A plan for more sustainable food
- Date: 01 October 2024
Global food production is a key driver behind both climate change and the loss of species and ecosystems. In fact, it’s responsible for roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions and over two-thirds of global habitat and biodiversity losses. That’s because unsustainable food production too often leads to the destruction of forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems in order to produce more food. So how do we create a more sustainable food system?
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Joining the show today is Dr. Jason Clay, Executive Director of WWF’s Markets Institute. Jason has decades of experience working with companies to find innovative ways to make their supply chains more sustainable, and today he’ll be explaining his latest initiative: Codex Planetarius. In short, Codex Planetarius aims to establish global environmental standards to limit the harm caused by the production of globally traded food. The idea draws inspiration from Codex Alimentarius, the international code of health and safety standards for food established in the mid-20th century. It makes sense: If the world can adopt standards to protect human health and safety, why can't we do the same for the health and safety of the planet? In this interview, Jason explains how his career journey evolved from human rights to conservation (with help from the Grateful Dead and Ben & Jerry’s along the way), and how Codex Planetarius could establish new global norms for food production that help us feed the world without destroying it.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Seth Larson: Welcome to Nature Breaking, a World Wildlife Fund podcast focused on news and trends affecting our natural world and the people and species who call it home. I'm Seth Larson, and as we've covered before on this show, global food production is a key driver behind both climate change and the loss of species and ecosystems.
In fact, it's responsible for roughly one third of global greenhouse gas emissions and over two thirds of global habitat and biodiversity losses. If those numbers surprise you, consider this: the Amazon rain forest stores 150 to 200 billion tons of carbon and contains more wildlife than any other place on Earth. And agricultural conversion for cattle ranching, soy and other commodities is the primary driver of deforestation in that region. There are lots of ways to address this problem, but today we'll be joined by someone who has a wholly new idea about how we can slash the footprint of global food production.
Dr. Jason Clay is WWF's Senior Vice President for Markets and Executive Director of WWF's Markets Institute. Jason has decades of experience working with companies to find innovative ways to make their supply chains more sustainable, and today he'll be explaining his latest initiative, Codex Planetarius. In short, Codex Planetarius aims to establish global environmental standards to limit the harm caused by food production.
The idea draws inspiration from Codex Alimentarius, the international code of health and safety standards for food established in the mid 20th century. If the world can adopt standards to protect human health and safety, why can't we do the same for the health and safety of the planet?
Before we jump in, please take a moment to visit youtube.com/@worldwildlifefund to find all our videos. And give us a follow while you're there. Now, here's my conversation with Jason.
I am joined now by Dr. Jason Clay. Jason, welcome to Nature Breaking.
Jason Clay: Thanks, it's nice to be here and uh, I look forward to the chat.
Seth Larson: Yeah, me too. This is going to be a fun one. I think I'm really interested to dive into this new initiative that you're launching. But before we get into that, Jason, I wanted to start by just asking, you know, what inspired you to get involved in sustainability issues to begin with? And how did you land your career at WWF?
Jason Clay: Well, I think that's a, actually a much longer story than you may realize.
Seth Larson: Well, I know for instance, that I've heard you talk before about how you grew up on a farm. And I know that's, that's played into some of your decisions. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that and sort of your personal journey.
Jason Clay: Right. So, I did grow up on a farm and um, it was a small family farm where we had, cash crops and cows. But we also had raised our own chickens for food And I would hunt and fish three days a week and we had an acre and a half garden and a half acre orchard. And I think most people don't realize that farms are actually businesses. I mean you actually have to pay the mortgage and you have to pay the working loans off and all this stuff. But I think it was a pretty idyllic life for me and I, I learned how to make decisions very early on because everybody has a lot of responsibility. Uh, but then my father was killed in an accident on the farm when I was 15 and I had to run the farm before I went to college.
Seth Larson: I'm sorry.
Jason Clay: And then farming became something very different. And I realized how hard it was. And in college, kind of, I did everything I could to get away from farming. But I actually got much closer to global food production. Uh, and I spent about 15 years working in human rights. Um, ended up, uh, mostly working with Indigenous people and they turned out to be most of the world's refugees and most of the world's famine victims. And I realized that the global food system was influenced by a whole lot of factors that I hadn't known about as a kid from wars and famines to displaced people, et cetera. Um, and, and I realized also that those people don't really have a lot of power, uh, just as I had felt on a small farm in the middle, in the Midwest, actually. Uh, and so when the Grateful Dead, uh, decided to do a benefit for the rain forest, and I was, um, representing a group that was working with Indigenous people, they, uh, invited the group I was with at that point to be one of the recipients of, of the funding. They, they added a 13th concert onto Madison Square Garden that year. This was…
Seth Larson: Get out.
