0:00 [Applause] ladies and Gentlemen please welcome Justin Gillis Dr Peter Glick Dr smon Hussein Kathleen merrian Raj [Music] Patel you not going there good morning everybody uh my name is Justin Gillis I write for the New York Times I'm the lead writer on climate science for the paper uh I also happen to have done uh both as an editor and reporter a bunch of deep dives into
0:45 Global agriculture in my career there uh which is how I wound up on stage today uh we are running about a half hour behind with this panel most of you have probably noticed I'm told that there is a Dropout later in the program and so we're going to catch you up uh we're get you both a coffee break and lunch reasonably on time I think so uh nobody uh nobody panic about the schedule um I have a fabulous panel here today to help me tackle uh the question can we really do it can we actually feed the world over these coming decades and over the course of this Century uh and and do it without wrecking the planet in the process uh there are full bios in your program and so I'm just going to very briefly tell you who my panelists are Dr Peter Glick runs the Pacific Institute
1:31 in California and as a world recognized Authority uh on water uh salmon Hussein works for unep the United Nations environment program where he leads a project looking at um ecosystems and and uh related subjects Kathleen Maran was the until fairly recently the number two person in the Department of Agriculture uh I know her better as um the lady who wrote The Organic Food law in the United States uh quite some uh years ago uh and at the end Raj Patel most of you know is sort of famous for writing a book called stuffed and starved uh it's about uh the sort of weird irony of the sort of billion of us who are sort of too fat and uh and need to lose weight versus the billion people who don't have
2:17 uh enough to eat in the interest of time and uh to sort of do this differently than your normal panel discussion uh happens I'm going to I'm going to adopt a weird format this morning I'm going to I'm going to ask my panelists to pretend that they are king for a day or in Kathleen's case Queen for a Day and and the first question they're going to tackle is uh if you could fix one thing in the global food system what would it be now let me let me start with a little bit of a premise that might be controversial In This Crowd I don't know uh we Face tremendous headwinds in agriculture including a rising population Rising demand for food and as Michael outlined so eloquently this morning uh the the the the headwind of
3:03 climate change which is already uh cutting potential output and that's only going to intensify I submit that the what we call the conventional food system is not going to go away in the face of those headwinds uh it is only going to get bigger it's going to be under pressure to become more efficient uh and so the real question I think is how do we improve that system uh how do we improve its environment Al performance and how do we improve its Human Performance its outcome for sort of ordinary people there's a related when we talk about the conventional food system we're sort of talking about the West essentially as people have already uh noted at this conference there's a there's another food system the one that actually feeds the majority of people on the planet which is the sort of small
3:49 holder food system they interact in weird and not always good ways those two systems uh we need to worry about both of them and about their environmental and in human performance uh and so i' I've said to my panelists it's not off limits to talk about either or both but they do only get they only do get one magic wish as part of this uh initial round of of questions anyway so let's start with Peter Glick Peter you're King for a Day you've got one chance to fix the global food system what would you change about it okay um well good morning everyone and thank you for your patience uh this morning uh this has been a fascinating meeting already I've had a chance to talk to to some of you I wish I could talk to all of you um if I could do one thing it would be to partly do what
4:37 we're starting to do this morning that we didn't do yesterday and that is uh to figure out a way to stop thinking about the food system as a food system the the problem is in the 20th century and in the 19th century that's what we did when in fact the food system is part of a water system and it's part of our climate system and it's part of our Energy System and we started to get that message a little bit this morning that the failure to integrate has been the cause of many of the challenges that we face today in sustainability and that the only way to move towards sustainability however you choose to Define it is to integrate and I'll just give you one quick
5:22 example as as carefully as the menu has been thought out and as carefully as this conference has been put together I'm sitting here presented with a bottle a glass bottle of portable water from Arkansas why food water climate energy is all represented in a way in this disconnect this this idea that we have to move water around the idea that a commercial brand of water is better than the portable water down the hill or in the tap that our food system and our
6:08 water systems and our climate systems are disconnected so if I were to do one thing I would integrate better and we're starting to have that discussion now and we can come back to some of that but that's the message I would leave and I'll stop there okay Tom on you King for a Day what are you going to do thanks um I'm an environmental economist and I work for unep so it's unsurprising going to see correct the market um going back to economics 101 even the most neoliberal economists will tell you that there is a market failure in the sense of what's called externalities that's costs or benefits imposed by one agent on a third party agent agriculture is is Rife with externalities and what those externalities mean in practices is the the food we that that the price you pay
