Supply Chains in the Wellbeing Economy

- So, as I said, we're going to think about the Wellbeing Economy, and I'm going to look at supply chains and most specifically though, I'm going to look at food because I think in the end, this is probably what a lot of you are thinking about every day and, you know, being concerned with. But I'm going to try and weave in a more generic story about if we follow some of the principles of the natural prosperity, which I've mentioned before, you start to look at human behavior in a different way. Now, in this country, we've had lots of conversations about the Nudge Unit policy helping to create the environments which help people change their minds and move towards other things. And what I want to present you with today is a different idea about how we can change behaviors, but it comes from a different social construct. It comes from the idea that we actually have to work at this together. There is no individual action. You're going to have to work together on this to find the right outcome that we are looking for. And that's really at the heart of natural prosperity. Natural prosperity is not something you can go out into the wilderness on your own and do; it's actually how you connect with your society, with community. About a year ago in the midst of the COVID epidemic, I was online with a few people from communities in the Cotswolds. Now, I don't know if you know the Cotswolds. It's an area of natural beauty. It's made up of absolutely beautiful lush, undulating hills. And it was, and remains to some extent, at the heart of the wool industry; a very thriving wool industry. It began in medieval times, for those of you who don't come from the UK or don't know so much about UK history. Cotswolds wool was the symbol of national prosperity. It was considered the jewel of the realm. And in fact, there was a 12 century saying, which said, you know, "In Europe, the best wool is English, and in England, the best wool is Cotswold." The golden fleece, however, didn't come from the Cotswolds. They think it was actually a long-haired breed. The lion breed. It's got a very heavy clip if you know anything about wool. And it was brought by the Romans, all right? So no surprises that the Romans brought yet another better thing for us to work with. So even then things were traded, wool merchants would travel all the way across from Europe, across the English channel to come and buy Cotswold wool. They would take it back to Florence for some of the finest weavers. It was very, very precious textile, you know, sat far above all of the others. And even now today in the Lord Speakers, you know, in the House of Lords, he sits on something called the wool sack covered in a sort of red cloth. And that indicates the importance of the wool trade. So if you ever hear the phrase, the wool sack, that's why he sits on it. It isn't a sack by the way anymore. So huge wealth going in here. Supply chains all the way across Europe. And then effectively this wealth built up beautiful wool churches, lovely houses and so forth. So if you have a chance to go to the Cotswolds, it's absolutely gorgeous.(indistinct), which is my neighboring town, Sheepwash town, as it is probably known from. They were really built to sort of show off the wealth of the area. And one of the most influential, William Greville, some of you may know him, became a very important person in kind of English politics. So wool was the thing that brought you prestige and position. It was very, very important. Interestingly, at the heart of the wool trade, is the Worshipful Company of Mercers, which is the first order in the precedence of all of the city's livery companies. These are the ones that evolve from the guilds and they're there for training. They are under a Royal Charter. And the company's aim, the Mercer, was to literally act as a trade association of general merchants, particularly the exporters of wool, also silk and velvet. So all those luxurious fabrics, and also to provide training. The company also looked after schools, the Mercer School established a long time ago, 1447, St. Paul, some of you may have heard of in 1509 and it founded Gresham College. And that's essentially why we are here because Barnard's Hall is essentially the home for what we do, and it came about because of the Mercer's company. So that's the story between the wool, the Mercers company and Gresham College. So that's a kind of nice story there. Anyway, out of that period, lots of historians have looked at how supply chains evolved, and what they showed is that right back into Roman times, there's very strong evidence that was literally showing how supply chains built up as trading route opened up. So by medieval times, we had supply chains underpinning society, no question about it. You had the local market where people would bring things, you had large fairs. And if you look at the documents about what was sold in those fairs, it is absolutely extraordinary. You find toys from what is now, Russia. You find things from all over the world, turning up in these large fairs even in the medieval times. So these are real sort of tangible evidence of how the way that we live and the way we think about consumption, not production so much, but consumption, has to do with prestige, has to do with wealth, of course, but also availability. No point pining after something if you're not going to be able to get it. What also emerged though, and this is the sort of heart of what I'm going to talk about at that time, is that these fairs and these trading areas and markets were actually organized by the estate owners, by the churches, by town councils. And the whole point of this was so they could extract revenues. So this was essentially the beginning of the middlemen, of the brokers, of the people who kind of slightly parasitized the whole process. And to this day actually cause problems in the global south, particularly where if you were to take a simple supply chain, let's say in a simple small holding farm in Kenya, you will absolutely find that between the lady that is growing the tomato and the person who actually ends up consuming it, particularly if it's not in that village, there can be as many as five people who are taking their small piece at every point. The problem is that if you only produce two tomatoes, it's quite difficult to bulk that up, to get a good price. Now, I'm just going to kind of skip to the end, because what happened in COVID was that the five people in the middle weren't allowed to be out and about. The government said,"Nope, you can't travel. You got to wear your mask, got to stay at home," and so on. So suddenly the lady in the farm, she's got her two tomatoes, and she's got her phone. And we have something called M-Pesa. And so you'd call around and then she'd find"Oh, but I can actually sell my tomatoes on my phone. I have two tomatoes for sale. Who'd like to buy them?" And that