Jason Clay: …I guess, uh, 1988. Uh, and they, they had a sold out house. But before we got there, we had to go or I had to go to Bobby Weir's house once a month for a year to explain to the Dead what the rain forest was and why it was important, why they should be working on it.
Seth Larson: Oh, wow.
Jason Clay: Because they wanted to do a press conference, but they wanted to be informed and they didn't want to be to be seen to be just charlatans about the issue. Uh, and so, and it was important because that press conference got something like 1200 clips.
Uh, and so it was important that, that we were able to, to raise that. Anyway, after the concert, there was a party and, uh, there were like 800 people there. So it was a mob and a guy came up to me wanting to know what he could do to save the rain forest.
And I said, well, who are you and what do you do? He said, I'm Ben and I make ice cream. Uh, and so that started a relationship with Ben and Jerry's that lasted for many years and, uh, three or four months later, we got together in the North end of Boston and he told me all the specs for the Brazil nuts and cashew nuts he would need. And, and, So I went to Brazil and started finding them, and I created a trading company and ended up working with about 50 companies, made 200 different products, and they had about $100 million in sales a year. Uh, and so we were able to actually triple the price to producers simply by taking waste out of the system.
Uh, and so we discovered, and I discovered that if I put long term contracts on the table that the producers could take those contracts and go to the bank and borrow money at lower rates. And so I discovered a lot of things about business that I hadn't really known before. Even though I had known that you needed contracts, I had known that you had to borrow money. I didn't know how to, make those things work for people. And that was a big discovery. And from that point on, then I started working much more with not just Brazil nuts and cashew nuts, but then with corn and soy and beef and, and other kinds of commodities as well. So it, it came from a background of knowing enough to know what I didn't know, uh, and actually try to find out more about it. You know, I think I've been reflecting on this and I think one of the most important things perhaps about my career is that I've only ever applied for one job. I got it and I didn't take it.
Seth Larson: Which one was that?
Jason Clay: At the World Bank to run a program in Brazil and I just decided it was too much bureaucracy. I'd never be able to do what I wanted to do. And what I found is about every three to five years I kind of change what I work on. Not the whole aspect of what I work on but a different aspect of it so I can learn something different because I enjoy the learning curve.
Seth Larson: I love the arc of your career and all of the different influences from, from, uh, getting those experiences on the farm as a kid and then getting that global perspective. Um, and I, I, That's definitely the first time we've talked about the Grateful Dead on this show. Um, and, uh, I can hear the jealousy from my little brother across the country, uh, he lives in Massachusetts, um, hearing that you got to go see the Dead when, when Jerry Garcia was still with them, I'm sure a lot of people are jealous of that.
Jason Clay: So, so here's just one more thing before we, we stop memory lane. Uh, I, I have used interns my whole life. I've, I've, I was an intern and I had a lot of jobs as an, an intern as an undergraduate. And so I've, I've felt it was important to give other people, uh, often who have to work and, and they need jobs, a chance to learn, uh, while they do it, not just to cook in kitchens or clean toilets or whatever. And so one of my first interns when I was working on with Indigenous people was Tracy Chapman. She was a freshman at Tufts, and she had chosen to work with, um, with this group, Cultural Survival, to learn more about Indigenous people. And in fact, she came in two or three days a week, worked at one end of my office while I was working at the other end. I had no idea who she was at the time. It was much later that I discovered it.
Seth Larson: Wow. That's amazing. It almost feels like there were a couple sliding doors moments there where you could have fallen into the music industry somehow, but, uh, we're grateful for, um, for your, uh, the fact that you stuck with food and sustainability and all of that expertise that you've, you've brought to our work here.
Um, so I guess I'll try to get us back on track. Um, and. I want to set the scene a little more for this conversation talking about the footprint of global food trade. I think it would be helpful for our listeners and also for myself if you could talk a little bit about global commodities and how the global food trade really works because I don't think many folks really understand it.
It's a, my, to my understanding, it's a pretty complex web of, you know, you have farmers like you and your family and farmers all over the world. Then you also have these huge commodity traders that supply raw ingredients to manufacturers or brands. And then you have the retailers that bring products to store shelves and interact with consumers.
