The Global Food System Is Heating Up - Can It Be Cooled Down? | Dr. Benedicte Deryckere | TEDxHSG
[Applause] thank you i am both a town mouse on the country mouse my mother come from the city on my father from the countryside who knows who remembers the fable the town mouths on the country mouse few do it's still learned in school but actually it was a story written for adults 350 years ago by jean de la fontaine and it finds its root in a story dated back from 600 years before christ basically for the one who doesn't have the opportunity to learn it it's about a proud rat from the from the city who invites his cousin from the countryside on humble cuisine for a test of the city life on a quite eccentric dinner but a big cat interrupts the dinner and they are forced to leave their meal on retreat in a hole to save their lives then the big cat tells the big cat tourism the town mouse tells his cousin that the big cat has already killed his father and mother and is constantly straightening him so the the country mouse decides wisely to go back to his safe home in the countryside and prefer security to opulence i grew up in the countryside with my grandfather living next to us my grandfather was like his father and grandfather a cheese maker he would purchase milk from nearby farms would turn it into cheese the cheese leftovers together with my grandmother's garden leftovers she was exploiting a large very large garden would be used to feed pigs and the pig's manner would be used in turn to fertilize my grandmother's garden no waste pure circular model everything was turned into tasty food pork meat as you all know all is good in pig pig potentially the best waste management device ever imagined by nature all was fine flourishing business my father started to work for my grandfather and my mother became the cfo she was a chartered accountant she became the cfo of the family business when she got married with my father and moved over from the city so all was fine up until the moment that the milk cooperative was established in the region and then the cheese of my grandfather became too expensive and eventually stopped his business and retired my father started to work for the milk cooperative and then was advised to start a new type of business an intensive egg production business i remember i was six seven years old at that time he would receive thousands of grown-up hands place them into cages by group of six seven and you know i was a child very curious constantly asking questions i would ask him dad what what what do you have in those big bags they would tell me it's soya beans it's food for the chicken it doesn't look tasty or so it was smelling it was really not looking like good food um and then i would ask him why why do they have their beak trimmed off and they would tell me you know them they get injured in the cages what's that it's antibiotics they get sick quite often and they need treatment and after several months of loyal egg laying they would be taken away in a truck and replaced by new hands on system i remember the question was from my mother mummy what's happening to the hands we eat them and i really remember she would reply to me quite elusively you know they are too skinny their egg their legs are distorted no butcher would want to purchase them nobody would want to eat them they have no value anymore we give them away to the and this just didn't make sense to the little girl i then was and i remember how relieved i was to spend my holidays in the city with my maternal grandmother enjoying the convenience the elegance of the city life shopping in department stores buying food on city markets it was so much nicer and at that time i properly disliked the country life systek make waste model no value anymore pure techmaster techmacquest model has become over the years the prevailing model of our food system a tech make waste approach and our global food system is based on three reinforcing mechanisms a reduced portfolio of three types of meat four types of crops three types of meat pork chicken beef four types of crop wheat corn rice for human consumption plus soya mainly for animal consumption then a set of intensive production practices at large scale fast as fast as you can produce food the better and then a mechanism of high volumes low price those reinforcing mechanisms apply are applied in silos on each type of food and there is no symbiosis anymore between plants and animals and moreover those reinforcing mechanisms creates accelerate accelerating loops and exponential trends over time negative and positive on the positive side exponential economic growth on prosperity unfortunately unevenly distributed over the world but many negative trends exponential loss of biodiversity because farmers across the world have stopped growing their local varieties to favor high yielding crops also loss of nearly 30 of local breeds over over time exponential loss in terms of agricultural jobs in the 60s 40 of the total u.s population was working on farms today it's just one percent and also an exponential increase in term of greenhouse gas emission in terms of water and soil depletion in terms of deforestation pollution and moreover negative trends in terms of health resistance to antibiotic is increasing within human beings human and animal population increases in diseases respiratory diseases in particular and moreover increasing the level of obesity across the world mainly within children today more people die of over on malnutrition than of all of them of under nutrition in 2019 the ln macarthur foundation has cursed the social and environmental impacts of our food system and she found that for one dollar spent on food two dollars are incurred in terms of social on environmental costs and those dollars will only increase because of those trending loops those accelerations those exponential trends moreover this system is incredibly wasteful one third of the food produced worldwide is lost or wasted so today actually we grow enough food for 10 billion people and you may you may remember the motto from