WASHINGTON, Nov. 4, 2015 - Top
executives of some of the leading food and agricultural businesses in the
United States have teamed up with the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) in a bid
to reframe the debate about sustainable agriculture in a changing climate.
DuPont, Elanco, Kellogg and Land O’Lakes
are the initial members of a new CEO Council on Sustainability and Innovation
that hopes to identify ways that they can “combat and adapt to the realities of
increasing climate volatility, a growing population and other threats to a
stable food supply.” BPC says the council’s work will produce a report to be
released next year.
Former Agriculture Secretary Dan
Glickman, a BPC fellow, kicked off an hour-long discussion
with three of the CEOs in Washington last
week, saying industry is responding to market forces by adapting to changed
weather and climate patterns and meeting customer demands.
“Feeding the world in a
climate-compromised environment will be one of the defining challenges of the
century,” Glickman said. “The food and agriculture sector not only has to adapt
to these changing conditions but improve the resiliency and productivity of the
entire food chain and mitigate the effect of a changing climate,” he added.
The executives were unanimous in their
appraisal of the climate challenge but also agreed on the need to be more
transparent and do a better job explaining the realities of food production.
“We need to raise the bar on what we do
and then raise the bar on how we tell it,” said Jeff Simmons, president of
Elanco, a global animal health company.
Farmers have “a great sustainability
story,” said Chris Policinski, CEO of the farmer-owned Land O’Lakes
cooperative. “We don’t tell it to anybody other than ourselves as farmers. We
need to tell it to everybody.” Heightened consumer interest in where their food
comes from “is the best thing that ever happened. What a fantastic opportunity
to engage in this discussion.”
In just two generations, he said, the
United States has been transformed from a time when a quarter of Americans
farmed. “Farmers in this short period of time have been so productive that now
we only need 1.4 percent – and the number gets smaller: every time I say it
somebody corrects me because it goes down – to produce enough to feed all of us
and beyond,” he added.
“Food and agriculture, broadly defined,
is one of the great growth industries of our generation – one of the grand
challenges of our generation,” Policinski said. “We need to make the discussion
more robust than it is – more fact-based than it is. The good news is there is
a lot of interest but we have to inform the discussion in a better way. We need
to enrich the discussion to enable farmers to continue do the things they’ve
done for generations – grow food more productively, more sustainably to feed
the 9 billion” people who are estimated to populate the world by mid-century.
“Let us show you what sustainability
means, authentic sustainability,” Policinski said. “Sustainability is
productivity – authentic productivity using safe, proven technology,” he said.
America enjoys “the safest, lowest-cost, most abundant food supply in history,
right here, right now. Food is too important to allow emotion or nostalgia or
any other agenda to set policy for this country and importantly beyond.”
Although the word “sustainable” is
widely used in discussing the food system, “I have not heard two [people offer]
the same definition yet,” said Elanco’s Simmons.
Increasing population and income growth
will boost demand for animal protein 60 percent in the next 35 years, by some
expert estimates, he said. “Already demand for milk, eggs and poultry is
outpacing anticipated expectations,” but the increase in supply has been met by
greater numbers of livestock and poultry. “That can’t continue,” he said.
“How do we move the average up in
productivity? How do we move the average animal up in terms of productivity?”
Simmons asked. “Do I believe we can give consumers what they want – a world
without antibiotics in meat? Absolutely. We have 25 candidates in the pipeline
to take antibiotics out of animal production. It’s going to take time.”
Moving precipitously to simply
eliminate antibiotics would endanger animal health, he said. “We need healthy
animals, a healthy food chain and healthy people.” Elanco has recently acquired
two data companies, he said, as industry needs to invest in “big data and good
technology.”
Kellogg Chairman John Bryant said that
industry needs to “keep working to improve the transparency, wholesomeness and
goodness and make food even better.” While consumers want good food and want to
know more about it, “people don’t want to eat a chemistry set. They want real
food. We have very robust labeling system in the U.S. The USDA organic label is
one example. There is a lot of discussion around GMO (genetically modified
organisms) labeling and that the USDA organic label is a great example of what
we could do about non-GMO labels.”
BPC President Jason Grumet said the CEO
council “will help kick-start a more robust national conversation about what’s
already being done to promote sustainable food production and what more needs
to be done.” Although there is extensive research into sustainability
practices, he said, “there is little collective understanding of the strategies
being deployed, nor is there public appreciation of adaptation challenges,
mitigation opportunities, and the importance of agriculture in what must be a
global conversation” that the council hopes to promote.
#30
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