is precisely what happened, was that during COVID, supply chains got really short, particularly in a lot of developing countries. Lots of people disappeared out of the middle. So ironically out of all of that, a lot of small holder farmers are much better off today than they were before COVID. So the question is, how do you avoid all of the people crowding back into the middle again, because it could easily happen. So back to the Cotswolds now. So COVID lockdowns are still going on. And of course the first thing that went out was tourism. So tourism was pretty much done and dusted, and it was over for the whole period of the COVID because people weren't able to get about. And the Cotswold particularly attract people from overseas, So that all went. So what happened on the core was it quickly turned towards farming, and sort of changes in buying patterns. And the hope that people would realize that buying locally produced food, where they could almost know who had grown it was going up the agenda, that people were really seeing that being able to get the origin to originate, to source your food was equally as important as being able to afford and to have the right price. And so the talk was about how could we try to assure in the sort of post COVID world, if there is such a thing, that that sense of connection in the supply chain wouldn't be lost, that people would value being able to really identify who had grown their food, where it had come from, and being able to be more transparent about the whole thing. So this is all fine, but then of course, as lockdowns have begun to fade away, and a lot of the world's population is actually just looking to return to normal, pre-COVID normal, was kind of resumption of consumption patterns, which means that you reigniting this idea of supply chains that provide just in time access for anything from anywhere in the world. And that is the danger. So we're at a tremendously important crossroads in the world today. The problem is that the reality is very different. What we are actually seeing is this cascade of changes. So you've got to kind of current context and then income's stressor like COVID where you've got all kinds of markets changing because people can't get out there and all the supply chains and so on being broken. But at the same time, you have drought, you have flood, you have major climatic events. So this whole building up of stressors means that there was a lot of market volatility. You have some crop failures, you've got people being displaced, and then you end up having all these different kinds of tipping points. So it's like a cascade. Building, building, building, building, which leads you to a lot of food insecurity. So we are seeing major sort of disruptions, the destabilization of global supply chains, not just in food, but in consumer goods. I mean, everyone can read the headlines for themselves, backlogs at ports like Shanghai, knock on delays, rising prices of raw materials. Now's the time to be in raw materials if you really want to make a lot of money, very quickly, energy, food and so forth. So the challenges that we've long known about, supply dislocations. We've had, for example, scarcities caused by shipping accidents. I mean like The Ever Given, the ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal, I mean, who would've thought the world was paralyzed,'cause one ship kind of didn't quite get it right and and got stuck. So I think there's sort of, oh, well, we'll get over it. It's not that much of a problem. It's a bit inconvenient but nothing fundamental is going to happen. But of course, now we have systemic changes in climate. We have extreme droughts, horn of Africa and spreading all the way down. We've got floods and it just goes on and on. Australia is feeling it, everyone is. And then we of course add conflicts and wars such as what's happening in the Ukraine and the Russian Federation. So food, which is very short lived in many cases, it can't hang about it, doesn't have a long shelf life, it's caught up in this perfect storm. You've got surging feed and agricultural input prices. You've got extensive crop failures and you've pretty much got the worst disease that's out there so. Well, a bit like foot and mouth, but sort of well beyond that. So that's all on one side. But on the other side, you have a cost of living crisis. So your production is really being damaged and the ability of consumers to actually pay for food is also severely damaged. So let's just think a little bit about supply chains themselves. Where do they come from? I mean, obviously they're right at the core of our society. Unwittingly, unknowingly, sort of almost invisibly, they're all around you. I mean, where did you, for example, buy your cup of coffee today? Where did you even buy your ticket? If you actually physically had a ticket to come tonight? It turns out that a lot of the tickets that are produced in this country, the paper does not come from here, of course, it comes from the other side of the world. So literally everything that we are touching is part of a supply chain. So it's made up of organizations of people, of course, activities, information, resources, and all of that is about providing us the consumer with services and with products. The fact of the matter is though the supply chains go even deeper, it's not just about shuffling things around the world, they can fundamentally distort the way that we extract from the planet, how we actually take resources. And depending on what happens on the ground, you can see that poorly constructed supply chains can have many, many unintended consequences. So let me give you an example. We have a tremendous appetite for thinking about reducing our meat consumption in some parts of the world, not everywhere, but in some parts of the world. So you have a lot, a lot, a lot of livestock farmers who are challenged to reduce emissions from their animals. And they do lots of things. I mean, whether you are in Australia on the big cattle ranches or wherever you are, and I'll come into that in a little bit. But it turns out there's actually a very simple solution in many cases, which would eradicate approximately 30% of those emissions overnight. And what that is, is if you think about a cow, and you think about what does it eat, well, it's eating grass. So a perfectly tuned cow, and there's quite a lot of research on this now that's coming out, a perfectly tuned cow eating grass and not moved around too much, will actually create manure that if you go and test it and the cow is healthy and the land is healthy, and this is the connection, that if you go and check what the microbial community is inside the manure, and you look at the soil microbe, you find out that they're exactly the same. So essentially a healthy cow on a healthy pasture will have a rumen full of a microbial mix that is actually a true reflection of a healthy ecosystem. If you go and do