6:54 for food isn't representative of the two true cost of that food now this huge heterogeneity across farming systems in terms of kind of bi physical conditions ecological conditions economic conditions and social cultural conditions and Norms that we've talked about this morning as well but even give given that heterogeneity there's a commonality as well farming systems provide food obviously but they also rely on and also provide what we call ecosystem Services the benefits that um we G of for instance leure and Recreation cultural heritage so what we need to look at is um try to facilitate the market mechanism to be adjusted to represent and push forward the benefits in terms of positive externalities and to recognize the negative externalities we've had a lot of discussion about the most well-known negative externality
7:40 this morning in terms of climate change um Global greenhouse gases we could also think about more localized effects such as for instance leeching of soils reduction of so the top soils any effects that has on on safe for instance um um um aquatic systems so I'll stop there but I think what I would say is let's think in ter terms of trying to address these externalities what we're doing in the te project is trying to address them quantify them and then try to as far as possible value them in monetary and non-monetary terms so I'm hearing you say we need to get the prices right we'll talk in a minute about how we actually do that um Kathleen you're Queen for a Day what are you going to do well first of all I'd want to be king for the day okay I think Hillary's ready to be king so
8:25 um uh my answer uh is really about women women and girls uh you come to a sustainable a meeting you see more women in the audience than you do in typical a meetings but we're now a million women strong as principal Farm operators in this country you saw some strong women at the panel this morning um when you think globally uh the food agriculture organization the United Nations has put out a report a few years ago they said if women had the same access to education resources and Leadership positions as men world food production would increase by 30% which is the equivalent of feeding 150 million
9:12 people huh you may quibble with fao's analysis and you might say ah that data is soft but even if you get somewhere into that magnitude that's really unbelievable and So my answer is really about women empowerment it's tied to land tenure it's um meaningful in terms of lessening violence against women and ultimately goes to the big question a lot of the panelists have been grappling with over this meeting about feeding the world in 2050 if women have more power in their lives and access to the things that they need we're also going to see a downward Trend in population
9:57 growth this is really one more [Music] remarkable one of the more remarkable things we've learned in the last 20 or 25 years is is you don't need coercive uh population policy at all to change the curve on population growth all you really need is education for girls and even really just a little bit of Education seems to seems to bend that curve uh quite substantially it turns out if you can read and write um you don't you you wind up deciding not to have 10 or 12 children um um maybe not surprisingly um rise you're King for a Day what are you going to do um well first of all I'd abolish the monarchy
10:43 I just the whole idea of being King I mean and I try it may not be that bad actually no it would suck because it would mean that that I would be officially the most powerful person in the room and no one wants that um but but particularly if we're going to solve problems of of Agriculture what we've what we've heard and seen today is that there's a a plurality of ideas and those ideas have to come from from Farmers themselves from peasants from Farm Workers rather than from you know the sort of Science of knowledge in the academy or in big big industry and and Industrial agriculture so um what I do also sorry Justin is just take issue with the question because I don't think that uh the industrial food system is is
11:28 going to get bigger solve things for us I mean I I think that given all the data we have I didn't say that well I said it was going to get bigger I didn't say it was going to solve well but I I think also given everything we've heard about the the the the poity of water about the the ways in which uh soil is already becoming salinated for example in in the Bread Basket of India see seeing where the industrial reev the agricultural Green Revolution has already been uh applied with Force imagining more of that I think is historically Fe I I think that that actually if if you imagine 25 years ago we still had a Soviet Union 25 years from now who knows what what there will be and so that gets me to the the my my if I'm King for a Day just before I abolish the monarchy uh what I would do is abolish poverty uh
12:15 and I would turn for for that because I mean if we're interested in creating markets for organic food then the clearly are we're going to internalize the externalities the price of food has to go up we have to pay for the Environmental Services of good food production but that means people's wages have to go up uh and that it seems to me that that we can turn to the great theorist of the modern food system Thomas petti uh whose uh capital in the 21st century recommends a global maximum wage and a global minimum wage and if we're interested in uh making sure that everyone can afford food if we're interested in an economic package that actually lifts women up disproportionately because women are disproportionately at the the lowest end of the the wage Spectrum then a global minimum wage and a global maximum wage of the way go all right those are some pretty big
