficial relationships – whose interest is focused solely on increasing profits. Unless reasoned justifications for why alternative investment strategies, including those avoided by the corporate world, are so crucial to humanity’s well-being are provided by the research community, nothing will radically change. No plea for additional funds based upon scientific rigour, nor emotional arguments however well-crafted, are likely to overcome the current deficit.
There is no single solution to eliminating hunger, poverty and malnutrition, nor of improving the productivity of agricultural systems. So much depends on context, resources and capabilities, a willingness to collaborate, and access to relevant innovations. But if non-governmental strategies are not sufficiently distinctive, the ability to compete against a deeply ingrained belief system that is now virtually impossible to dislodge will become futile. Fewer resources will come the way of research institutes as a consequence. In addition, if strategies are not leveragable and cannot work at scale, these NGOs will fall still further behind. This may be one of the most critical of present day and future dilemmas for the design of the food system.
Copycat strategies, whereby the goals of the large agribusiness corporations are mimicked and causes are apparently aligned, only serve to weaken the authority and distinctiveness of research entities in the long run. So these organisations should not try to feed the world by tweaking the current system. They should not directly pursue greater yields. And their quest should not be to produce more and more food. These are corporate strategies and they should be left to the large agribusiness players, if indeed that is the game they want to continue to play.
The mission of agricultural research bodies should be complementary to the extent that it assists grass roots growers to place less reliance on industrial methods - encouraging them to move into deploying low-cost, culturally-enhancing, commons-based, and ultimately poverty-reducing and organic agricultural innovations in the management of sustainable agro-ecosystems.
Mitigating the Risk
This strategic dilemma is laden with risk. The large agribusiness companies have their own research agendas. If their short-term goals, for that is invariably what they are, are not supported by the non-aligned research community, the latter may be cast as the enemy by an industry intent on refusing to play game in any way that would hasten genuine reform of the food system and lead to a subsequent loss of power and profits. That could well result in them protecting their intellectual property more vigorously and openly opposing the development of alternative, albeit viable, systems at every juncture – especially in terms of agroecology.
On the other hand if NGOs fail to impose their own unique role in the food system public sector funding may stall and dry up altogether. In this case the risk is that NGOs will be perceived to be irrelevant or, at best, superfluous fringe players, in comparison with the mainstream industry.
This situation is not all downside risk. In fact there are considerable advantages for research bodies in pursuing dissimilar strategies to the corporate agribusiness industry. For example:
- Traditional know-how and techniques, like permaculture, are frequently superior to industrialised farming practices and just need better marketing and propagation to be accepted by farming communities
- Most technologies are getting cheaper - especially those that enable collaboration, communication, and the sharing of information
- Much knowledge is free, as in the Global Innovation Commons - a massive repository of over two million inventions, held in Trust by Centre for the Future, that are out of patent and are available for anyone to use, anywhere, without restriction, at no cost.
The conventional funding mix is also changing in ways that could work well to the advantage of researchers. Corporations are becoming much more narrowly focused in their spending. The need to remain viable in highly competitive global markets, together with the fickle nature of customer loyalties, have become abiding distractions for them.
Meanwhile as public debt grows, and governments begin to take the pursuit of a low carbon economy and the provision of free public services such as health and education more seriously, liquidity will shrink. Taxes will shift from labour and consumption towards capital and wealth. Private equity firms, funds managers and venture philanthropists are ready to step into this void. Indeed many investors already see agriculture as a key component in their portfolios - especially as they expect agricultural earnings to outperform equities and bonds over the coming decade.
In that context it is important to appreciate a novel philosophy that is beginning to gain ground in the investment community. As the conscience of ultra high-net-worth individuals, persuaded by a few celebrity investors with an humanitarian ethos - shifts deeply ingrained attitudes about how wealth might be better used, philanthropy is being reinvented. Today’s impact investors aspire to leverage massive social change where revenue-generating portfolios are used to channel funds into more principled “not-for-profit” ventures that can scale-up once the source idea is proven to be effective.
Seen purely from this perspective, the time-honored arms-length competitive process regarding the giving of large grants is increasingly considered a blunt instrument. Outcomes are difficult to measure and appear to have little enduring impact. Besides this process is more suited to an old-fashioned scarcity mentality rather than the contemporary idea of provisioning within abundance. The use of small and micro investments to prototype new products, processes, and relationships, on the other hand, is gaining in popularity.