the same experiment from cows that are industrially produced or where they get moved from pasture to pasture, they get moved around and so on, and they're given a lot of exogenous food. Then you find that the manure microbial community is totally different from what is on the grass that they're standing on. And that stress manifests itself in how efficient the rumen actually works. And which is why you get extra ordinary levels of emissions from some cattle. So that's not to say whether you should eat meat or not, it's just to say that there's a whole other round of working with planet earth to actually solve some of our problems. So imagine that you are a consumer and you actually do want to have a low emitting cow, or you've got various options. You know, you've got the technology solution, you've got the don't eat it, and you might have the one, well, actually, where are you growing your cows, and are they healthy and is the pasture healthy and so on. So on that spectrum, there are many, many choices that you can have. And this is the whole point about supply chains, is that they have very superficial way to accommodate all those kinds of choices. And choices will affect supply chains, but I'm going to make the argument that individual choices actually are extremely inefficient way of changing the way that we live on planet earth. So think of supply chains in another way. think about them as linking values, linking your values. So take anything that you would value in your food and just think about how much you value it and how it's grown, and essentially, what would you be prepared to do to have that particular food item, and you are very quickly realize that you are applying value judgment after value judgment, and then you need to ask yourself, well, where has that value judgment come from? Did it come from my head? Did it come from something I read? Did it come from my friends, from my community? Where did I get that value system from? And so lots and lots of exchanges that are otherwise known as supply chains are just literally about one set of values sitting alongside another. Now, there are books and there are courses and you can take degrees in this. You know, you can go to business school and you can learn all about this. And you'll learn about, you know, brokers and middlemen, and you'll learn about all the characteristics of supply chain. They can be functional, efficient, responsive, innovative, there's a whole raft of describing them all. But the key question at the end is the relationship between the buyers and the suppliers, and the relationship between those two and the consumer. And whether or not it's about reducing efficiencies, delivering quality, delivering the just in time. There are many, many decisions that are made in how something magically appears on the shelf for you to buy. So tied up with all of that, of course, and rather unfortunately, is that our choices get jumbled up into what is put on the shelves. So you might think you're making conscious decisions and choices about what you buy, but actually what you are doing is choosing between what is on the shelf in front of you, okay. You didn't really set out to describe the world and then say, this is actually what I want. And because of that, many companies and brands are sort of looking at motivations, they're playing on your preferences and needs, and they're trying to influence all of that into what's going on in your head internally. And then that will be moderated by the externality of all of this, the availability and so on. So this sounds completely obvious, but in fact, when we do experiments and ask people about why they choose to buy certain items, very often it's the case that they do far more spontaneous choice buying than actually considered thinking. And the more you study the way that people make choices around what they buy and what's available, you realize that whether we like it or not, a vast number of our choices in stores are based on impulse, on emotions and on habit. So I did it last week, it worked out okay so I'm going to do it again. I bought the avocados; they were really nice, so I'm going to go back. I really like those, you know? And this time they weren't nice, but then maybe they were better than the week before, so I'm going to go back and try again. And so you get into a habit, you know, oh, oh, I always get my avocados from, I don't know, Morrison's or wherever. So we buy what we know. We choose what we know. And so large corporations are trying to corral us into supply chains, which are easy for them. And this is not a big bash by the way of corporations, but it's how corporations have to work because they need to make profits to function. So what they try to do is corral us into a situation where, well, we know it's good because we bought it last week and it was very nice, and I'm going to go back and get it again. Behind the scenes, of course, what the companies and global brands are trying to do is to make sure it's efficient, reduce the losses, don't stack things up in inventories and warehouses and get it to you just in time, okay? So there's a kind of tension here, and it's very important that as we go forward in this sort of post COVID world, when a few things have got knocked out of shape, that we start to ask questions about the codes, the sort of labeling that we see. And there's many, many things that you can talk about labeling, which is, you know, it's 343 different kinds of labeling just on the kind of cotton that you can buy. I mean, it's slightly crazy. But you may start to see new kinds of labeling appearing. And that new kind of labeling is, I think should have a big warning sign on it, it's a labeling that says we are on a journey to net zero. We are doing nature based solutions. We are a biodiversity nature positive, and your cotton is doing this and your whatever is doing that. And having spent the last year and a half looking behind the scenes at the claims, it is absolutely clear that many, many companies are struggling and in a sort of panic because they don't have the evidence to support it. It's not that they don't wish it, it's not they don't want to do it, but there's a dose of consistent, scalable measurements that are reliable and that could be tracked transparently around the world. So to say something is ethically sourced, I don't know, what does that mean? I actually don't know what it means. To say something has supportive climate justice. Don't really, I don't really know what that means, but I read it on a label yesterday. And yet a lot of industries are now putting huge demands on facilities, on farmers, subcontracted services, you name it, they're all being asked to sort of deliver