I'd love for you to just describe how that whole web works, um, to give us a baseline to, to continue the conversation.
Jason Clay: Sure. So, so, primary production is at the, at the top, uh, of, of the food chain. Uh, and in that you have maybe half a billion families today. I think it used to be closer to a billion, but it's, it's been declining over time. But you've probably got another half a billion to three quarters of a billion people that work as workers on farms or related to farm industries, et cetera. Uh, and then, uh, their crops are sold into local markets, and most food is still consumed in the country it's produced in, uh, globally. But there are some, some crops that are, that are traded. And in fact, the global trade of food has actually started to increase because of climate change, and weather variability, and the fact that, uh, We don't know where food is going to come from.
So, so global trade is actually a way to make ends meet, when one part of the world has a bad harvest, you can count on the other part of the world to have a bumper one and, and, and ship some your way. So, so then you get, associated with that trade, you get aggregators and granaries and, and, and traders, and then they sell to, to processors and manufacturers and brands, and they sell to retailers, and the retailers sell to, uh, to consumers. And so you get this, And in each of these stages, there are hundreds and thousands of individual players that are quite important. But basically, at the top of this, you've got about 1.5 billion people engaged in food production, and about 8.5 billion engaged in consumption, and then you have a much smaller group of people throughout the rest of the system, down to about 8 or 10 traders that control the trade of each of the commodities.
Seth Larson: Yeah, that, that is amazing how there's that choke point with just a handful of companies that have such a big influence.
Jason Clay: We call that a leverage point.
Seth Larson: A leverage point. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, so within that supply chain from farmers to retailers, there are a lot of decisions that get made along the way that determine a food product's environmental impact, right? And I think we're going to talk a lot about what it means to have food sourced sustainably versus unsustainably in this conversation. I'd love for you to just define each of those a little more for us so we really understand what we're talking about.
Jason Clay: I think a more sustainable food system is one where in the aggregate, over time, you either maintain or improve the renewable natural resource base that food production depends on. And I think an unsustainable Uh, food system or a less sustainable food system is one where You are operating at a deficit. So you're mining the resources. You're not replacing things. Uh, society is not forcing you to include those in pricing so that you can fix them. These are called externalities. It's soil erosion. It's the loss of, loss of habitat. It's taking water out of streams so that they don't even reach the ocean anymore, uh, to use for irrigation for certain crops in some places. So I think there's a stark contrast between what's more sustainable and what's less sustainable, but there's a continuum throughout. Uh, and I think the, the issue is not about defining what's sustainable and, and getting every farm to achieve it. I think at, at some kind of philosophical level, any use of these resources is degrading them over time. And so we, and whatever is more sustainable today won't be tomorrow with more people and more consumption and the need for more food production.
So what we're trying to do is figure out what are the key impacts that we can't live with. And improve those and set up a system of a continuous improvement. And that involves agreement on what the impacts are. But just as important, I think it involves how to measure them, and having common agreements about the impacts, the measurements, the boundaries, those things which we don't have today. Even for something, let's say, as simple, which is not simple really, as greenhouse gas emissions. We have, what, 10, 15, 20 that are being used in Europe. Life, life cycle assessments to figure out greenhouse gas emissions. About the same in the US and I'm sure China and India have their own. Brazil certainly does. And so nobody's doing the same way. So part of what we need is, is a set of common agreement about what the key impacts are. And it can't be hundreds. I mean, if a bank only uses six indicators to give a loan, we're gonna have to have something kind of similar to that in terms of how we manage the planet for producing food because we just can't afford a really complicated system. And most countries don't have the technology to do much measurement at all. So ideally, the measurement that we need is already happening. We're just not using it the way we could.
Seth Larson: Yeah, yeah. So that's, that brings us right to, I think, this initiative that we want to talk about today, uh, which is Codex Planetarius, and you recently launched this initiative at Climate Week in New York, and I'd love for you to tell us about how it would help to reduce the environmental harms caused by, caused by food production, and how it would put some sort of global, um, standards around how we think about these things.
