It’s time to regenerate the global food system

Around 70% of the natural world has been destroyed by food production in the past 50 years, but the race is on to reverse the trend 

If you are looking for sectors likely to see both deep disruption and exponential progress as we move through the 2020s, there is no better place to look for clues as to how tomorrow’s Regenerative Economy will operate than the closely linked farming, food, nutrition, and health sectors. 

This massive commercial nexus is not just the source of many of our current “Black Swan” challenges, taking us exponentially where we don’t want to go, but also the locus of some of the biggest “Green Swan” solutions, potentially taking us exponentially where we do want to go. 

It’s easy to overlook the sheer scale of the global food and agricultural industry, but in 2018 it was valued at around $8.7 trillion, or about 10% of world GDP at the time. And this immense scale is reflected in the sector’s contribution to problems such as water stress, toxic pollution, soil loss and climate change. Just focus on that last issue for a moment: food production is responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

As a member of the WWF UK’s Council of Ambassadors, I regularly see evidence of the impact of global food systems on nature and the planet. You may not know it, but the sector is now the world’s biggest driver of nature loss. Want to know more? Well, read the Chatham House report, Food System Impacts on Biodiversity Loss. Its findings are endorsed by the UN. As the authors explain, the project provided “a harrowing snapshot of the ways in which current land-use systems are fueling Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction.” 

This global extinction crisis is a striking example of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb has called a “Black Swan”. Clearly no-one set out to destroy 68% of the natural world between 1970 and 2016, with goals, targets and KPIs, but that is exactly what has happened. As a result, the farming and food industries are now coming under intense pressure to move beyond responsibility mindsets and strategies, important though they are, to approaches based on ensuring resilience and, the key to long-term resilience, regeneration. 

My 2020 book Green Swans built out from the first-ever “product recall” for a management concept, the triple bottom line, a concept I  coined in 1994. The case for withdrawal was that, at least when viewed within a responsibility framework, the concept too often led to trade-offs between different forms of value, rather than driving integrated solutions delivering value across all three dimensions, economic, social and environmental. 

The results can be dramatically different if, instead, business uses the TBL framework in the spirit of regeneration. The book’s sub-title was “The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism”, which probably had some people rolling their eyes. But last September, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon publicly committed his giant retail business to becoming “regenerative”.  

His speech was drafted with the help of Paul Hawken, the renowned environmental activist and author who is currently finishing his latest book, Regeneration, to be published in September 2021.