Satya Tripathi, Secretary-General, Global Alliance for a Sustainable Planet
It’s wonderful to be here today.
I’ll break down the keynote this morning into four distinct parts. Because it’s a room full of champions and whatever you do, you’re doing something that is of great significance to people and planet. So, I’m not assuming that anybody that’s not interested in changing how we produce and how we consume and how we sustain ourselves as a conscientious species—one among the eight million species that inhabit this planet—wouldn’t be here today. I’m assuming that we are all here because we care about Mother Nature at the deepest levels. And of course, while our thoughts and efforts may be different from one another, we all converge at that point where we really care.
Rethinking mental barriers in food systems transformation
Simon [Eassom] really put it so well when he was talking about behavioural change. I hadn’t really thought about it but as Simon was speaking, I quickly remembered—as an economist going back to the 80s when I was studying for my masters—Richard Thalor, the Nobel-winning behavioural economist. He talked about something called ‘mental accounting’ which is completely counterintuitive to everything we do. In simple terms for those of you who have not spent time studying Richard Thalor, what he said was we make these boxes in our heads. So, like you have a huge credit card debt and you’re possibly paying 30% interest a year, and you kept some money in another account for your holidays that hardly gets you any returns. All money is fungible, and if you use your piggy bank to get rid of your credit card debt, it could save you thousands of dollars over a period. But we don’t think that way; we do mental accounting—”that’s a different box”. “This is a different box; you know, I’ll use it when it is time for that activity”. While all money is fungible, it is not so in our heads—thanks to mental accounting.
That’s the true metaphor for food systems transformation. We make these little boxes in our heads: what humans need are proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and nutrients to survive, thrive, prosper and do what we think is our purpose of existence on this planet. But then we get into these false binaries of alternative proteins, land-based agriculture, aquaculture, whatever it is that [fits] the boxes that appeal to us or that we are comfortable with, we just break them down into nice little boxes and that’s the biggest challenge of food systems transformation.
The imperative of protein alternatives when natural resources are being depleted
The second thing I wanted to talk about today is that the Oxford study from 2020 that Simon quoted. It is right as of 2020. As of 2024, and we will be in 2025 very soon, what is about to happen and what has already happened, is that last year we breached the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold numerous times at different places on planet earth. Yes of course, these were aberrations and spikes, but what are aberrations in physics, to be specific, become the new normal as they keep happening repeatedly. So, 1.5 degrees Celsius is done and dusted. We’re not going to be at 1.5 degrees Celsius at the turn of the century, no matter what we do. 1.5 Celsius is done. It will get to that on a steady state basis—maybe by 2030 or 2035, certainly not 2100. The question now should be: can we stay under 2 degrees Celsius by the turn of the century? We certainly can, but that will require radical change in the way we think and the way we produce and the way we consume our food.
Since the 1920s, when we discovered NPK (more popularly known as nitrate, phosphate and phosphorus)—our agricultural systems have changed completely. There was again a lot of mental accounting going on. In the 60s when we had this ‘green revolution’ a lot of people got prizes and rewards for the green revolution in India and elsewhere. What did it do? It basically brought about a bump in food production and agricultural productivity to deal with an immediate problem of feeding a large population. Which, in our mental accounting, we were thinking ‘’Oh, we need to feed people because people are starving and dying.” So, what has happened in 50 years since then? Take the case of India. India had roughly 3% of soil organic carbon a hundred years ago, a healthy soil to be able to produce anything in terms of land-based agriculture. It is now less than .5% pretty much across the landscape. You’re not going to produce anything worthwhile with that level of soil organic carbon. And so, when people say, “You are only 50 harvests away from extinction in terms of food production,” people laugh and say, “Where did you get your science from?” Well, the science is simple. Without soil organic carbon we are talking about dirt or dust, not about healthy landscapes anymore.
That’s the challenge that we have and that’s why alternative proteins are so very important in terms of resource efficiency. We have a food system that is actually split down the middle, again in our mental accounting we don’t look at it that way. Let me explain why. There are products that we consume, that agriculture produces or processed food that we consume, and there’s a large segment of the population in economic terms (but in population terms a small segment of the population) that can afford it. And so, they can pay for it. Because they can pay for it the market sees that as resilience. So, the market drives the farmer to grow those things that have greater market resilience. In a downturn, the rich people should be able to feed themselves because they can pay for anything.