An acupuncture-like appreciation that small, well-targeted, donations can release entrepreneurial energy within a community, thus effecting system-wide transformation in ways that large grants often fail to do, is also becoming prevalent. This opens up new options for philanthropists and sponsors to directly engage with their beneficiaries while educating and freeing local groups to embrace new responsibilities, rather than passively accepting their plight as labourers in a system controlled and operated by a coalition of big business and government. Another trend that cannot be ignored is the cumulative amount of money being spent on dealing with systemic emergencies, whatever the cause. Global heating is making disasters such as floods and droughts more frequent and intense, land and water more scarce and difficult to access, and increased yields in agrarian productivity even harder to achieve. These effects increase the risk of hunger and the breakdown of food systems.
In this situation it is not hard to imagine a future where a significant proportion of all monies invested will focus on the resilience of our most life-critical needs, like food production, security and distribution, for example. This is a system already struggling to come to terms with a global population of over seven billion people at a time when the cost of food is rising and farmers are having to adapt agricultural techniques and apply disaster management strategies.
Three Wild Cards
- Climate
When most of us think about climate change we imagine gradual increases in temperature and only marginal shifts in other climatic conditions, continuing indefinitely or even leveling off at some stage in the future.
Conventional wisdom has persuaded us that modern civilisation will either adapt to whatever weather conditions we face, and that the pace of climate change will not overwhelm the adaptive capacity of society, or that our concerted efforts, such as those embodied in the recently concluded Paris Protocol, will be sufficient to mitigate the most severe impacts. Optimists assert that the benefits from technological innovation will be able to outpace the negative effects of climate change. I believe this to be an unsophisticated point of view infused with, and propelled by, our innate hubris.
Climatically, the gradual change view of the future assumes that agriculture will continue to thrive and growing seasons will lengthen. Northern Europe, Russia, and North America will prosper agriculturally while southern Europe, Africa, and Central and South America will suffer from increased dryness, heat, water shortages, and reduced production. Overall, global food production under many typical climate scenarios increases.
This view of climate change may be a dangerous act of self-deception, as increasingly we face weather related disasters - more hurricanes, monsoons, floods, and heat waves and droughts - in every region around the world.
Past examples of abrupt climate change suggest it may be prudent to consider rapid climate change as entirely plausible, especially because some recent scientific findings and new records suggest that we could be on the cusp of such an event. This past October in Australia was the hottest recorded for any month since 1910. Nationally, maximum temperatures were 3.4 degrees celsius above average for the month and 2.7 degrees warmer than previous years. This is simply another factor that could expedite changes already noted in the way funds are allocated and investments are made.
- Coal
One of the most powerful outcomes from the heightened awareness of our changing climate has been the recent shift away from fossil fuels by a diverse group of institutional investors. The shift away from is the fastest growing global divestment movement in history. This movement has already seen pension funds, universities, churches and local councils commit to pulling their investments, currently valued around USD 2.6 trillion, out of coal, oil and gas companies.
As this wave of institutional divestment accelerates, individual investors will begin to embrace the same thinking - and a global investor-driven push for a new low carbon economy will become a powerful driver of change. What is not yet ordained is where this money will be reinvested. At the moment the renewable energy industry is benefitting from early reinvestment patterns. But other options, compellingly communicated, could see huge inflows of capital to agriculture and agroecology research – especially as this would be viewed as a risk-reduction tactic by the markets.
- Connectedness
The dire situation concerning food cannot be quarantined from emergencies in other life-critical systems. Investment in agricultural research and associated fields could benefit from an explicit association in the public’s mind with other well exposed issues. Foremost among these today are climate change, natural disasters, terrorism and the links between food, poverty and conflict.
Arundhati Roy and others argue that the World Bank and the IMF under the guise of philanthropy are complicit in the development of approaches that privilege the “free market” systems of just a few global conglomerates. Currently the World Bank is helping 130 countries take action on climate change. In 2014, it doubled those financial lendings targeting adaptation. The Bank-administered USD $7.2 billion Climate Investment Funds are now operating in 48 countries, leveraging an additional USD $43 billion in clean and ethical investments.
However, while the World Bank is intent on supporting action on the ground to finance the kind of projects that help the poor find their way out of poverty, greater care must be taken to ensure that such actions do not consolidate the non-viable systems that have caused problems in the first place.
Making the connection between grass roots farming, climate change, and alternative models of distributed capital, based upon fostering community rather than reinforcing vertical institutional power still further, could well lead to additional funds being made available from organisations like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. This is acutely the case if organic, chemical-free, local agriculture as a key strategy for shifting large numbers of people out of the poverty trap.
Future Pathways
So what should agricultural research organisations do differently that would help shift the entire global food chain towards greater viability - especially in terms of access, nutritional value and food security? How should their thinking change? How can they craft future pathways that continues to access available private sector and state funding for a set of unique strategic imperatives? In other words how can they adapt to an investment landscape that is changing quite dramatically?
