The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment contributed to a seminar titled “Fixing The Business of Food: Private Sector Alignment with the SDGs and Accountability to Achieve Food Systems Transformation.” Guest Writer Linus Glenhaber covered Thursday’s 8 am event.

We all know that climate change is going to be catastrophic for all of us. This past Thursday, Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition held a webinar bright and early describing how we might change our food systems to address this worrying future in part. On September 23rd, the UN will hold a summit on Food Systems, outlining their guidelines with the goal of ensuring universal access to good and nutritious foods. In anticipation of the Summit, the Barilla Center discussed the position they believed the private sector will play, and what rules should be made with this sector in mind. After brief opening remarks by the Global Managing Director of the Climate Policy Initiative Barbara Buchner, Guido Barilla of the Barilla Group (a multinational Italian food company) spoke.

The first part of the talk focused on defining the problem at hand. “Global food systems” is pretty abstract, making it hard to identify what exactly will be discussed at the Summit. As a whole, this system covers everything and everyone related to food production––over 1 billion people. And, as a global system, both current and predicted future problems have to be addressed. Mr. Barilla brought up one example of each. Presently, for example, there is a diet crisis in the world, with around half of the world having an “insufficient diet” (counting both those who live in hunger or have insufficient nutrients and those who are obese). When it comes to long-term and future issues, climate change (an issue inherent to the global food system) and our choice not to do anything about it, threaten to further break this system, causing even more people to suffer worse diets. 

After Mr. Barilla spoke, the floor was turned over to Jeffery Sachs, president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a professor at Columbia. While climate change may be too large a problem to fix with one summit, he described how we can focus on one smaller part of the issue on the 23rd. In particular, he focused on corporate responsibility. Corporations and the private sector, after all, are the ones who deliver food around the world and into our supermarkets. Rather than having sustainable development practices solely fall on the consumer, the private sector should have responsibilities to follow. In particular, corporations should ensure that every stage of their goods is sustainable––that is, ensuring they are sourcing food ethically, that the processes they use to make their products are sustainable, and that ultimately what they are providing to their consumers are sustainable as well. In addition to these specific guidelines, they should create their own rules backed in ethics in science, rather than using the earlier guidelines as a justification to ignore any potential faults with their processes.

After these guidelines were described, a panel including Jeffery Sachs, Diane Holdorf of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, Viktoria de Bourbon de Parme of the World Benchmarking Alliance, and Peter Schmidt of the Beverages Catering Union then discussed the possibilities of getting the private sector to adopt these rules. In a way, accountability became the central question of the entire webinar. It is much easier to create guidelines than create a system of enforcement, especially when the rules are for private businesses around the world instead of governments. The panel was asked if the rules should be voluntary for now until methods of enforcement are thought of. In response, the panel brought up how earlier UN summits on food policy (such as the Zero Hunger Pledge) have had similar questions about accountability. As the UN Summit on Food Systems begins, then, rules for the private sector will be just as important as methods of enforcement.

As a whole, this webinar did not attempt to provide a silver bullet to solve climate change nor one even to adapt the global food system to be resilient in the face of change. It is simply too large a question for an hour and a half. Instead, the panelists zeroed in on one “more manageable” part. Even this part requires urgent attention, and it was hard to cover every aspect of even this relatively small part of the picture in the time constraints. This does not mean that we should give up hope and that it is too complex to change, however. As these panelists showed, there are concrete next steps that the UN summit can try to adopt.

A link to a recording of the webinar can be found online.

Global Food Systems via Metabolic.