Jason Clay: So over the last 20 years, uh, WWF has, has been one of the leaders of developing, uh, voluntary standards. And these standards are, were intended to help improve, uh, the production and trade of globally traded commodities, things like soybeans or beef or sugar or cotton, uh, or shrimp or salmon or tuna or whatever, um, and including, you know, round wood and pulp and paper, et cetera. And what we found is that while those systems that we created are very good at identifying the key impacts, they often become Christmas trees where a whole lot of other things get added to them that aren't necessarily essential, make them more expensive, make them less effective. Uh, but I think the biggest issue that we've discovered is that the focus was to agree on what the impacts were. It was, over time, to agree how to measure them, not just to say, adopt this practice and you'll be fine. Um, but what we've, we've really seen now is that rewarding the better producers makes their products cost more in the marketplace, and they can be undersold by the worst producers. So there's something wrong with that equation.
We need to figure out how to make every product on the shelf more sustainable. Not just how to differentiate what is better from what is worse, because that gives people too many options to buy things that aren't produced particularly well. And so, What I think we've been able to do is distill what are the six or eight key impacts and say, let's put a floor on what is acceptable performance. And we know that we're not going to be able to do that for domestic consumption. Governments are going to have to do whatever they feel they have to do to feed the people that they are responsible to.
Seth Larson: Of course.
Jason Clay: But global trade shouldn't undermine, or it shouldn't mine, the environment for food. And what we've seen is that over the last 40 years, the amount of food trade has gone from 6 to 8 percent to 30 percent. It's quadrupled.
Seth Larson: That’s crazy. Can you, can you explain how that has happened and why? I could make an educated guess, but it's wild to me that so much, of the food we used to eat was produced domestically, whatever country you're in. And now a third of it, whatever we're getting anywhere in the world is, is traded across a border.
Jason Clay: There's a few reasons for this. I mean, probably the first is comparative advantage. Some places can produce food much more cheaply than others. And, and other places have lower labor costs, which can be used, like China is a good example of this. They don't have a lot of water or land to produce all the food they need, but they have labor that can do manufacturing and can do other things. And so there is now a more, um... parts of the world are being used in certain ways that don't always involve local food production for the needs that they need. Or Singapore, where they just don't have a land base to actually produce the food that they need. But we're seeing a lot more specialization in the global economy and countries are doing what they do best, and that's actually good for the environment. We don't want countries to be producing food unsustainably or to be eroding their environment by trying to produce everything that's needed.
So I think, I think, you know, comparative advantage is real. I think trade has become cheaper, uh, as technology has allowed that to happen and they're larger, uh, boats and ships and there's ports and infrastructure that's been created. And, and it's not just the ocean part. I mean, I think the infrastructure inland in many countries. I can remember as a kid when I was first growing up, we didn't really eat much seafood. But by the 1960s, frozen seafood was actually very common. And it was because of being able to freeze seafood and bring it in. And so you started getting things like shrimp and pollock and other things that, that weren't always available in the past. And that's happened all over the world.
I mean, that's, that's really what has happened with China now in terms of the coal chain has actually reached further and further into China. And, you know, as China has brought 400 million people above the poverty line, that has had a huge impact on consumption globally and on, on trade. Now we're seeing India in exactly the same position where they're going to bring another 400 million people or so above the poverty line. And China is probably going to bring another 400 million people above the poverty line. Looks like Africa's population is growing. They're, they're exporting a lot of minerals. They're currently importing almost half of their food. So with more money, they're probably going to import more food. So we've got to figure out how these different parts of the world are going to be fed more sustainably. And that's where I think having minimum performance standards so that global trade does not undermine the current production of exporting countries or the resource base for future production that the world's world is going to increasingly depend on.
Seth Larson: Yeah. So. Okay. You talked just a moment ago about the role that voluntary standards have played and certainly WWF has been very involved in working with companies to set voluntary standards. And as you just said ultimately that hasn't done enough to solve the problem of the footprint of food on our world and I'd love for you to just tease out a little more how Codex Planetarius would change that dynamic and get us further than the voluntary standards have so far.
Jason Clay: So another aspect of the voluntary standards that that I didn't mention is that by making this voluntary, you're, you're appealing to companies to do the right thing, and some companies want to do that. Most probably don't. But let's say even if we got all of Europe and North America to agree on this, the percentage of the market share that those two regions, um, actually control is much smaller than it used to be. So when I first started working on globally traded commodities, palm oil was one of the things on, on the table for WWF because of its impact on biodiversity and habitat loss. Um, at that point, the late '90s, about 25 percent of palm oil was consumed in the US and Europe. By now, at this point, it's about 10 or 11%. Asia is, is the one that's consuming resources and Africa is beginning to do that too. And so we're seeing that a strategy that's focused on markets in North America and Europe is not going to succeed globally.