On the contrary, poor people need subsidies to get by. And so, the market signals of that are, ok if you are producing say dairy, if you’re producing cheese, rich people can afford pizza so let’s keep producing that. And so there is huge pressure on the land and other resources like air, water, nutrients, everything we can imagine going into it. And that’s why that segment [alternative proteins] needs to be looked at much more importantly, much more urgently than the other segment [traditional agriculture].
Now the other segment is equally important because that’s 600 million small holders across the planet who draw their sustenance from subsistence agriculture. Alternative protein is not going to feed them, and they will never be able to afford it. Certainly not within the next 20-30 years by which we all need to really, really change the way we produce and consume. Six hundred million small holders—with an average family size of five people—you’re talking about three billion people. We saw what happened in Syria and I’m talking about climate and security and about a million people moving into Europe because of the troubles there literally upended the EU project. I am sure you remember from roughly 15 years ago those largescale movement of refugees into Europe. When climate change hits home, it already has, but in a much worse way, we will have hundreds of millions of people moving across international boundaries, and even within the countries. How do you think that is going to play out?
I’m not trying to overwhelm you with bad news, but facts must be addressed, otherwise we’re living in a made-up reality. We really need to understand what the challenges are and then address them with a sense of urgency.
It is really shameful that alternative proteins do not get the kind of funding it should. Simon talked about solar. Solar in the last 25 years has received $500 dollars of subsidy per tonne of CO2 removed. If you calculate the solar industry and the Co2 they’ve gotten rid of by virtue of being renewable and clean energy—at least in the operational sense—governments have spent $500 dollars per tonne of carbon. Carbon now sells for $15 in the market. So, if renewable energy is important, why are alternative proteins not important enough? Again, mental accounting.
The policy makers really need to come out of their cubby holes of mental accounting and start thinking big in terms of food systems transformation and look at all these as parts of the jigsaw puzzle, not as isolated images: X is trying to do something and Y is trying to do something, do I really have the money to do this? And one thing I really liked about the slide that Simon presented about air pollution. Air and water pollution also comes from fertilizers and pesticides in the agricultural landscape. Much of all our environmental problems are related to unsustainable food systems. So, people relate to specific things, whether it is land, air, water, nutrients and everything in silos, but they do not see all of it as connected to the food that is produced for us and the food that we consume. So that is the biggest challenge.
Back big, bold initiatives
Let me then move onto the next thing about finding money for the right causes. I’ll share an example from India. Sometimes you structure things, and you plan for things, and it works. Sometimes just the divine, if you’re religious, or if you believe in the chance theory and all, whatever works for you, it just falls into place. We started supporting back in 2017 a program in the Andhra Pradesh state of India. The Andhra Pradesh state of India has 55 million people, and six million small landholder farmers. When it started nobody gave it a fighting change: “Oh but it’s a boutique idea, maybe it will work but not at scale.”
What was the idea? Converting women farmers to natural farming and we got a lot of help from Australian scientists in that area, so I want to recognise their contribution [and] who selflessly helped without getting a penny in the process. What has happened now from a tiny boutique project in 2017? A million women farmers are changing the world, they’re changing the world one farm at a time. Input costs have dropped by 80%. The Global Alliance for the Future of Food flagship study that was published last year: 50% income increases for the farmer, 11% increases in farm yield. So those that tell you fertilisers and pesticides are a must otherwise you will all starve to death, please give me a break, that’s not true because before the 1930s we produced everything without NPK. Now, did plants need nitrogen and phosphorus to grow? Of course they did, but nature provided it for them. It unlocked all those things for them as you did crop rotation, and you didn’t do monocropping so there were those things that really worked for you. Now last year they reached a million, their target is to reach six million farmers.
This year they won the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity which is considered the Nobel for humanity as they award ideas with the most potential for serving humanity. It’s a million Euro prize decided by a jury led by Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor. Why am I sharing that? I’m sharing that because just seven years ago an idea that nobody, not even the people who believed in the government of Andhra Pradesh whose program it is that we’re supporting, nobody gave it a fighting chance. So, when people come together, it’s about those women farmers, their resilience is this little, their life depends on what they make in a crop cycle so their families, everybody’s welfare, depends on what they make between one crop cycle and the next and they’re willing to change. So, if they are and we are not, shame on us.