13:02 Ideas um got a big agenda here and the 15 more minutes to sort of resolve it so uh who on my panel wants to react to something somebody else said either to disagree vehemently or to sort of agree and stamp your foot and say that's really the way to go let me let me respond um let's put a question to Raj what of the issues I think that we're we're facing is even if you had the minimum wage would it not be the case case that you'd still have a momentum towards say for instance more Dairy and livestock production which means we still have some of the issues that we've been talking about the last day and a half well I I think that's absolutely right I mean I think the the terms of Justin's question we only allowed one thing and of course the thing we're learning today is that if if there's one thing you can do to change
13:47 the world for the for the better in the future is there's not just one thing it's it's to un askk that question so I certainly think that there are structural reforms that we you know that we need as well but and in fact I think Justin's going to ask you the question then well if we're going to internalize the exaltics and remove some of the the trends towards unsustainable agriculture that are already around us how do you do that and I'm I'm I'm wondering if if I can back to you um well one of the things no that's fine I mean some of the things we're looking at is actually trying to trying to put a quantify and then as said as far as we can kind of value and valuate the benefits and costs associated with different agricultural production systems that's inherently an extremely difficult task it means bringing together other people from an anthropological domain a sociological domain uh biophysical ecological domain
14:34 and an economics domain this is actually I think very much Cutting Edge work but I think it's very important for us to do that because we have to as as Peter said think about things in terms of food system overall and we have to think about their integration but actually try to look at the value value chain in different elements of the food system a more direct answer is to say for instance you can find relatively Simple Solutions we talked about carbon a lot so carbon pricing is a relatively simple solution although politically of course very difficult and what that means is that we actually get around some of the issues in terms of trying to work out where in the system we actually have carbon usage um so the story I have is for instance um I was talking to a a friend who's actually a guardian writer in Scotland I'm sure some people here probably know him we're talking about buying some um some Trout from a from a
15:21 local farmers market and I said to well there's all kind of benefits to the farmers market in terms of Engagement with the with the person you're selling understanding the Providence but in practice that Scottish trout in Edinburgh has traveled 200 miles from the west coast of Scotland and if that total 30 30 kgs of trout is split we we have actually got a huge carbon footprint so sometimes we have unacknowledged unintended effects that we can't actually allow we can't understand the system whereas an E con say just get it right to start with put a carbon price on things and then the market will in some senses deal with the issue let me pick up on that I was I'm a little surprised that none of my panelists went specifically after uh the issue of meat and so I want to raise uh that as the
16:07 you know maybe the single biggest uh uh uh issue we have I was in uh Denmark recently and walked into a restaurant in Copenhagen I'm not a vegetarian by the way but but I was a little floored to be presented with a menu that listed uh this is in Copenhagen one of the more environmentally conscious cities in the world and I'm in a restaurant that lists sort of three or four varieties of prime Nebraska beef you know that was presumably going to be you know had been you know flown halfway around the world and uh uh this meat question uh I keep thinking about it as a reporter we haven't done anything really ambitious uh grappling with the greenhouse consequences and maybe we need to uh uh the the it seems to me that you know we
16:52 we have we have Rising demand it not just in the western system either I mean we're seeing this now in even in places where small holder agriculture prevails when people get a little bit of money it seems one of the very first things they do is start eating meat or eating more meat than they used to uh uh uh governments in the meantime have been I think sort of chicking about this if I can use that word uh we seen I see no government anywhere in the world that's really sort of pushing on this issue and sort of asking themselves how can we how can we suppress meat demand how do we go after this uh should we go after it why let me ask my panel why are governments so afraid of it uh and and and what do we need to do I mean Banning it seems like you're you're probably not going to
17:38 get very far politically with that so what are what are the Alternatives do we need a global meat tax to go along with Raj's sort of global minimum wage what are our what are our options anybody everybody's they're dear in the headlights here well well Banning me okay so I'm just gonna throw out something that's currently percolating that some people in the audience may be aware of uh every five years the federal government puts out dietary guidelines for Americans the 2010 um there's this is the document that nutritional professionals use um that helps inform SNAP program benefits meals ready to eat a lot of different things School meals um and in 2010 the public facing icon
18:27 for the public to understand the dietary guidelines was my plate we went from the food guide pyramid to my plate with a message being half a plate fruits and vegetables um the next iteration is due in 2015 and the advisory committee for the secretaries of Agriculture and HHS has been talking very much about sustainability there's a subcommittee on sustainability this is hot politics in Washington and around the country and a lot of it converges on protein particularly me are there parallels is there a Synergy there where your dietary guidance is about lessening meat consumption and your environmental needs is lessening meat