the agro for every food and agro chemical industries we need to to feed 10 billion people by by 2050 this doesn't hold we already grow enough food for 10 billion people moreover this system i mean the system is really heating up it's largely contributing to climate change on global warming and it actually impacting the human unnatural systems it relies on and this creates major issues in terms of resilience to increasing climate change extreme climate change events but also in terms of food security during the last decades the price of food has constantly decreased but the price of food is expected to increase in the coming decades mainly because of climate change and this will create major bone of contention on the geopolitical point of view recently you may you may have heard brazil decided to limit its export of soya in order to protect its national economy so what can we do how can we cool down the system can we find less is more reversing loops reversing dynamics for food produced less globally unless intentionally few global companies contribute and benefit from the global food system so they have the power to generate those counter balancing loops and bend the exponential trends they have the power to do that by radically changing their business model we hope we roll over that we need to radically change the business model but there are two major roadblocks first what i learned for from 20 years of professional experience working with large business corporation working with top executives helping them actually by managing large business process engineering projects for them aimed at improving their inefficiency on improving their profitability what i learned and was actually confirmed by five years of doctoral studies on corporate strategies for sustainable development is that firms business business models act as a blinder large companies see the world through the length of their business model and they would only accept changes if they fit in their business model so more recently when some of those companies have been investigating technologies and innovation to to produce plant-based substitutes to meet or to even produce lab grown meat you may have heard that recently those are options actually which are aimed at all pushing further the intensive practices or aimed at shifting to other intensive practices those two examples are potentially two examples of new intensive practices so what can we do can we oblige them through regulation to change their business model another roadblock those companies are multi-billion companies 40 50 plus billion revenue company on a on a yearly basis they are larger than many national economies and gdp-wise so regulating their business model would require international regulation on recently the cop 26 has shown us how difficult it is to establish international regulation so what can we do how to cool our global food system down there is one coordinate it is to work on the system not in the system it's about recreating dynamics in order to inverse the trends and the ellen macarthur foundation is providing in a report food on the cir cities on the circular economy for food sorry and an approach which has the potential to to work on the system and it's it's about using cities as hub for for a circular economy for food and the rationale is that by 2050 80 of the food consumed worldwide will be consumed in cities and actually 40 percent of the crop plant worldwide can be found in a 40 in the 20 kilometer radius around cities and moreover cities are huge stakeholders because they find themselves at the end of the production consumption continuum and they are left with the responsibility to manage waste on the bear the cost of managing waste on food waste in particular so the idea is to reconnect cities with the countryside and have cities using their power demand for food in order to influence the way food is produced and consumed so we could then imagine envision cities where retailers department stores groceries restaurants hospitals would primarily source food locally and generatively produced and by degenerative we mean produce grown while taking care of the soils while avoiding exhausting soils we could then also imagine that cities would push forward their as a complement their urban farming practices may develop at scale structures in order to create and exploit large collective gardens or install and manage solar powered greenhouses and install them in gardens on rooftops on terrace balconies you many solutions exist in different shapes even vertical greenhouses which could be installed on your balcony and you'll be able to to grow food on the last aspect cities may also push forward and go beyond just reducing waste by establishing structures which would collect at large scale unsold food on food leftovers and reprocess that food into meals into canned food into juice you name it and resell that reprocessed food or give it to people in need for greater social purpose so such structures managed at large scale will not only create jobs but also have the potential to positively impact on a social educational and civic point of view so basically it's about keeping the value of food for as long as possible one of the core principles of the circular economy which is not only waste actually it's everything except waste it's about avoiding waste at the first place so basically it's really about reuniting about connecting cities back to nature on on the countryside actually if we re-read the fable the fable sorry from jean de la fontaine in today's context we may see the big cat as being climate change on global warming we actually even see it as being the pandemics we're going through today unlike the country mouse say wisely decide to go back to to his home in the countryside we may wisely consider less local and more regenerative food production practices by reuniting the tan mouth with the country mass may actually be able to work on the system and produce food less globally less intensively for a more secure for a more resilient on a more healthy food system thank you