Seth Larson: Right.
Jason Clay: I think the limit of voluntary standards was that they were voluntary. What was great about them was that they made people aware of the impact of food in a way they had never been before. It identified the specific uh, impacts that were the most important. And we found that about six or eight cut across all food, food products. And that's the core of Codex Planetarius, those six or eight. But we also discovered that the bottom 10 or 20 percent of producers of any of those commodities produce about 60 to 80 percent of the impacts, but only about 5 percent the product.
Seth Larson: That's crazy. And it's just because their, uh, their approaches are so unsustainable that the, the impacts are, are sort of vastly out of step with the, the actual amount of food they're producing?
Jason Clay: It's that their land is not as suited for production. These are some of the places that probably shouldn't be producing food, and, and their populations have grown well beyond the areas that they have that are, that are the most suitable for food production. So people are farming marginal land, and they can't afford to invest in the technology. They don't have the same kind of training, uh, in many cases. This is not just poor small farmers, but it includes them. It's also other farmers that haven't had the advantage of understanding how, what it really takes scientifically to farm more sustainably.
Seth Larson: Gotcha. And so, where the rubber meets the road in actually, um, not only setting, some of these global standards through Codex Planetarius, but actually, putting a plan in action to, to make the changes required to, uh, to achieve those standards, that's gonna require money, right? And it's gonna require, uh, uh, resources for those poor small farmers, or those farmers who just don't have the resources or education to, um, to, to produce food more sustainably to make changes in the way they do things. And I'd love for you to just speak to, first of all, where is the money going to come from for them to be able to do that? And, and how would, how would that all be structured?
Jason Clay: So, so I think that the first thing that we have to understand is that the countries that need food from other countries are already beginning to invest in them. If you look at China, it's invested billions of dollars in Brazil. Uh, the codex, uh, is, is going to require that all of the exports around the world, whether it's to China or Europe or the US or India are, are all going to be elevated up to a certain level of production. And the question then is how to pay for this in a more systemic way, the same way that the trade is becoming more systemic. Everybody has to buy products that are produced more sustainably.
We take the ones with the biggest impacts out of global trade. How does that get paid for? And the proposal on the table, which ironically came out of the work I did with Ben and Jerry's after the Grateful Dead concert, I, I charged all those 50 companies, two things. One was an environmental premium. It was 5%. And one was a form of profit sharing, which actually came to about 1%. Because the, the assumption that I made was that the people that you are buying from are the ones that are creating the value that you're able to turn in food and products and sell, and they deserve a portion of what your profits are from that. And so it was a principle of the thing. We didn't, we didn't say you had to pay 1% or you had to do one part per, you know, uh, one out of 100 units sold, would go back to them or anything like that. We let every company decide it for themselves what would work for them. But it averaged about 1%. And what we found is that that's what allowed us to invest back in communities to let them achieve more value added production to bring other communities in that hadn't been involved. Uh, what we did was make trade transparent, which it isn't today. And we, we guaranteed that a hundred percent of those premiums would go back to producers.
And so with Codex Planetarius, we're proposing on a kind of, uh, uh, the other side of the axle, we're proposing a 1% solution, which is an environmental fee on all food exports. And 100 percent of that will be put into a fund that's jointly managed by the government involved and the governments and consumers countries that are paying into it so that it's transparent. 100 percent of that money will go back to producers.
Seth Larson: Wow. Okay.
Jason Clay: And it will be grants, not loans.
Seth Larson: Grants not loans, ok.
Jason Clay: If they don't achieve the results, and it's clear that they have manipulated or abused the system, then it'll be converted to a loan. And this is the thinking now. We haven't put this in place yet because ultimately this is not an NGO's job. This is government's jobs. And so this needs to be done by government, both the codex and the 1%. So now what we're doing is the proof of concept to answer all the questions people have to put out a straw, uh, person that can be the example of what this might look like to document it and start a discussion. And recruit ambassadors and important people that support this work as we go forward. But it's also to do analysis like what would this actually cost China compared to what they're doing in Brazil right now? In fact, it would cost them a lot less. And yet it would be a significant source of funding. One percent of the export of just five commodities from Brazil that are linked to deforestation would generate now it appears about $750 million a year. That is way more than half. That's about two thirds of the budget of the Brazilian agricultural entity, Embrapa, that supports innovation in farming. And it's, and it's less than the billions that China's putting in right now.
