What I've Learned about Food and Sustainability

Jason Clay is the Senior Vice President of Markets and Food at WWF.

Where to start? My early market transformation wake-up call came after a Grateful Dead benefit for the rain forest, when I met a man named Ben—of Ben & Jerry’s fame. Ben asked what he could do to help, and I said: make an ice cream with ingredients from the rain forest. Use Brazil nuts from natural forests and cashew nuts from replanted ones. WWF research confirmed that the export of these nuts would not harm the forests. And when Ben & Jerry’s launched its Rainforest Crunch ice cream (sustainably harvested nuts included) the sales and accompanying flood of media raised the awareness of rain forests globally.

By 1993, I was working with WWF to compare the impacts of wild-caught and farmed shrimp. Some 250 pages and 1,900 external reviews later, we reached the conclusion that both wild-caught and farm-raised shrimp had tremendous environmental impacts, but farming (aquaculture) was growing rapidly and had greater potential to improve. We began to explore what sustainable shrimp farming would look like.

A three-year study resulted in some of the best data in the world on the impacts of shrimp aquaculture, as well as the best ways to reduce those impacts, from on-farm practices to trade regulations. From shrimp, we expanded our focus to the 12 most valuable global species produced by aquaculture.

To find out, we tested representative species for chemical residues and found that toxins—including unacceptable levels of the newest, supposedly safest chemicals—had accumulated in all of them. Even more concerning, we also found evidence of chemicals that hadn't been used in the region for 30 years. Turns out, the most worrying environmental impact in the Mesoamerican Reef wasn't from overfishing; it was from agriculture. And we needed to approach the problem by targeting soil erosion and chemical runoff.

Another lightbulb went on as we realized that the key to a solution was to work with the main agricultural industries associated with chemical use in the region. With support from the Summit Foundation, we put expert boots on the ground in Mexico, Belize and Honduras.

Even with those commitments in hand, we were still left wondering: Which of these gives the world more food over the long term: recognizing the best producers and certifying them, or helping the worst actors clean up their acts?

Turns out, the 25% of food producers whose practices are least sustainable produce only 10% of the product. But they cause about 50% of the environmental impacts. Yet all of our previous work focused on the best performers. That’s an upside-down equation.

It became abundantly clear. To produce more with less, we need to start moving the least sustainable actors, right now. To do that, we take the lessons learned by better producers—ones that increase productivity while reducing environmental impacts—and turn those into blueprints for action. Then we can show farmers on the low-performing end of the spectrum exactly how sustainable decisions are good for the bottom line. Moving the bottom also means we have to work with governments to create policies that reduce waste and are aligned with productivity, efficiency and continuous improvement.

What exactly is WWF’s role in all this? Well, we’re not entrepreneurs, building our own businesses. We’re not intrapreneurs, creating innovation inside the companies. We’re extrapreneurs. We help companies connect to the right people, identify risks and efficiencies, solve problems earlier, and share information between institutions which might not talk to each other without our help. Like honeybees pollinating an increasingly abundant field.

We pull together the best science and industry know-how, the latest thinking on trends and issues, and use that to inspire better practices across sectors. Still, nobody has fully solved this riddle. Yet that is how we can shift the entire performance curve.

Simply put, sustainability is a pre-competitive issue. It has to be dealt with apart from issues of standard business competition. When entire sectors, platforms or even countries tackle critical sustainability issues together, that’s when we can start to drive progress that is swift and dramatic—exactly what we need to freeze the footprint of food.

The message is plain: Food is precious. Don’t waste it. Producing food takes a lot of human effort and gifts from the Earth. If we don’t get food right, we might as well turn out the lights and go home.

Lesson one: If you want to change companies, work with them. The first step is to create awareness, with partners and others and then build consensus. From this, partners can each choose their own strategic focus and the best way forward. The work is up to the companies, but we can help. We talk to and learn from companies that don’t talk to each other. We can share those lessons learned in order to accelerate change.

Lesson two: The present took centuries to make, it will take time to change it. In Wisconsin, our work took six years. In the Mesoamerican Reef, it took 12 years (and is still going on today). In aquaculture, it took eight years to get standards in place and another seven years to get them implemented by two thirds of the industry. While you can’t rush a good thing, if we learn from all our efforts, we can cut the time it takes to achieve results in half and the cost even more. To work at the speed of life, we need to do more with less—less time and less money.

Lesson three: Be strategic, measure performance. We can shift the needle faster when we focus on what's most important. Our approach has been to be extremely targeted: to help our partners measure what matters and then manage what they measure.