19:13 consumption um we don't know where that's going on Friday George Washington University where I now work in collaboration with tus University we're having a symposium on this issue that's not mandating it's not saying no meat but but it's about dietary guidance but the other thing is when you're a consumer and you're trying to shop it can be confusing case in point I know a company where they get Frozen beef trim from Australia shipped to Utah where it's thawed and then blended with ground meat and at the end of the line in the processing plan it's labeled as freshly ground well that's true but as a consumer bu that
19:59 packaged hamburger do you think it's beef Trim in part coming from the other side of the world so it's also really hard you may put out new dietary guidance you may go to labeling but it's it's um it's a difficult terrain looks like Raj is eager to dive into that just in terms of when we think about the world wanting more meat as it gets richer often that's presented as a natural sort of obviously people want meat but the way people want meat is very unnatural I mean if you look at for example where uh one of the the the favorite food one of the favorite foods in Samoa is Turkey taals um which is a euphamism for turkey sphincter um which has been exported by the UN I mean this this is a thing in after the second world war where it was exported it
20:45 wasn't fit for human consumption here but it was exported to Samoa as a meat that people could get their teeth into uh and and it it ended up being tremendously popular now what what's weird is that that our desire for meat is isn't something that's natural it's something that's marketed to us your your thought about dietary guidelines makes makes me think about the Brazilian dietary guidelines that just came out and they're very interesting it's you there are 10 of them and the number one thing is cook meals at home and the number 10 one is don't believe what food the food industry adverts tell you uh and they're even going a step further and suggesting that what they need to do in order to protect children's rights is Ban all marketing of food and everything else to Children uh and banning the marketing of food and in fact everything else to children ends up being a way in which you get to to curb the sort of the
21:31 desire for the kinds of bad meat that are cheap and therefore for which a demand is then you significantly spurred yeah but if you're one of these sorry I just one less if you're one of these small meat producing entities and you have a diversified farming doing all that proper nutrient recy you know cycle all that you don't you're not doing the rendering you're not doing the kind of export of parts that Americans don't eat and that's a part of what Mak makes the system efficient and lowers the price and I think some of the chefs are challenging us to think about using more of the animal and having less waste and as had been said earlier in today's proceedings we know that food waste is the largest um user of our landfill so
22:17 so I might challenge you a little on that about the parts and I want the farmers who are in livestock a to be prosperous and so some of it is about sharing the wealth some of that meet in parts of that meet in other countries is not necessarily problematic I think Peter had an answer yeah I have to say this is the first panel I've ever been on where turkey sphincters have come up um maybe not the last though well hopefully uh but this is this is an issue so the issue of meat is a it's a subset of this whole problem uh of the intersection between science and sustainability and policy um maybe it's about meat maybe that's a piece of the puzzle um understanding what from a science perspective what the implications of a meat diet or
23:03 production of certain kinds of protein are for water demand or for energy demand or for land implications is part of the challenge and if we decide that meat intensive production of certain kinds or meat intensive diets of certain kinds have implications for the global uh environment or the global economy then the policy question is what do we choose to do about it do we choose to deal with the advertising and the demand side of things do we work harder to internalize the externalities of those of the consequences of our agricultural decisions so that the prices go up adequately enough so that demand goes down from an economic point of view do you regulate do you ban meat I'm not going to go there but do you regulate in some form or another to deal with the
23:50 adverse consequences of of our choices we're we're running into a situation worldwide that that I describe as Peak water we're we're running into absolute constraints on the amount of water in certain parts of the country that we have to do certain kinds of things and if meat diets or meat production is in is water intensive as it is as we've heard it's energy intensive and carbon intensive then that has implications for our regional choices for our land use choices and we're not adequately integrating those things into we're not adequately integrating the science of what we know or ought to know into the policy of what we do and to do I think we want to say take some questions from the audience before we're done and uh so if you're if you're burning with the
24:36 questions sort of go ahead and jump up now do we have uh mics uh floating around that we can get to people or um it's hard to see out there people behind you too uh looks like we do have over here and somebody here in the front row has a question and then that person would be next in the sort of third rep building on Peter's recent comments there and and some of the things that have been said at this conference earlier um Michael Poland mentioned briefly a little bit about Hope and good news but didn't really elaborate too much on that I I'm wondering if the panel is willing to look at the large-scale Intensive commercial production systems that have been the subject of much disparagement um and recognize the progress that has been made in these areas of sustainability for instance in University of Arkansas looked at the