Seth Larson: Right. Yeah, so a potentially a good deal and an incentive for them to want to get behind something like this. So if I'm understanding sort of the way this would all fit together is basically we have this massive problem with the global footprint of food production, a third of the food produced in the world is traded internationally. This, initiative would put, uh, some basic standards in place to ensure that there's a floor for the sustainability of food that's going to be exported, uh, over a border to another country. And any globally traded food would, would then be meeting these series of standards to make sure that we're limiting the footprint on ecosystems, on, and, and carbon budget and all of those things. And, um, as a way to, uh, to finance the, the changes that would need to be made in the food system, there would be this 1% fee on all of those globally traded, food products, um, which would then be jointly managed and distributed accordingly.
As you said, that's, this is not an NGO's job to, to make this happen. This is going to be governments and, uh, and, and global bodies that are going to make this happen. I'd love for you to tease that out a little more. Just, you know, does the UN need to pass a resolution? How does this, you know, I, I understand this still in the early phases of being rolled out, but ten years down the road, if this is actually going to be implemented globally in the same way that Codex Alimentarius has been for food safety standards, what governments or international bodies actually need to be involved in making this a requirement?
Jason Clay: So it's, it's a bit more complicated than it, than it used to be. Uh, right now in terms of Codex, what the proposal is, is over the next, uh, year or 16 months to do about six, uh, pilots that look at different commodities in different geographies, uh, both of exporting countries and importing countries. And to look at what the impacts of codex is on trade, uh, and to document what it is and how it could be addressed to make it less or to make it more positive. Uh, by the same token, once the proof of concept is finished, which is 16 months from now, then the goal will be to get individual companies to begin to put this into one on one trade agreements, bilateral trade agreements, or small group trade agreements. And we're in discussions already with some governments and some smaller trade agreements that could test this. Because at the end of the day, to become part of the WTO, even to be adopted by the WTO, not necessarily run by them, but to be adopted by them all the governments will have to approve that this become the issue. And so that's the governing body of, of the WTO, which is about 30, 35 countries. Uh, we need to, to hand pick countries that will also, if they like this, become supporters of it. And if they, if they don't particularly like this approach, find another one. Because we're not wed to this name or this approach, but we think something like this is necessary. As an NGO, we can provide the information and the analysis and the things that that will help shape the ultimate product. But countries are going to have to buy in. Uh, and if an NGO's name is associated with it, they often won't. And so we need to keep our distance on this.
But this is about leverage. I mean, the world doesn't need another 50,000 projects from NGOs. We need leveraging governments and companies to do much more transformative things, especially now in the face of climate change and the variability that's coming from that. And the 1% solution is in a similar position in that we need a country to put this on the table and look at what it would look like take to make it work. We think Brazil is probably gonna be that country. Uh, we think their relationship with the EU and some deforestation regulations that have been put into effect with the EU, but also their bilateral agreements with China would allow them to begin to work on this. And even the relationship with the US suggests that the US government might be receptive for this as a kind of one off thing to look at in Brazil. So I think this all is just a very slow game of, of moving things incrementally. It's like playing a fish on a line. Uh, it's, you have to, it's a very delicate operation. You can't just yank it in.
Seth Larson: Yeah, you don't want to you don't want to lose it. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. And Brazil would be an amazing place to start I mean, I mentioned Brazil and in my intro to this episode. Like when we talk about environmental impacts and climate impacts and agricultural impacts, Brazil is ground zero for so much when it comes to deforestation and carbon emissions, and they have a huge opportunity to be a game changer in a, in a positive way, uh, in, in this work because of the, the scope of their production and the, the, the land that we're talking about.
Jason Clay: What's really important about both Codex Planetarius and, and the 1% solution is that each of them uses the market to change the market. And, and what's, I think, really convincing about that is that we don't have enough funding in any government to do more. We, we can't, we're not gonna, I mean if we could pivot agricultural subsidies to more sustainable systems, we could do some things with it. But I think we're at a point in time, if 30 percent of, of global food is being traded, we need a mechanism that countries cannot... not necessarily subsidize production in other parts of the world, but can ensure production to be more sustainable at the minimum, but also more resilient, uh, in the face of climate change. And that's what the 1% solution actually allows. Uh, it is using market mechanisms to generate funding that's dedicated to fixing the problem, not just avoiding it like the EU deforestation regulation. It's about avoiding deforestation going to Europe. This takes a fee on all exports and then focuses it like a lens focuses the sunlight to start the fire. Maybe a bad metaphor, but to really fix the problem so that it's on five or 10 percent of production.
