Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture and Executive Director of the Food Systems for the Future, Ertharin Cousin joins CEO of VegTech Invest, Elysabeth Alfano, on The Plantbased Business Hour to discuss the pivotal year of 2025 for food and other systems shifts.
Specifically, we discussed
- What is the Food Systems for the Future Institute?
- Given your long tenure as the Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture and as Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme, how have you seen the landscape around global nutrition and food insecurity change?
- At COP28, the World Bank declared that Food Tech is Climate Tech. There is a growing understanding of the overlap of food systems and energy use and food’s impact on Climate Change. Why is funding/investing in food systems transformation so low?
- With 5-year plans on the horizon for companies and countries, do you expect to see investing in food systems transformation tick upwards as organizations lay the groundwork to meet 2030 goals?
- What is the piece of the puzzle of food systems transformation that is holding up more funding ? Is it lack of press ? Cultural norms? The data is there…so the funding should be there?
- In talks with Cargill, a senior level management director stated that they thought once the dominos started shifting in food systems that the systems would shift really quickly. Do you agree?
- Given #6, would you like to make any predictions?
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from our long-form conversation.
Elysabeth: I want to bring on the former Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture, the former Executive Director of the World Food Program and the current CEO, Founder, and Executive Director of Food Systems of the Future. Ertharin Cousin, thank you for being with me today.
To boil it down for people, we need to feed more people with more nutritious food in a shorter amount of time, traveling shorter distances, using fewer resources and creating less damage. So how are we going to do that?
Ertharin Cousin: Well, I believe that the change happens at the nexus of policy and finance and where we can drive the catalytic policies that are necessary to support the change that is required and provide the amount of funding to support farmers’ actions to develop the markets that are required, we can drive the change that you’ve just described.
Elysabeth: So this to me is actually inspirational. I’m very hopeful about this. The World Bank at COP28 said that Food Tech is Climate Tech and that we need to start investing along those lines. I wonder if you could elaborate your thoughts on that and how much money it’s going to take to do that.
Ertharin Cousin: Well here’s the reality: We’re not going to solve this problem by coming up with quick slogans. This is a hard slock that is required to move us from where we are to the sustainable transformation of the food system that we talked about to achieve that desired goal of ensuring access to an affordable nutritious diet by all. Right now as you and I are sitting here, 3.1 billion people cannot afford access to an affordable, nutritious, diverse diet on a daily basis.
As you know, our food system consumes 70% of the freshwater draws on an annual basis and our food system is the primary driver of the biodiversity challenges that we are witnessing across the globe. So the type of change that is necessary is not going to instantaneously come. We saw this when some $3 billion was invested in cultivated meats, for example. $3 billion was invested in cultivated meats over a 10-year period and then we saw lots of bankruptcies in 2020 to 2023 that resulted in a lot of the venture capital moving out of the market because people were looking for fast answers.
AgTech, food tech, agriculture, and food systems don’t move at the pace of fintech, but the opportunities for those who invest in these areas are quite significant, but it requires patient investments. Too often when capital that flows into food systems seeks to drive quick change, the science doesn’t move as fast as they want. The seasons don’t move as fast as you want, and then the follow-on capital doesn’t come and as a result the companies fail.
We should not sit here and say, “2025, let’s move lots of money.” Let’s move smart money into food systems that recognizes that the capital must be patient to support not just the idea of what is possible, but building into companies the ability to have the operations that can bring down prices of the production of cultivated meats, of what I like to call supplemental proteins, that can support that transformation but also the tools that support sustainable livestock management. This includes the new feeds that are necessary to reduce the methane emissions of cattle, tools that will support the measurement of carbon sequestration in AgTech that will support the farmer’s ability to move from the agricultural production systems of today to the systems that we need tomorrow that also meet the climate demands for the monitoring, measurement, reporting, and verification.
All of that work, it’s not going to happen in one year. It’s not going to happen in one year, but if asset managers and owners recognize that this opportunity may not move at the pace they want, but will deliver the returns that they need, we can move forward.
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