25:21 Modern pork industry and can look back over the past 50 years from 1959 to 2009 we we've reduced our land area per unit of pork production by 78% we've reduced our water consumption per unit of pork production by 41% and we've reduced the carbon footprint of that unit of pork production by 35% that's remarkable progress and it's not unique to Pork you can find that in beef and poultry and in Road Crop Production as well but there is no acknowledgement I hear in this debate or this discussion about that tremendous stride continuous Improvement made by the commercial system and what's your idea about the potential for future improvements from that large scale commercial system I think we get you so somebody talk about that yeah can I
26:07 comment on that I I think that's a great question and it's worth addressing and I'm not going to address the the big versus little issue but it gives me the opportunity to say uh there has been enormous success and progress in the agricultural sector in different forms in different regions in different sectors in moving toward sustainability we've heard lots of pieces of that throughout the conference and that's a good sign uh we're producing much more food with much less water for example and in the panel this morning uh Bruce talked about the ability of subsurface drip to increase to to increase crop per drop so I get the argument sometimes in California that efficiency doesn't really save any water uh because uh the
26:53 W the farm the farmer just puts that water back to use but he made the point that not only does it maybe keep water constant or cut water demand but it increases yield and what we really care about is not water use but water use per unit food produced or dollars per water per per unit water used and there's been tremendous Improvement and learning from those success stories I think is a points the path toward the way we have to go there was somebody in the third row that had a question I think could we get the microphone back there we are we are at three and a half minutes left so uh we're going to probably squeeze in one or two questions here and then we'll be done believe it or not yeah my question is about the word efficiency which has been used a lot this this during this conference and it usually is
27:38 lo used casually like we have to be more efficient I always say to my students whenever you heard the word efficiency assume job loss uh because efficiency has always meant the maximum loss ma lowest amount of labor for the largest amount of production that's what efficiency and agriculture in the United States has meant so I plead that everyone talk about what you were talking about is it water efficient energy efficient in what way is it efficient well well very simply when I mean efficiency and I my focus is water often I mean doing what we want with fewer resources now there are lots of definitions that's not how the word is used I don't think that's what was meant by a lot of people up here okay some fing um of the future Joan as you probably know May mean less labor and
28:24 maybe that's okay I'm thinking particularly of the dairy industry and and the survivability of some of the smaller scale farms in this region May really depend upon figuring out how we Marshall government resources so we have milking robots so people aren't tied to three milks milkings or two milkings a day and they can have other kinds of jobs I think that we in the big picture are going to see a lot of different kinds of farming entities in the future and some of them are going to be more and some are going to be less labor intensive there was a question over here on the end uh can we get the microphone to wander over here um where did the microphone go okay okay my question is for Kathleen um in regard to the new dietary guidelines so
29:11 I hope I'm not too off topic but has there been any conversation with the uh Dairy recommendations because to my knowledge correct me if I'm wrong cheese actually has a very high carbon footprint um and I know that with the dietary guidelines there's often this push for three servings a a day for dairy which actually uh we don't necessarily need there are many other ways to get calcium in your diet I'm just curious if that's come up before before you answer that those guidelines correct me if I'm wrong still have to survive the assault from the National Corn Growers Association and and all the other lobbying that that comes to bear on USDA and they're not final yet is that is that right or no the committee will make their final recommendations in January and the responsibility for leading the process alternates every 5
29:57 years years between the secretaries of HHS and USDA this year it's HHS so secretary Matthews will be leading the charge to get them out some point in 2015 the big issue around Dairy is really revisiting our um sort of Mantra on skim milk and new research and questioning about the foundations scientific foundations that led us to a no fat or a lowfat uh Dairy recommend mendation um but anyone who's interested about this debate if you just Google dietary guidelines for Americans 2015 it will bring you to the HHS website where all the PowerPoint slides from the public meeting all the public comments there
30:43 and a lot of the um testimony is on video so it's it's a very open transparent process we have just used half an hour uh minus 8 seconds so I think we're going to finish there I think we're now going into a coffee break if somebody correct me if that's wrong but I believe that's right and uh thank you all for your attention this morning [Music]
