Name: Future-Proofing Food and Water
Uploaded: 2025-10-28
Duration: 20 min 26 s

From extreme weather to growing populations to armed conflicts, global food and water systems are under mounting pressure. Right now, more than 2 billion people face food insecurity, with nearly 700 million experiencing hunger in 2024. If current trends continue, more than half a billion people could be chronically undernourished by 2030. How can innovation, investment, and inclusive partnerships drive lasting solutions? From biotechnology and cultivated proteins to aquaculture and regenerative practices, leaders will discuss solutions to help secure sustainable access—for people and planet—for decades to come. 

Future-Proofing Food and Water

Conferences

So just as you saw written at the end of the screen, written on the screen at the end of the video, the solution to the food insecurity problem begins with dialogue. That's what we're here to have. Joining us to talk about how we can combat food insecurity and improve access to food and water sustainably are my esteemed panelists. Uther and cousin is the chief executive officer of FSF Ventures and a board member at Monddale's International and Bayer. Fernandouiroz is the chief executive officer of Minerva Foods, and Sonny George Bergaza is the chief executive officer of OLAM Group. Thank you all so much for being here. I know you've you've traveled far. Um, so we know that we produce enough food globally to feed the world, and yet food insecurity remains the strongest challenge. It affects as many as 2 billion people a year. Uh, how do we sort of bridge the gaps? Between the need and the supply, what's the most, I want to do a little quick lightning round and ask each of you what is the most vexing challenge when it comes to solving this puzzle. Earth and we'll start with you and tell us a little bit about what FSF Ventures does as well. Well, thank you very much and thank you to Fortune for the opportunity to participate in this conversation with my colleagues here today. Let me start by Saying you're wrong, we don't grow enough food to feed the world. You've all heard that, right? That we grow enough food, we grow enough calories to feed the world, but we do not grow enough nutritious food to feed the world, which is why there are 2.4 billion people today who can't afford a diverse and nutritious diet because we don't grow. So what is required to support the diet diversity to meet human health as well as to meet the environmental challenges of the food system of today. So what I'm excited about is the opportunity to participate in conversations like this one where. There's uh where we know what the answers are and we are in the room with those who have not only the imagination to address those to provide for the change to those answers, but the financial interest in investing in the change that is required and that is exactly what FSF Ventures is all about is raising the capital that is necessary for us to grow. The businesses that can drive the access to more affordable nutritious food by while also delivering robust and market-based returns to investors. So there's a misallocation of resources, and part of what FSF is doing is getting the resources in the right places. I want to hold that thought. Fernando, tell us, tell us a bit more about Minerva Foods and the challenges you're facing. We are in the food production, especially proteins, animal proteins, beef, lamb. And from a platform of 7 countries in the southern hemisphere, we export that to 100 countries all over the world. We believe that the the biggest challenge is not only the quantity, but is the affordability of food. Uh, food is not affordable in an equal way all around the world. If you take out the development, developing countries, especially the What we call the 7, the countries that are Brazil, Russia, India, China, uh, uh, Indonesia, Mexico, all these countries, uh, uh, the family budget that goes into food represents 35 to 40%, so food inflation and food cost, uh, it's a big threat. And if we add that to this equation, uh, the geopolitical scenario that we are facing today is getting even more complicated, uh, bringing more volatility and much more uncertainty for the next uh few uh few years. Thanks. I actually, uh, recently read a report about how Americans seem willing to pay whatever the price might be for beef, but that's, uh, but America is of course an unusually wealthy country. That's not a scalable solution. So keep an eye, keeping that thought in mind. uh, Sonny, tell us more about Olam and the challenges you're facing. So we are a global food and agribusiness. And our purpose is to reimagine global food and agricultural systems so that we can have a more sustainable food secure future going forward. And we are focused on solving for some of the key challenges that exist in achieving this mandate. So the first challenge that we we have is a major food and growing food demand gap in terms of calories as was just mentioned by my fellow panelists. We have 12.5 trillion calories that we produce today. We need to produce about 20.5 trillion calories. So that gap of 7.5 1000 calories, trillion calories is a food challenge, demand challenge. The second is we have a huge supply challenge in terms of the land gap. We need an additional 593 million hectares of land. Which is equivalent to twice the size of India. So every year, two Indias have to be brought in the cultivation at current productivity growth rates to meet the challenge. Thirdly, we have a huge GG mitigation gap, which is compounding the problems that we are facing, and we cannot afford to have more than 11, more than 4 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. By 2050 as against that, the, the forecast is we will be at the current levels of productivity, about 15 gig tons of greenhouse gas emissions. And that is if you want to get to 2 °C. If you want to get to 1.5 °C, we will have to put under cultivation another 7 million hectares of land to achieve that 1.5 degree goal. We have a nature biodiversity challenge. We have almost 28,000 species which are very important for agriculture that are going extinct. So that