KPIs or different kinds of indicators. But the truth of the matter, and, you know, I say that genuinely coming from the UN where we have to measure things to sort of show where the countries are making progress, is that there is a shortage of comprehensive, transparent and robust data that can give confidence to consumers that you're not standing there wondering what an earth it is that you're looking at. On the one hand we're in this post COVID or sort of tailing out COVID period, there is still COVID around by the way. But nevertheless, we've sort of come out of that massive public health crisis into a world where the underpinning of supply chains can be rethought. We know we have a planetary debt, we have climate change, we have biodiversity loss, we've got land degradation, all going in the wrong direction. And so we are at a crossroads where we can make choices, genuine choices, but on what basis are we going to make these choices? So how can we do this? If we want to regain the resilience of our sort of food supply chains, let's just talk about that for now. And let's make sure there's sufficient food for all, and that it is affordable and if it has good nutritional status. How are we going to do that? Well, we need more transparency, first of all, where's our food coming from. We want to assure that it hasn't traveled necessarily thousands of miles, but at the same time, it isn't always the case that just because it was grown locally, that it's actually high quality, because if the farmer has used a lot of different chemicals, and pesticides and so on, it could very well be that those residues are in the farm produce, okay? So local doesn't necessarily mean tick, tick, tick. It means it's actually addressed the transportation issue, but you need to go and check whether the land is healthy and whether or not the food is really what you expected it to be. So when we talk about getting back to normal, post COVID, build back better, for me, it all begs this amazing aptitude that we have, a sort of unfailing aptitude for some kind of organizational and political amnesia about events, where we should really know better and we should be reshaping our world if we possibly can. And I think it comes back to a sort of cognitive overload. So just think about it. We've got real nagging doubts about what we ought to be doing in terms of our impact on the planet's functioning. So there's one thing. I don't know if you all sleep well, actually I sleep very well. But anyway, a lot of people I know who wake up in the night, wake up and they're worrying about the planet, young people, especially. Then if you kind of get over that one, then of course, there's the origins of the pandemic, you know, well, where did it really come from? Do we know? And if it is wet markets, should we not address wet markets in the supply chain? Do we really want to have wet markets with live animals, wild animals mixing, okay. So there's a whole issue about our food supply chain there. As if that's not enough, we've got ton of other things going on with climate and then of course, you know, we've got conflicts and so forth. So of course what we see is an increasing growth of sort of attitude, oh, let's leave it all behind. Let's just go back to how we were because it was okay before. But it's actually not an option, it really isn't an option. And I think because we're in the midst of a severe economic downturn, we're going to end up with really desperate times for a lot of people in terms of the enmeshment of food and energy poverty. And nobody's going to be sh, well, very few people will be shielded from this. So I want to think about how a theory like natural prosperity could step in. Could, doesn't mean to say it would, but it could step in. So the first thing I've said from the very beginning is about needing to build resilience. So in our choices, we want to make certain that we are not, so to speak, creating perturbations that will have unintended consequences, but we also want to think about our food. So simply saying, we want regenerative agriculture is the first step. But what does regenerative agriculture really deliver? Regene, it's in the name. The clue is in the name, regenerative agriculture. So this is agriculture where you can continue growing food essentially forever, because you're doing it in a particular way. What does that mean? Well, today it means no-till. So you don't, you don't basically take great big plows and pull up the soil. You leave it as much as you can. You do inter cropping, you put plants on the ground all of the year round. You never have bare soil because you leave, that would, you know, you lose that. You essentially don't necessarily just fall into the routine of crop rotation because crop rotation will also lose carbon in the soil. So you have to imagine the soil is like your skin, the top 30 centimeters, that's where it's all happening. And if you don't look after the top 30 centimeters, you will not sequester carbon in the land. So effectively you have to treat it as it is, a sort of fragile skin that needs to be well tended and well taken care of. And if it is healthy, you will produce not only good food and maybe less farting cows, but you will also sequester carbon from the atmosphere because a highly productive soil, a healthy soil, in this country, can trap somewhere in the region of four to eight tons per hectare. So that's quite a lot. Now where I live in Kenya, we can trap somewhere like 180 tons per hectare. So if you want to solve the world's problem of carbon dioxide, you can go to the Amazon and you can go to sort of a whole swath of countries across the middle part of the world. But still, it's a very respectable thing to be able to trap, you know, maybe up to even 10 tons per hectare in a temperate region like this. So these are the kinds of questions we should be asking our farmers. Yes, you grew our food, but could you tell me how many tons of carbon you were able to trap whilst growing your food? And I know several farms, the Dutchy of Cornwall's farms and others that are able to achieve these kinds of figures. So if they can do it, many people can do it, all right? All the way across the way we grow our wheat and so on. So these are the kinds of little taglines that you need to look at, because if land is managed in a way where it's resilience isn't knocked off course, then you get everything, you get good food and you get carbon. So you can have it all. That's the point. if you do these things carefully, you can have it all. The second thing is about using recursive social processes. So recursive social processes, what on earth are they? Well, here's what social practice theory tells us. Social practice theory is about picking up actions, everyday actions, and just doing them again and again and again. And eventually they become what we know as social structures or norms. So they reinforce and so on. So to give an example, you might have practices that are not gender discriminatory, okay? Less racial or gender discrimination, and you keep on doing it. You keep on doing it. Keep on doing it, and it reinforces. It's recursive. Until you get to