World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

Empowering Agricultural Entrepreneurs to Sustainably Feed the World

By Mike Fernandez, Corporate Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Cargill, Incorporated.

At Cargill, sustainable food production is fundamental to what we do. Our core business is buying, processing and distributing grains, oilseeds and other agricultural commodities and selling them to customers that include food and beverage manufacturers, foodservice companies and retailers.

These customers increasingly want to know – and want to prove to their consumers – that the ingredients in their products have been produced in ways that respect people and human rights, and employ responsible agricultural practices that protect land and conserve scarce resources. In short, sustainable food production is increasingly a business requirement.

WWF's mission is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on Earth.

We’ve all heard stories about the foolish rich guy who blew his fortune on outlandish cars, homes and yachts. They usually follow a predictable path: He experiences a windfall of cash, spends beyond his means and inevitably plummets into bankruptcy.

This story is being played out on the biggest stage of all: Planet Earth. On the whole, humanity is currently on a natural resource spending binge. At the same time, more than a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Until we balance these inequities, we’ll all suffer the consequences – from the price we pay for food to access to clean water.

Maybe it’s all the recent droughts, or severe storms, or basic supply/demand dynamics, but there's a lot of buzz about water risk these days. Alexis Morgan, a global water expert at WWF, is most concerned with the latter issue. Alexis and executives from PepsiCo and Calvert take to the “Wet & Wild: Assessing & Managing Agricultural Water Risks” panel session at today’s Ceres Conference, where they’ll discuss strategies to bring water use back into balance with nature.

Scanning the busy agenda for this week’s Fortune Brainstorm Green, I’m struck by the opening and closing sessions of the first day. Focusing these highly visible sessions on the economics of conservation is telling. Indeed, how businesses, financial institutions and governments account for nature as a material asset has become the hottest sustainability topic of 2013.

Being green in our material world can be exhasuting. Our global economic engine runs on consumer spending. But the more we spend, the more we consume, the more our planet struggles to sustain itself. If we continue gobbling up resources at the current rate, by 2030 we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain life as we know it.

Reconciling this conundrum may seem impossible. But fear not my material friends, balance can be achieved.

There’s a good chance that you’ve bought into a black market of illegal products. But this is not a blogpost about a massive, global conspiracy by corporations to defraud consumers. It’s about our collective obliviousness to the growing prevalence of illegal products in our lives, and the consequences of the status quo.

Ostensibly a product that was harvested or traded illegally looks and functions the same as a legal one. But a deeper look reveals the hidden costs of illegal products. There are economic and national security implications. Local communities and endangered species are robbed of their homes. Companies and their customers are complicit in breaking the law.

We can no longer claim ignorance and look the other way. Modern information technology equips us with tools to solve the problem.

Oxford, England, the historical town along the River Thames is currently teeming with really smart ideas. Nearly 1,000 “social entrepreneurs” gather each year for the Skoll World Forum, to challenge the status quo and collaborate on solutions to world’s pressing challenges.

Among this intelligentsia is my colleague Jason Clay who’s participating on the Sustainable Sourcing: The Business Imperative panel session on Friday. The panelists will tackle, among other topics, “the role certification can play in creating value for all players in the supply chain.”

Forget what you know about corporate sustainability. It’s probably all wrong.

Gone are the days of PR spin and shallow words. The new sustainability is about strategic management of natural resources, which are increasingly hard to come by. It has evolved from a reputational strategy to a business imperative. Don’t take my word for it; take the word of the biggest companies in the world.

It’s hard to feel sorry for the world’s biggest companies. But consider this. They have to figure out how to meet skyrocketing growth in consumer demand that is unmatched in human history. Factor in a recovering yet fragile global economy, weather variability and an increasingly scarce natural resource base and they have a real dilemma. As they look ahead to 2050, they see two billion more potential customers earning more, living better and consuming twice as much on average as we do today. With just 24% of Earth’s surface left on which to farm, supply/demand ratios look grim.

Whether we like it or not, our lives are bound to these challenges. Global supply chains are complex and impact us more than we know. The price we pay for food and long-term access to our most basic products hangs in the balance.

Nervous yet?