is another major gap. We have a water gap is about food security and water security. We have a huge water gap. We consume about 4170 L of water per person per day. Out of that, 3800 L of water is required to produce the food. We only need 50 L of water for our consumption, 320,000 L for industrial use, but 3800 L of water is there. And we have, in order to we have compounded our problem by wasting more than a third of the food that we produce, 34% of the food that we produce is wasted. So how do we reduce food loss and waste to also solve for this equation? And finally, we have an innovation gap, which means we need about $4.5 trillion of investment in finding the next breakthroughs to find a sustainable food future which we are not in this at this point in time making that investment. And lastly, there's a livelihood gap. 550 million smallholder farmers, 55% of them are below the poverty line, 90% of them are below the living income. So unless we solve for all of this, we're not going to have a food secure future. So I don't know how. You started off by saying you have enough. This is the point at which people in my business say, Well, AI can fix it, so AI will fix it. Thank you very much. Good night. No, not to be glib, but it is a very daunting laundry list of challenges. It feels like a common thread in it. You mentioned the shortage of land, and of course they're not making any more land with a few exceptions, at least agriculturally usable land. So I think a big common concern becomes how can you Make the land more productive while at the same time not depleting it, you know, but you know, in many places you've had a situation where farmland gets over farmed and you can't and that it's no longer productive. So where are some of the solutions around around better use of land? What are some things that you were seeing that are that are promising on that front, and I know you've got some thoughts on this. Sure. The, the reality of everything that was just said. Often limit the interest of those outside of our community in the work that is necessary because people say it's too complicated but in fact it's not particularly when you think about biotech and digital solutions that are coming online, the AI supported solutions, for example, BA you mentioned I'm on the board of BARR has a new nitrogen fixing. Uh, corn that is biotech seeds that supports the reduction in chemicals that are necessary but increases the efficiency of the corn stock and I can we can we we can talk a lot about specific. Fix, but I think the, the point and, and because of our limited time is that while we will continue to have chemicals as a part of agricultural production to support the, the, uh, what is necessary to. Ensure that we have the most efficient, uh, agricultural activity we will also have new biological tools, new digital tools, new AI support that ensures our ability to increase production on land that is already under cultivation as opposed to expanding the land that is under cultivation. We will their new. Tools coming online to support agriforestry as well as um we talk often about new indoor activities that support growth. The challenge has been in the past that the energy that is required for some of the some of the indoor agriculture uh facilities. Has limited the financial return on those facilities, but that too is changing and I AI is providing new abilities to monitor the energy that is necessary to reduce what is actually used. And increase the viability of those facilities as well. We will require a diversity of solutions that we do not have the luxury of implementing on a piecemeal basis. We have the we have the responsibility. Of identifying the investment capital that is necessary to support the multi-sectoral investments that are required from farm to consumer that will change the food system in a way to make it more productive and make that food more affordable and available. So there's a connection between the sort of the precision of the science and the productivity of the land and the health of the land in a sense. Yeah, that's interesting. I, I know that in animal protein, the concern over the amount of land and soil and resources take per calorie is always a concern for those who are sustainability minded. How is that playing out in Brazil? How's that playing out for Minerva? What are some solutions you're finding? I think Brazil, one of the main vocation of the country, is to produce agricultural products. Uh, both, uh, uh, raw material for food, uh, for, uh, biofuel, and I'll give you an example that, uh, combines technology with, uh, the local advantages. Uh, we have a growing industry to produce, uh, ethanol out of corn. The DDG that uh is the byproduct of the methanol, of the ethanol, uh, is given to the cattle to feed the cattle. The tallow, that is the fat of the cattle that's the leftover, uh, it's used to produce biodiesel or sustainable aviation fuel. So in a piece of land where you're producing, uh, corn or soya bean, and you have the integration uh with uh with uh cattle, you have a whole chain that you produce renewable fuel. And affordable, uh, food. So this is an example of, uh, the technology applied to the reality of the place. Technology is not one size fits all. You have to be very conscious of the advantages that each area, the conditions that each area has. Brazil has 3 crops per year. Uh we don't have a winter, so we are able to cultivate 3 times a year different crops, and this integration makes it much more efficient. Uh, the, the carbon credits that are generated, uh, really adds value, uh, for that, and this, uh, transformed the products once again into a more affordable products in the whole chain. So Brazil is, I believe, by far a net exporter of food, uh, producing because of those three crops producing more than it needs, um, and at the same time, as Sonny pointed out, there are the greenhouse gas challenges of transporting food from where it is to where it's needed, um. Sunny, I'd love to hear your perspective on some of the supply chain challenges right now, both in terms of being able to ship things sustainably, but also in terms of the way that geopolitics