a point where the norm is, that it's just not acceptable to have racial prejudices, to have gender discrimination. And it's that recursion that is incredibly important. And it's what natural prosperity for me is all about. How can we instigate the kinds of actions which you can see done again and again, in different contexts, in different contexts, but they're done again and again. And this is why I say, we are never going to solve our problems individually because you might be out there on your own, doing this recursively, basically talking to yourself, that's not going to solve the problem. So the final sort of piece about all of this is you need to report back to society, you need to be part of a community, you need to give feedback. So that recursive empowers you and has a responsibility to tell your friends, to tell your community, to talk to people, oh, this works. This is how it works. Now, again, that sounds totally trivial. But amazingly, in social practice theory, it's continuously coming up against the challenge, which is that we talk a lot about what can I do? What are the actions that I can take? And you often feel that,

"What can I do that will make a difference?" Actually, what you can do is get all of your friends together and do the same thing and actually repeat it, and then do it again and do it again and do it again with more communities. Small things, yes. So again, this recursive process is about how we can make behavioral change, because it becomes just second nature. Interestingly, in a lot of indigenous people, that is exactly how they adapt to new things. They try it out, seeing is believing, someone else tries it out, then they try it again. But because it's always done inside a community, you get reinforcement very, very quickly. And it's why in some indigenous populations, new innovative ideas that work get literally overnight, they move very, very quickly, is because the community structure is intact. It isn't about one single farmer trying. So when I look at regenerative farming in places like Australia, like in the US, now more and more in Europe, I continually bump into and talk to farmers who are regenerative farmers. They're doing a great job, but their frustration is, they can't persuade their neighbors. There's a sense of I'm doing it on my own. And only now, after, in some cases, 30 years of doing regenerative practices are people beginning to see, oh, oh, actually that is the right thing to do. That's a good thing to do. And my yields, aren't going to go down and I'm going to make a profit. Oh, and I'm also going to store carbon and so on and so forth. So Elinor Ostrom, who's a Nobel Prize winner in economics. She wrote a very, really, really lovely book on collective action and the evolution of social norms. And that's what she talks about. She talks about agency and the action situation. And that all levels of government, all levels of society is about who you connect to. In fact, there's a really important book, which I love to read again and again, which is called,"Who Do You Think You Are?" And it was written by Sir Michael Marmot. And he did a famous study called the "White Horse Study." And what he did was he took a whole bunch of civil servants who, to all intents and purposes, were very, very similar. Their pay scale was quite similar, very similar sort of outlooks. So you could salami slice them, literally, you know, they were very similar to each other. However, if you did salami slice them and gave one of them, you know, like a hat stand or a Dustin, oh, you know, everyone's looking over, oh, what did they do to get the hat stand? And this was what he discovered, was that the tighter packed people are, the more sort of angst they have about their neighbors, but that in the round they're able to actually produce a cohesive outcome. And so what he studied was life expectancy. So the richest people he looked at were often like bankers and others on their own, you know, maybe sitting in Canary Wharf with a quarter of a million pounds in the bank, nice, happy life on their own. And then with a lady in a village, chairman of the knitting club, and guaranteed, she would have a life expectancy that was going to be a lot longer than the individual because of that community persuasion, because of the community in which she was working. And there is absolutely clear evidence that that is the case. So if we want to change behaviors, it's not about nudging, it's not about small individual movements, is about the collective coming together as communities and doing recursively things again and again. So that's actually what social practice theory does, is sort of sets up this contingent view of the world. It's not black and white. So people like Pierre Bodo, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, people like that. They've been talking about this, but they've done it from a very theoretical point of view. And what I'm trying to do is say there's a very practical, realistic way of how we would do things in the world. So the recursive is a two-way process because you can see this thing goes around and round and round. And you need to have dissonance because otherwise you won't have transformative change. So you do need to have people asking questions, but then you coherently need to agree on what we're going to do. And that's unfortunately where we are today with the warfare between Ukraine and Russia. We haven't arrived at that moment where the recursive action has become strong enough for us to act. It's almost like we don't have the military structures with strong enough muscles,'cause we haven't been rehearsing, we haven't been using them in the way that they're going to be called upon right now. So let's look at food, and let's ask the fundamental question. Many people want to change their diets. You hear about veganism, you have vegetarianism and so on and so forth. And there's all sorts of reasons why people make those choices. And those are personal choices. I know lots of families now where one person is a vegan and then this person is a piscivore and then this person is a vegetarian. I mean the mothers are going crazy and the father's cooking all these different dinners. I mean, it's absolutely bonkers, but nevertheless that's where we are. Families with four or five different choices all going on. Okay, that's choice. But that's not going to shift the dial. That isn't going to shift the dial. If everybody's eating different things, they all feel, okay, I get on with my life and you know, but that's not going to change things. What's going to change things? Well, I think storytelling, community storytelling and seeing what other people do. And now this is where it gets slightly controversial because I often think that social media creates echo chambers and people just, same people, talking to people, but actually social media can open your eyes to see what other people are doing. And there's nothing more exciting than looking at what people eat. Okay, I've shown this once before another lecture, but I just love it. Okay, so this is a typical family in the United Kingdom. It's a bit dated. It is a bit dated ''cause I recognize all these sweets and biscuits. I'm not sure if everybody in the room does, but anyway, I recognize them. And so this is a wonderful picture of a typical family's consumption. The dog is doing very well here by the way.