Improving resource efficiency
There is another idea I wanted to share with you in this room full of champions that are here in alternative proteins. Now we have several alternative proteins champions within the organisation I lead in New York, the Global Alliance for a Sustainable Planet, and I can recognise some of them in this room right now. I take great inspiration from the work they’re doing for this very specific reason I mention—is that they are disrupting that market in terms of natural resource efficiency. It’s not just the money that drives the market to prioritise you, whether it’s encouraging farmers to grow certain crops, supporting lab innovations, or whatever else you use. It’s also because these are the people who can afford to invest in more resilient options. When what they can afford becomes much more resource-efficient, there’s less pressure on the land for other purposes. I could go on and on, as there are many statistics you already know: water efficiency—anywhere around 80% less water being used for producing the same food, energy efficiency is much more and land of course, you don’t need to cut down forests.
Throughout much of human history in the last 150 years—we explain it in a thousand different ways—what we have done is nutrient mining. What we do is we go into a new frontier, we cut down the forest because Mother Nature has fixed all the nutrients in the soil. We get rid of the forest, we make it agricultural land, we use up all the nutrients, and then we move onto a new frontier. The bad news is that we simply do not have anymore forest to cut down without cutting off our legs and limbs. So that’s where the challenge is.
Staying within ecological limits
So let me conclude by sharing with you two distinct ideas about what we can do together. The organisation I lead is an organisation of 300 entities from smart startups to an $800 billion-dollar financial institution. What explains that range? It is very simple. These are all organisations that are vetted very carefully, who we work with very closely because we believe they care. We believe they really want to change the way the world should be moving to stay under the two degrees Celsius threshold. I can’t tell you enough how worried we should be. And it’s going to kill us literally, and that’s not a joke.
Because the fabric of life as we know it, biodiversity—and we say that in many, many ways such as the web of life, the fabric of life—is unravelling without us even noticing it. We exist in a very fine balance as one of the 8 million species that humans have identified so far. Take out one, it has impact. Everything is connected. It’s incredibly stupid of us if we believe somehow God created us and that we have right to all the resources that nature provides, and every species exists to serve us. That’s not true. We’re delusional if we believe that. You don’t have to be humble; you just have to have a little anchoring in science to know that. It is a really bad place that we are in.
So, the thing we do is, I’m often reminded of Michelangelo the famous sculptor, (once he was doing his sculpting and had these huge chunks of stone in his backyard) somebody that visited him asked him, “You know what I’m always amazed how you bring these lifeless pieces of stone to life, these amazing sculptures”. And he looked at him incredulously and thought, “This man is really stupid”. That was the look on Michelangelo’s face. And he said, “Actually that’s not what happens here. What happens is that these amazing pieces of sculpture as you call it, so full of life as you call it, are already inside them. I just chisel the unnecessary parts away.”
So that is what I’d like to appeal to you. Another quote from Michelangelo: the danger is not that we are very ambitious and fall short of our goals, but the danger is that we expect too little of ourselves and achieve them. This is not the time for dreaming small and achieving them, that time is long gone. Humanity must find the reserves of our innovative genius that has brought us to this room today. If you look back 10,000 years of history we certainly have it in us to rise up to the challenge, to see the problem for what it is, humble down a bit and understand that we exist in a fine balance with all the other species and do what we need to do.
The problem created by eight billion people is not going to be solved by a few governments. The governments have a huge role to play make no mistake. Beth Jones [Agriculture Victoria] is here and I’m sure she’s going to talk about the things her government is doing—but governments have a significant but very small role to play. Because ultimately the governments can do regulation, policy and all those other things but we must act. We have to wake up from our deep slumber and we have to realise that our very own existence, those of our families, loved ones and friends, the structures that we love, the homes that we’ve built so carefully, everything is at risk because nature exists in a very fine balance within a range of tolerance. You breach that range of tolerance, and you perish. There are no exceptions to that rule.
So, everything, just look around, every imaginative structure that humans have built is at risk because nothing exists beyond that range of tolerance. You can push it a little here and there but then it disintegrates. That is why we need to act. We need to make sure that the ideas that deserve our support happen here and now, not in 10 years’ time and we need to shale the tree or rock the boat if we must, because that is what it will take to ensure we live to tell the tale.
This speech has been edited for brevity. You can watch it on YouTube.