is disrupting trade flows right now. Yeah, as if these challenges that we have all identified on the panel was not significant enough, we have gone and shot ourselves in the feet by having trade policies that are further distorting global trade, which is creating a significant amount of inefficiencies. So we know that there's a standoff now between China and the US on the export of soybean to China. At one point in time. The US accounted for 70% of China's soybean imports. It imports about 110 million tons. As against that, it has not imported 1 kg this year and it is unlikely. Unless of course there is an agreement in the near future for US to resume shipments of soybean. And China has diversified. Most of its soybean comes today from Brazil, even from Argentina and other locations. It is not dependent anymore on American soybeans to meet its growing requirements of protein. So that's one example. There are many such distortions. It's not just the US and it is not just the US trade policies. So India was a single digit share of global rice trade flows. In the last couple of years, it has changed, and India last year ended up being 40% of world trade flows of rice. And India then suddenly banned the export of some grades of rice as they perceived a shortage of those qualities of rice and rice prices shot up through the roof. This year, India has reversed that policy and decided to again allow exports. Rice prices have crashed. So farmers in different producing countries are going to face the consequences of this capriciousness in policy. Because of the uncertainty surrounding it, nobody is able to plan and invest on that basis. So there is a serious impact on how to reconfigure supply chains. And unlike production and manufacturing, where it is possible to go from Country A to Country B by some act of providence. Uh, it is only certain countries that can produce certain crops. Not all the crops that we need can be produced in all countries. So almonds, the world's most expensive producer in the UN, but it accounts for 84% of the world's almond production. Because you need a certain set of microclimatic and agroclimatic conditions. You need bees. Bees will not fly all through the day. They will fly only for a couple of hours in the day. I can't give them more time and encourage them to fly more. They can't fly with the wind speeds at about 25 kilometers an hour. If the temperatures are below 0 °C, there will be no flights for bees. And therefore we can only grow in California. So irrespective of where we want it to grow or how we want to diversify the supply chain, it is just incumbent that many of these agricultural commodities can only be grown in certain regions, and if they are going to be blocked from free trade or access through tariffs and non-tariff barriers, we are shooting ourselves in the feet. Given how fragmented all of these markets are, uh, I, I found myself thinking, does, does, does the global agriculture industry sort of need an OPEC? Uh, does it need some kind of coordinating body that sort of helps balance out, uh. Imbalances in supply, uh, but that's a lot to ask, especially, uh, you know, in the current global conditions, um, so that, that makes it seem as though the solutions become somewhat more local and somewhat more driven by the private sector and more driven by hopefully technological advances. um, in the time we got left, I'd love to hear from each of you about sort of one technological advance, uh, that you're particularly excited about that's affecting your work, um, Sony, let's start with you. I think the number of the issue is how do you increase productivity per unit of resource employed, per unit of land per unit of water, per unit of carbon, per unit of biodiversity. How do you as was just mentioned by a fellow analysts, it's not possible to solve for this problem by finding more water. There is so much of water, that's it, or finding more land. There's so much of land without destroying the planet. If you want, without destroying the planet, there's only so much of land. So our challenge is how do we find productivity breakthroughs that for the same unit of animals, same unit of land, same unit of carbon, same unit of everything, fertilizer. There's no way we can keep on growing fertilizer usage. The forms of fertilizer with which we cultivate, etc. has to change to balance the equation out and to solve for all of these constraints. So one specific example I can give is in carbon and how we have to be more carbon efficient to do a carbon assessment of any supply chain, uh, doing a life cycle analysis approach, a bottom up approach. It takes 9 months for a single supply chain. I run 1800 supply chains globally. For one supply chain, life cycle analysis, bottomless approach takes me 9 months and takes me 20 to 25,000 pounds for one supply chain assessment. So imagine doing it for 1800, how complex and difficult it is, and doing it for all the scope of emissions, scope 12, and 3. 96% of my emissions is scope 3, only 4% is directly under my control. So then we can use technology and AI, for example. To find a more reliable system, a much cheaper system, a more accurate system to measure emissions. What you don't measure, you can't manage. So that's the starting point. So to measure to manage, I've run down our time relatively low. I apologize, but can you give me a one sentence thing you're excited about? One census on what I'm excited about is the AI and the technology solutions that are giving us the reality of transforming the food system for environmental health, human health, and to support the return to farmers in particular, but the equitable return to all of the stakeholders across the food system. Thank you. Thank you. And one sentence from you, Fernando. Uh, for me, uh, in the multipolar world is the whole that the private sector has on building the bridges between different ideologies and different countries with different needs. So the the the hold that the private sector has is a very important one more than ever, and this group has a lot of that hold. Uther and Fernando, Sonny, thank you so much for being here. so grateful for your time. Thank you.