(audience laughs) Very well. Okay. So let's flip to the other side of the world to our family in Ecuador. And this is what a family in Ecuador is eating for a week. So totally different, all right? totally different. And when interviewed, this family, they're very happy, they feel very prosperous. They have all this food and they know where it's come from, and they've got it from their neighbors, and they went up the mountain to get this, and they went down to go and get the... They went up to get the potatoes, down to get the quinoa and so on. So effectively, you've got alternatives and you have choices. So here in Bhutan, you know, choices are made. And I see that all the time where I live in the Maasai, choices are made. People will do without food for several days because they want to, for example, buy a goat for a family that's going to have a wedding or some kind of ceremony. But it's not seen as a negative, it's seen as a positive way of contributing to the wellbeing of others. But this is the choice of this family. Now, it's not as if, 'cause I happen to know where they are. It's not as if they couldn't get pizzas, actually you can get pizzas in Bhutan, definitely. But you see this is the choice. So think about the choices that you've made in your house about the food that you're eating. So these are your choices; nobody forced you. You want to be a vegan, nobody's forcing you, necessarily, so. I think this is the issue for me. But having made those kinds of choices, then there are consequences. So the actual individual consumption, and let's say, we're going to use GDP for now. The a AIC is the magenta color and the GDP is the sort of blue color. So what you see is the Ireland has got the second highest recorded one. But the UK, which is here, okay? Has a higher actual individual consumption. Now, what does that mean? Well, the analysis behind this graph initially was just statistics. It was just what were people eating individually and how did that link to their GDP. It turned out that as people got more and more interested in these kinds of data, they ran another set of criteria, which was how big was the family in which the individual was consuming. It turns out that the larger the family, the smaller the individual consumption. And literally it was showing more and more, that is decoupled from GDP. So what you eat and what you choose to eat is as much what the community, your family, the people around the table are eating and that forces your choices and that's making your choices. And when asked whether or not this is the famous basket of goods or not, it was more than likely that the group decision had far less environmental impact than when you had individual choices notwithstanding packaging. So it would appear that there was a group pressure on how people actually perceive the food that they're eating and where it comes from, asking questions and so forth. So let's go to meat production. So meat, production by region. As you can imagine in Asia, it's very high. Europe's not doing, you know, this is a little bit old, but actually the numbers have continued and you can sort of see north Americans are... So Asia is the really big meat eater in all of this. Didn't used to be, but in the last sort of two decades, it's absolutely skyrocketed. If you look at it per capita, yes, you do have very high levels here, but you've also got massively high levels here per capita. So essentially there's a mismatch in the supply chains between the individual consumption and the production. So we are actually really very wasteful in how we produce meat versus what we consume. So effectively, there's a sort of dialogue to be had that it is not necessarily that it's good or bad to eat meat, but you have you have to think about where the meat is coming from. You have to think about how it's produced, because it's not bad culturally in many places, in fact, it's quite the opposite. So again, it's a cultural choice, absolutely. And it shouldn't be mixed up with an environmental choice because meat eating doesn't necessarily have to have the footprint that in many cases it's claimed to be. Now, you may make a choice, a cultural choice that you do not wish to eat meat because of animal distress, for variety of reasons, a variety of reasons, religious, cultural and so on. But it is a mistake to simply use the environment and the footprint as the argument for not eating meat, because again, and again and again, we can show that that isn't the case. And why is it? It's also to do with portion control. So if you take per capita consumption now, per capita consumption, and look what's happened in the last few decades. So in the 1960s in the USA, 20 kilos has gone up to 43 kilos per capita consumption, right? So, and it's also shifted from red meat. Now there's more poultry up from 25% in the seventies and more fish. In India, threefold increase in GDP, no increase in meat consumption because vegetarianism is what two thirds of the population do. UK, we had a big shift to plant-based foods. People drinking oak milk, the whole raft of things. Plant-based foods have taken off. And in fact, yes, there is a savings, but when people are interviewed as to why they're eating plant-based foods, now it's not just about environmental conditions. It turns out that for a large portion of people, it has to do with health. It has to do with gluten intake. It has to do with many other issues. And quite a lot of people are intolerant to many of the things that have turned up in meat products. But once they've claimed to have stopped eating meat and two thirds are eating less meat. So again, there's other things coming in here. There's health issues coming in here, as well as environmental concerns, cultural concerns and so on. So all of these decisions around food have to do with not just simply black and white, but also portion control. And why are you doing it? What's motivating you. So think about hamburgers, 20 years ago, this was the size of a hamburger. In 2012, it was that. I have to say it has actually gone up even more. I couldn't find... I was almost going to walk into McDonald's and take a photograph, but I thought I might get arrested. So I decided not to do that.'Cause people who made that complaint sort of spent 10 years fighting to the high court in Europe. So I didn't want to go there. But anyway, understanding our choices is as much about self-discipline and portion control. So let's get to the sort of last bit then about food because what Cass Sunstein said, he's a really well known political scientist, he said,"Improbable social movements have got traction, and they've become mainstream," because you basically cause people to have convictions, but you can't have a conviction on your own. You literally have to have a conviction with other people. And we know that and we know that's got to be sort of behind what we're doing, is thinking reinforcing, you know, reinforcing convictions to catalyze action. And this is exactly what's happening with plant-based foods. But if you really want to tackle the food chains, the supply chains, you have to tackle food waste. That's actually the criminal side of all of this. It's not really about what people eat. It's about how much we waste. 