It has a chance. These air all kind of stranded assets, trade and subsidies. All these things. We've got to figure out how to use them differently.
Seth Larson: Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, I do want to just address one, one potential concern that, you know, I, I'm sure some people will listen to this conversation, and the thing that's going to stand out for them is, you're talking about adding a 1% fee to the food that is coming to me and my family's dinner table, and, uh, isn't that going to mean that I'm gonna pay 1% more on all of the food products I buy at the grocery store? I know it's much more complicated than that, but I'd love for you to just, uh, address that potential concern that some folks might have.
Jason Clay: Right, so we're talking in this particular instance about food commodities. So we're talking about dry goods. We're talking about seeds and, and grains and, and things that provide the calories in the diet, but not necessarily the fresh fruits and vegetables and those types of things. That that may become part of this later, but, but that's a very, that's another whole complicated set of relationships, et cetera. And so we're looking at commodities really. Um, and, and I think that what I discovered back in the days of the rain forest, uh, trading that I was doing was that when I added 5 percent on the export value, the FOB price of those goods, it didn't make a difference at all. Uh, in fact, we were able to use those funds and targeting of the communities and tripled the price they received, but it actually lowered the cost to the consumer. And none of the companies that we worked with had any problems competing in the marketplace. Because people were very supportive of this work. They liked what it was doing in the rain forest. It became something they could agree with. I think we'd find the same thing with this. So, but if you take it even something more basic like a box of cereal or a loaf of bread.
If you took the wheat out of the, of the bread or the, the grains out of the cereal, The box would still cost about the same because the price is only about three or four or five or 6 percent max from the, from the food that's actually in the package. Everything else is marketing, transportation, all, all kinds of logistical issues. But what the farmer was paid for what's in that box is very small. And so 1% of 5% is pretty negligible. So making this transparent is also important because then the traders can't add on a big margin on this because they're doing nothing different. There's just funding being collected, but they are not handling any different. We're not asking them to set up a different silo system or traceability system. We're using the whole system to change the system.
Seth Larson: So Jason, I don't want to keep you too much longer. Uh, I, as I said earlier, you, you recently just launched this initiative at Climate Week in New York, and I know you're going to be, uh, diving into the hard work of, of getting those, pilot projects up and running. Can you just give us a preview of what the next, say four to six months look like for Codex Planetarius and what comes next?
Jason Clay: So the next four months, we're going to be finishing up research projects that we've already identified and started, and we're probably going to be launching a few more based on all the feedback we get from the New York event and subsequently, all the questions. Because you've got to answer the questions in a timely way or else they just become fact whether they're that way or not. And then starting with January, we will begin to do the pilots and we'll do probably six of those. And then we'll document them and make them public as well. If the proof of concept is supporting the work as we think it will be, then then we are in line to get funding to move it forward to the next level. Uh, and, and more significant funding, but we still have some work to do to do on that. So I think the role of WWF can still be to kind of help nurture and incubate this this thinking about this process. But it will be to hand it off too, and then hand it off where? And we don't know the answer to that. It's not our decision to make, frankly.
Seth Larson: Great. Well, Jason, um, best of luck. I can't wait to see where this project and this initiative goes in the next 6, 12, 18 months. I'd love to have you back on down the road, uh, once we get further into implementation and maybe we can talk about what the results have looked like from some of these pilot projects a year or so down the road. Um, definitely want to keep, this in our sites and see how it, how it plays out.
Jason Clay: Thank you. And I'll be happy to keep talking about it.
Seth Larson: Great. Thanks, Jason. Best of luck.
Jason Clay: Thanks.
Seth Larson: Thanks again to Jason for joining the show today. He's had an interesting career, to say the least, from tending his family farm to collaborating with the Grateful Dead and then working with WWF for the last 30 years. He's always been about big ideas and Codex Planetarius certainly fits the bill as the kind of initiative that could drive change on a large scale. As he said, we'll learn more about how this concept works in practice and what changes need to get made through the pilot phase, but I think we can all agree that any initiative aimed at reducing the harm caused by global food production and ensuring that we can continue to feed the world without sacrificing the planet is one worth pursuing. Best of luck to Jason and his team, and together, let's keep building a more sustainable future.