Innovations to Build Food Resiliency | Asia Summit 2022

Context and Definitions

• Food resiliency is defined as the ability to prepare for threats, absorb impacts, recover from, and adapt to shocks within the global food system.
• The system has faced compounded disruptions over the last three years, including the pandemic (health shock), climate-related events (hurricanes), and geopolitical conflicts (war in Ukraine).
• Current data indicates the situation has worsened: 345 million people now face high levels of food insecurity, a significant increase from 135 million prior to the pandemic.

Key Statistics and Crisis Indicators

• Agriculture accounts for roughly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with 20% from production, 6% from land use changes, and 3-4% from food loss and waste.
• Food loss and waste alone contribute approximately 33% of global emissions, equivalent to the total greenhouse gas output of China.
• Approximately 819 million people go to bed hungry daily, including 150 million stunted children and 55 million wasted children.
• 550 million smallholder farming households exist globally, supporting 2.5 billion people; 55% of these households live below the poverty line ($1.90/day), and 90% are below a living income.
• 1.3 billion tons of food are lost globally due to waste annually, despite 800 million people lacking sufficient food.

Corporate Strategies and Decisions

• OLAM International (Sunny Vergis):
  • Accelerated its net-zero operations target from 2030 to 2025, aiming to reduce waste by 230,000 tons in a single year.
  • Launched "Jiva," a platform using AI and machine learning to deliver hyper-customized agronomy "nudge" messages (voice/video) to smallholder farmers based on local crop and soil conditions.
  • Committed to eliminating added sugar from all products to improve nutritional access for one billion consumers.
  • Incubated a purpose-built consumer brand, "RE," to test sustainability-driven marketing and distribution, acknowledging a lack of internal consumer DNA.
  • Reported supplying 87 billion servings of fortified food in the previous year, with a target of delivering one trillion servings by 2030.
• Dole Sunshine Company (Pierre-Luigi Sijismundi):
  • Committed to the SBTi 1.5-degree pathway, requiring a two-thirds reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030 to achieve net-zero by 2050.
  • Facing a financial risk of $250 million annually (50% of after-tax earnings) if carbon is priced at $50 without action.
  • Disintermediated middlemen for 65-70% of farm purchases, moving to direct sourcing.
  • Advocates for mandatory QR code labeling on products to display carbon emissions per kilogram, empowering consumer choice based on supply chain data.
• Euler Group (Ian Roberts):
  • Emphasizes the need to solve food system problems before 2030 rather than 2050, requiring front-loaded transformation.
  • Defines a resilient value chain as one where every actor can extract wealth (monetary or social) even amidst market perturbations.
  • Focuses on leveraging existing industry-proven technologies rather than solely creating new ones, specifically for digital value chain optimization.
  • Identified that the current cost of growth factors in cellular agriculture remains prohibitively high ($1 million/gram), necessitating scale to reduce costs.

Technological Innovations and Trends

• Precision Fermentation: Endorsed as a high-growth sector capable of decentralized production; companies are developing home-fermentation systems with full digital control (e.g., startup Dynasite).
• Smallholder Digitalization: Mobile phone penetration has become a critical tool, with GrowAsia noting that less than 3% of rural enterprises currently adopt any technology.
• Pinduoduo Example: An e-commerce platform enabled smallholders to access a broader spectrum of fertilizer suppliers, reducing costs and securing supply contracts.
• Plant-Based Alternatives: The sector is shifting from over-excitement to scaling affordable, high-taste alternatives; Euler Group notes the need to lower prices to make these mainstream.
• Food Parks: Sijismundi proposed industrial food parks that could reduce CO2 footprints by 5-10% through optimized energy flows and circularity, capable of producing 10,000 tons of staple food daily per park.

Investment and Collaboration Dynamics

• Investment Flow: Tomasiq reported investing $8 billion in the global farm-to-fork system since 2013, yet capital remains siloed between private business, governments, and philanthropies.
• The "Uninvestable" Gap: There is a consensus that high-risk investments are required to bring smallholder farmers (who are also the future consumers of technology) into the middle-income bracket.
• Call for Consolidated Capital: GrowAsia (Bev Postma) calls for "rainmakers" to couple investment from different sectors to target the same goals, rather than working in isolation.
• Ecosystem Approach: Dole is currently collaborating with 58 startups to disrupt internal operations, leveraging external innovation to achieve resilience without fixed internal overheads.

Forward-Looking Statements

• Demographic Shifts: The panel anticipates a generational shift in food consumption driven by younger generations entering the market, viewing the current era as a transition from "extraction" to "creation."
• Dietary Evolution: A full transition to veganism is deemed unlikely within a single generation; instead, a gradual shift toward sustainable protein sources (plant-based, hybrid, cellular) is expected to occur over decades.
• Consumer Behavior: The introduction of carbon labeling on grocery items is predicted to become an industry standard, fundamentally altering purchasing decisions based on supply chain transparency.
• Scalability of Tech: Precision fermentation is projected to follow a "hockey stick" growth curve similar to the transition from horse-drawn carriages to combustion engines within the next decade.