27% of food is wasted before it even gets into the stores. In this part of the world, 27% doesn't even make it off the farm or into the shops. Food waste in Kenya is much less. In Africa, it's pretty low. However, it spoils very quickly. So you might get it to the shop, but then because of the heat, and the humidity and so on it spoils. And there's very, very little infrastructure to hold food, which is why aflatoxin is spreading and why, you know, a lot of grains and others have to be destroyed. So Norway is doing particularly well, apart from maybe Oceania, but they don't have very much, and Australia and New Zealand. But essentially food loss is the big is the big baddie in the room when it comes to food supply chains. We lose about 300 million tons of food every year. So a ton of fish is about half a quarter of this room. That's a lot of food that we are losing. That's just industrials, industrialized countries. So this loss is causing food to become more expensive in the supply chain because you have to make up and recoup the losses, the financial losses as well. And so in the end, if you just took the waste, literally if you took the waste, you could feed 870 million people. So, you know, that's kind of like the food problem. And as things get more expensive, you know, we cannot afford to have a supply chain where up to one third of it is lost and not actually finding its way into the stores. So what to do. So I want to take a kind of side step very quickly and it's about recycling, circular economy. So part of the food waste solution is to stick the food waste into bioenergy plants. All right. So we've caused a problem, so let's make a solution, let's burn it, right? That's a really good idea. But now you got to ship it. You got to put it in a truck, and you've got to get it to the food station, the energy place to burn it, all right? So, you know, that might be the point of last resort, but it isn't. That we have policies all over the world, here in this country as well, where all food waste, as much as possible, is not put into landfill, of course, but it's taken over for bioenergy. But there shouldn't be any waste in the first place, that's the point. So we've sort of created a sticking plaster for a problem that shouldn't be there, okay? So that's one issue, but it comes back to the whole idea of supply chains and which sort of natural prosperity tries to tackle, which is that in the circular economy thinking and the bio economy thinking, particularly, we are trying to make the best use of the raw resources that we have. And once we've put them into the economy, into supply chains, what we then try to say is let's design things in such a way that they can be reused and recycled and all of those things, right? Whether it's metals, or wood, or paper and whatever. Paper, 14% gets recycled a year in the world, 14%. Plastics, 4%. All right, so that's a disaster, but we there's another whole thing going on there. Whereas metals, iron and all of that is up in the 70%, 80%, 90% because it has value and people can understand it and it's got real longevity, okay? So people can make arguments about that. But in a sense, the right to repair is what we're talking about here. You have a right to have food where you don't have to take this into your cognitive dissonance, worrying about how waste has been created to get you the food in the store. So we go back to labeling. What I would like to see is food labeling that tells me that in producing this avocado, we only created, you know, like 10 grams of waste, as opposed to several kilos of waste. So these are the kinds of questions that consumers and you kind of need the answers to'cause you would like to know, I hope, how food is actually brought to you. Is it healthy? Is it creating losses? And what is the impact of it? All the way through that supply chain? Not just how many food miles, not just other things you might want to talk about, but the whole supply chain. The waste that's created and so forth. So again, if you look at commodities, look at the food losses with things that we all think are really good to eat, roots, tubers and oil bearing crops. Unfortunately, they have the highest levels of food loss associated with them. Cereals and pulses, unfortunately this is going up because of climate change. Fruit and vegetables, very high. Meat and animal products is not quite so high either. So again, different categories of things that we think are really good for us are putting a huge burden on the planet because of all the waste. So we put all that effort in, we put all those inputs in, we use all that lab, we use all that water, we move things out, we destroy biodiversity to grow all these things and yet we say they're the healthy option. Hmm. Okay, so think about that one again. So the circular action, the circular economy is about thinking in the round. And for supply of consumer goods, is about the right to repair. And certainly, I mean, President Biden has said quite a lot about this. He issued an executive order actually encouraging the federal government and Trade Commissions to allow,"to allow" the right to repair of digital devices. And so finally, and hopefully now it'll continue, Apple and Microsoft are now both committed to it. So there's nothing simpler than changing the keyboard, changing the screen. And so it's been a matter of great resistance. So the right to repair is in the same principle as all of the things I've been talking about supply chains, okay. So you have a right to repair. The UK regulation has now been brought in and there is a right to repair. What that means is that you have a choice, and you can exercise that choice, which means that if you want your car repaired, you can take it to the Peugeot garage, but you can also supposedly go to this garage and all of the parts should be made available for that garage. So it's a nonsense by the way, if you buy an vehicle and you're told that only one place can fix it, uh-uh, right to repair. So consumer rights, yes, they're hard fought for, but they're not going to be the right kind of consumer rights unless we think in this more holistic way, unless we think in the round. And