Jason Clay on LinkedIn: Montana Has More Cows Than People. Why Are Locals Eating Beef From Brazil? (2024)

An offshore windmill, not to mention a whole wind park, is a stranded asset. This article describes an ingenious way that existing infrastructure is being used to produce food, proteins, fiber, and even sequester some carbon while at the same time cleaning up nutrients in the water column and providing habitat for fish. This is precisely the kind of thinking that we need to see much more of if we are to address the impacts of climate change on the food system and vice versa. But our thinking is too linear, going down a rabbit hole too quickly —what can we produce right now, and how can we produce more of it more efficiently going forward? In fact, in some places it may be easier to produce several things rather than just one. If the wind farm doesn’t want to do it itself, perhaps for a rental fee it will allow others to take advantage of the opportunity. We need to be more open to new ways of doing things and nimble about making them happen.

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Even when laws are on the books in Indonesia to prevent permits that allow for deforestation to establish oil palm plantations and the mills to process the fruits, there are always those who want to find loopholes to allow them to continue with business as usual. Different departments in Indonesia’s federal government have contradictory language in their permitting processes, e.g., forestry allows deforestation for timber and pulp wood, while agriculture has permits that allows for deforested areas to be planted. In this case, though, it is the state government that has chosen to support the establishment of palm oil plantations when the local indigenous populations are opposed to it. Natural resources and land have long been the way that more isolated parts of the world can generate income and the tax base necessary to afford expenditures for the public good. We are now at the end of that frontier, and we need to find different resources and sources of income to support local populations.

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When it comes to AI, we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves here. I am sure AI can do great things, but improving agricultural production efficiency, et al., is what we have been doing for a century or more. That is just business as usual and it will not get us where we need to go — to an 80% absolute reduction of GHG emissions and at least a 50% absolute reduction of the other four-to-five key environmental impacts. Making better producers a bit better will not solve the problem. China has shown how this can happen, and AI could speed up the process globally. More than a decade ago, China announced that 250 million farms would be consolidated and/or retired. Some 67 million farmers were to be returned to larger, better farms, while many of the farms would be used to create larger natural floodplains and riparian areas along rivers. The remainder of the farmers were moved to cities where they would work in factories and their children would go to school. Before we use AI to make producers a bit more efficient and productive, perhaps we should use it to determine which farms are too small, marginal, or degraded to be competitive in the global food system. At the very least, we can stop subsidizing them to produce inefficiently with huge impacts. https://lnkd.in/erJ3kyxh

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What makes multistakeholder and precompetitive platforms successful? World Wildlife Fund has a long history of both launching and participating in these kinds of platforms. In a new paper, the Markets Institute distills common themes and lessons about what has worked well, what hasn’t, and other opportunities related to such groups. https://lnkd.in/eVnx5k7B

Last week I participated in a trade forum in Geneva focused on harmful subsidies. The question was how to foster international cooperation to reduce or eliminate environmentally harmful agricultural subsidies because of their disproportionate impact on biodiversity and habitat loss. When addressing participants at the forum, my first point was not to eliminate the subsidies but rather repurpose how the funding was used. It has taken decades to create the appropriation in budgets for ag subsidies. We shouldn’t just let that slip between our fingers and then try to claw it back later.The problem with subsidies is that they become entitlements. Globally, we subsidize the crops and production systems of the past century, not the current one. Also, there is every indication that it will cost much more to pivot our global food system to reduce its GHG emissions while simultaneously adapting to the impacts of climate change on agriculture.Going forward, we should use subsidies to support innovation and investments to transform the food system into what we need, rather than try to maintain the system as if nothing is changing. As a friend of mine used to say, money is like manure: if you spread it around, it makes things grow; if you pile it up, it begins to smell. Too many subsidies have been going to the same people, to do the same thing. If anything, this has made them less innovative, not more. And we wonder why nothing has changed.We need to support producers who are innovating and trying to find the next crops and produce them better. We can insure them for the risks that they are taking, but should we be insuring people who plant the same crops in the same place and then bemoan the impacts of climate change?When I raised the following points, I lost the audience. Governments increasingly require food imports to meet their basic food needs. Why wouldn’t they dedicate 1% of the value of the imports to go back to the producing country to ensure that exports either maintain or improve the resource base, ensuring that food exports can be produced in the future? Otherwise, they are just mining resources to cover current needs. Think about it. This kind of thinking is what has encouraged agricultural sprawl.

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"Subsidies are like manure: if you spread them around, they make things grow; if you pile them up, they begin to smell. "Read "Rethink Food," the weekly WWF newsletter — and subscribe!https://lnkd.in/e84iBtRw

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