In the end all strategy is temporary. Because the external world is so dynamically complex the most effective strategy today is frequently navigational – a flow of real-time responses to the ever-shifting fluctuations and nuances in the food system and its contextual dynamics. So where is the future of agricultural investment going to come from and how should it be used for the greatest impact? To that end I see a shift in strategic emphasis will be needed.
Most research bodies commonly espouse the importance of cooperation and innovation. I would urge putting greater emphasis on reinvention and, particularly the prototyping of alternative systems, processes and relationships that can spring without too much effort from a connected communal base and networks, keeping a close eye on Beddington’s Perfect Storm as an unwavering focus.
In terms of actual strategic content a number of options present themselves. These are relatively straightforward to envisage, yet require courage and determination to execute – particularly if the non-aligned research community concludes that a move away from what previously brought them success is warranted, or that they should now highlight the need for grass roots collaboration and innovation with even greater passion than before – as indicated in this paper.
Taking a longer view, the main game will be to forge a revitalised and unique strategic role for agricultural research entities that heals the more destructive effects of industrial agricultural practices that have mined the earth and plundered its natural resources in a manner seemingly blind to the aftermaths. One thing is absolutely certain from a purely strategic viewpoint: research organisations must stop espousing and duplicating the profit-focused corporate goals of the major industry players. Instead they must think for themselves. Finding appropriate alternative themes worthy of support in their own right, and projects that invite collaboration on their own terms, will be critical.
Their future mission should be to liberate a suite of systemically forceful, financially viable, culturally acceptable and socially engaging strategies that are internally consistent, focused on outcomes that local communities find compelling and inspiring, and that help neutralise or reverse the more toxic elements resulting from the worst excesses of industrial agriculture.
This needs to start with an appreciation that the term agriculture has lost almost all its original meaning. Large corporate farms are fundamentally different from those of smallholders, niche producers (organics), intensive farms and urban producers. Future investment and research therefore needs to be framed against this more complex matrix of understanding.
For example, starting from the bottom-up, focusing on innovation that occurs as a result of reinventing management and organisational systems, and always remembering that one size does not fit all, they might focus their efforts on co-creating the following with relevant stakeholders:
- Designing ways of supplying diverse, culturally-appropriate foods to different regions
- Legitimising food democracy by securing the ability of smallholder farmers to prosper while reducing dependence on imports
- Encouraging poverty-reducing forms of agriculture that suit local conditions
- Helping cities become self-sustaining by using disintegrated supply chains; innovative composting; alternative forms of al production such as agroponics, etc.
- Sharing knowledge freely in appreciation that different cultures have often pioneered solutions to present-day problems but that these are often forgotten or outlawed owing to the pressure from a highly litigious agribusiness lobby
- Advocating open source and commons-based innovations (rather than just scientific breakthroughs) that are low-cost or even free to implement – as exemplified by the Global Innovation Commons
- Finding strategies for sustaining soil and water resources and for connecting urban consumers with local organic food producers
- Strengthening cooperatives so as to sell to large buyers under dependable contracts
- Raising food security levels within areas that are currently vulnerable.
Needless to say these initiatives can only succeed if they are supported and openly complemented at national and regional levels, and accompanied by an international willingness to provide a coherent framework that integrates and aligns new strategic imperatives. This is best done by designing changes into the food system that create enduring value whatever external factors prevail.
National and regional bodies can help, for example, by introducing natural capital accounting into national accounts; doing more to encourage local resilience; persuading affluent nations to move away from export-driven agricultural policies - thereby making space for small producers in local markets; curbing the desire of wealthy countries to purchase large tracts of global farmland for industrial purposes; containing the demand for animal feed and agrofuels; and reducing food waste.
All these examples are worthy of consideration in the context of a revitalised grass roots response to the problems facing the food system. They also have the advantage of fitting more suitably into an agenda concentrating on entrepreneurial activities leading to greater social impacts, that are occupying the new generation of philanthropists and impact investors.
This article is an expanded, albeit redacted, version of strategic advice commissioned by APAARI and delivered in the form of a paper and presentation to their High Level Policy Dialogue in Bangkok in December 2015. Taking just one element in the global food system – namely changing investment patterns in agricultural research - it explores the various strands of design thinking and contextual relevance, much of it counterintuitive, required in any serious attempt to redesign a dynamically complex system regarding this theme. Given that the reinvention of humanity’s most life-critical systems is core to the mission of my new enterprise, I hope this brief article will evidence the wide-ranging and discursive analysis required of any such inquiry undertaken by Centre for the Future.
[1] I am using the term system to mean a set of interdependent components forming a complex, organic, and recognisable whole. Every system is defined by its spatial and temporal boundaries, contained within (and influenced by) its environment, described by its structure and purpose, and expressed in its functioning.
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