I'll leave you with sort of one, couple of pictures. how we make choices, that's also changing. You know, there are lots of policies, lots of communications about products. We can do a lot of online shopping, but how many of you stop to think whether you can repair those things that you are buying online and you want to look at it and check it out. So, you know, there's much less self-regulation and actually that's what we need. We need more self-regulation so that we can actually understand what it is that we are participating in when we go into our next purchases online. So knowing the consequences of your choices is extraordinarily important. And so final thought I want to leave you with is that we can solve things piecemeal, bit by bit by bit, but every time something falls off the table out of a supply chain, it has the danger of becoming a conflict material. Because resources are so hard fought after whether it's plastics, or diamonds or whatever, they will become the conflict materials of the future. Because resources are in steep decline, therefore, if it's not thought about, and it falls into sort of the black economy, guarantee, somebody will buy it. And it'll appear back in the economy in a different guise. So conflict materials, no matter what they are, metals, tungsten, you name it. These are the things that are the consequences of not paying attention to our supply chains. But you can't do it on your own. We have to do it collectively. You have to think about it, but you have to allow choices, of course. But think about the choices, they don't always seem as they appear. There's not always just one simple answer. This is bad for the environment. Eh, maybe just go and look behind the scenes and think a little bit more about it. So I hope that's left you with a few thoughts. I know I've used up a lot of my time, but hopefully we've still got time for a couple of questions, I hope. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you.(audience applause)- Who is putting green supply chains into practice and who is looking after our soil as well?- This is not an advert for whom I have any vested interest, but please go and look at Good Earth Cotton. So Good Earth Cotton, Australian company, working with very difficult soil, has rebuilt the soil and now uses only less than 10% of what any other cotton producers in terms of water. And they have now put a little thread in their cotton from the a hundred dollar bill. So when you buy a pair of jeans in, I don't know, H&M somewhere, and it says "Good Earth Cotton," you know exactly which field, and you know the soil conditions, and you know the soil organic carbon and you know how much water it's used. That's what we need. We need more of those.- The comment is that when I went to Germany, one of the things that struck me is the number of consumers who are looking at the contents, you know, for fat and salt and the things, I'd not seen that at all in Britain. So I don't know whether it's a cultural or national difference there. The question I wanted to ask you, I've heard it said, and I have no idea whether it's true, but you know, used to Africa extremely well. People tell me that a lot of people working in the agricultural sector, they're growing a lot of flowers, in fact, to be flown to Britain and other parts of Europe. Whereas basically it would be better if they grew food for the benefit of their own communities. I don't know whether there's any truth in that tun-- It is absolutely true that in east Africa, Kenya, it's a massive flower industry. It actually keeps many thousands of people in full employment and good employment, but is having a massive impact on Lake Naivasha, which is where a lot of this happens. And so there are questions asked, and during COVID, because people didn't buy flowers I'm sorry to say, they didn't buy flowers. Neither did they buy Kenyan beans and many other products. Then a lot of people left the flower growing locations and went back to their farms. And a lot of them stayed. Lots of people left the city, they went back to their family farms and they've stayed there. They've not gone back.- [Audience Member] So yeah, I just wanted to talk about the Soil Association and also about WWOOFing. Yeah and also about WWOOFing. I don't know of how many people in the audience know about WWOOFing. So WWOOFing stands for, did stand for, Willing Workers on Organic Farms, and now got changed to Worldwide Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Futures because farming actually refers to rent rather than growing things. And it's a body that has allowed people from the city to go out and get involved in organic, no-dig methods, for free. essentially for board and lodging. So really the answer, I think, would lie with those people who've devoted their lives very often to developing no-dig methods. I have a friend who was living north or south, has moved to Glastonbury. And about 15 years ago, I helped take down a greenhouse that was going to be destroyed that used to provide flowers for this country and has had that greenhouse, which is about a third of an acre or two thirds of an acre in storage for about six, seven years before could get the land, had a massive battle with the local council in order to get the thing up and is now producing a huge amount of vegetables for that local community. So on no-dig practices, which has been practicing- Completely, completely.- [Audience Member] for maybe 30 years.- Can I just say something about WWOOFing? I think you've kind of captured in a very simple example, what I was talking about, which is that by dint of being a group of people going to a place, you've started to create the kinds of communities that will have impact. What needs to happen though, is that they need to be recognized inside the, let's say the whole supply chain, because their efforts are helping to bring food, you know, into the marketplace. And I think that the challenge we have is that not enough people have that personal experience, they don't get out and they don't see essentially how food is grown. And so there is a sort of (indistinct) tale in how farmers today are really struggling to keep some of the farms under good production, because they don't have enough people. But they don't feel that there's an access point to have volunteers to come out. So, I mean, I would strongly suggest that you do much to promote the idea of people volunteering, but maybe in exchange, you know, you have some food that comes back with you because there's nothing like learning how you grow food for yourself. I think that's a tremendous thing to do. Tremendous-- Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid, we are going to have to wind up. But I'm sure Professor McGlade will remain rooted to the podium.- I will.- I will.- And you can go and speak to afterwards, but can we just say thank you for another fascinating and very stimulating lecture.(audience applaud)