How we can feed the world by 2050
Transcriber: Federica Bruno
Reviewer: Maria Pericleous
Every pitch for an agricultural
startup or project
begins with the same statistic
and emphasis:
”The population is growing rapidly
and we will need to feed
10 billion people by 2050".
This is great.
It’s a big, hairy, audacious goal
that the entire industry,
the entire world,
can get behind.
But right now, it’s not clear
that we can achieve our goal.
If you spend enough time
talking to people in agriculture,
development, or impact investing,
you’ll get the idea
that nothing is working.
If you talk to someone
in agricultural finance,
they’ll tell you how just 14 percent
of rural Zambians are formally banked.
If you talk to someone
focused on productivity,
they’ll tell you how smallholders
are producing just 20 percent per hectare
of what commercial farmers
in Zambia are producing.
Above all, you’ll hear about poverty.
You’ll hear how rural poverty rates
haven’t changed in four decades.
How in 1980, the rural poverty
rate was 80 percent.
In 2019, 78 percent.
Every time, the picture painted
is one of struggle and suffering
and, above all, scale.
Hopeless, endless scale.
Ten billion people to feed.
821 million currently going to bed
hungry on any given night.
1.6 billion overfed.
750 million in poverty.
Trillions of dollars have been spent
in the broad field
of agricultural development
in the last 60 years.
We all share the same mission
of ensuring that we can feed the future.
And yet we’re still here.
I’m convinced that the major problem
facing agricultural development today
is an absolute obsession with scale.
The privatization
of the number of farmers reached
over the depth to which we engage them
has brought us to where we are today.
Trillions in investment wasted, billions
of people out of balance and unsatisfied
and millions in a seemingly
endless cycle of poverty.
Clearly, all of us
rushing to feed 10 billion people
are doing something wrong.
There’s an expression most often credited
to Desmond Tutu that I love.
“There is only one way to eat an elephant,
one bite at a time”.
In other words, no matter
the size of the challenge,
if you break it into bite sized pieces,
you can achieve it.
Those driving the agenda today
in agricultural development
are trying to live by this maxim.
But they have no table manners,
their bites are way too big.
As an agricultural entrepreneur
and a social entrepreneur,
I can’t count the number of times
that I’ve been told:
“If your model can’t reach
a million people, it doesn’t matter.”
To which I reply: “Doesn’t matter to who?”
Those living by the million person gospel
are mistaking large numbers
for long-term thinking.
Unintentionally,
they are encouraging the proliferation
of what I call disposable solutions.
Short term, light touch, single issue -
products, projects or services
that reach many yet truly affect few.
They scale but they do little,
if anything, to address the root causes
of why these solutions were needed
in the first place.
We must change the dominant
thinking in development
to the prioritization
of depth of engagement
over number of people reached,
because in truth, long term thinking
is taking the time
to build the foundations
and invest fully in the farmers
who will feed us all.
I grew up on a farm in the northwest
of the United States.
When I return to farm someday,
I will be a fourth generation
steward of that land.
My great grandfather pioneered the farm.
This is him, the young man
in the overalls, looking pretty handsome.
My grandfather followed in his footsteps.
And my father after him.
My cousin is there now
continuing the family profession.
When my grandfather began farming,
the primary source of power
for preparing the land was horses.
By the time he stopped farming
90 years later,
the farm had 500 horsepower
tractors that could steer themselves.
This change didn’t happen overnight.
It took generations.
And when I relocated to Zambia,
although this may sound different
than a typical smallholding,
what struck me was that the similarities
are actually far more profound.
Farmers all over the world,
whether on five acres in Zambia
or 5,000 acres in the United States,
asked the same five key questions
every year.
What am I going to grow?
Where am I going to get the inputs?
How will I pay for it?
How do I get a good yield?
And who am I going to sell to?
Understanding these questions
and how farmers answer them
in a given context
is what agricultural
companies are built on.
In order for farmers to grow
from horses to horse power,
companies must grow alongside them.
At home, when we have
a pest attack our crop,
we have agronomists that
we can reach out to
for identification
and recommendations on control.
When the farm needs financing,
there are institutions
that we can engage
that know my family, their wants,
what they’re working for
and what they’re capable of.
Most farmers in Zambia
are facing a very different reality.
After decades of disposable solutions,
in rural areas there are no banks,
few service providers,
limited storage infrastructure,
roads are terrible, farmers
have no address or credit profiles.
And connectivity to Internet
and even cellular service
is often nonexistent.
So in 2014, my co-founders and I
started our company, Good Nature Agro,
to be a full farm partner
to smallholders in Zambia.
To be one organization that the farmers
could come to for answers
to any or all of their questions
throughout the seasons.
Every farmer who grows for Good Nature
has access to high value markets
in legume seeds or commodity.
Every farmer receives a fair,
secure, and transparent contract.
Every farmer has access
to training and advice
through our network
of private extension agents,
lead farmers who are incentivized
by revenue share in the company.
Every farmer has access to inputs
that are increasingly customized
to their fields and production histories.
And they have access to financing,
to make these inputs accessible.
At the end of the season,
every farmer can receive a premium price
when they deliver quality product.
This model delivers results.
When we started working with farmers,
baseline net grower income
per hectare was 113 dollars.
Our long term average is 357 dollars
net grower income per hectare.
This year, with favorable rains
and continued improvements on the model,
our farmers are averaging more
than 600 dollars net income per hectare.
How many of you want to farm now?
(Applause)
We’re proud of what we’ve built.
But we’re also aware
that we are just one part
in a growing ecosystem of support.
And this is where it gets hard,
because if we are to achieve our goal,
if we’re to feed 10 billion
people by 2050,
we will need the many to work together.
To illustrate what is possible, I’m going
to introduce you to a farm and a farmer.
Her name is Enis Tembo.
In the scale driven model,
Enis will always remain a number.
A phone number,
a national registration number,
one of the thousand
or fifty thousand or a million.
But we’ve worked together for five years,
and Enis is a hell of a farmer.
Year after year, she’s proven
her productivity and reliability,
all while supporting 40 of her peers
as a private extension agent
with Good Nature.
There are many agri businesses
that want to work with Enis,
but there are no systems, no visibility
on which farmers like her
are ready for more,
more contracts, more financing,
more investment,
and which farmers
are just beginning on their journey.
Individually, organizations
are trying to close this knowledge gap.
Over the past several years,
Good Nature has invested heavily
in mapping farmers’ fields,
establishing credit scores
with each of our growers,
transitioning to digital
payments and savings.
Even establishing expanded
Internet access and access to phones.
These are different from investing
in financing farmers or logistics.
Those are annual costs
that will occur time and time again.
These are foundational investments
designed to improve how we can engage
with Enis and her offspring over decades.
We’re not the only ones
making these investments.
We’re definitely not the only ones
investing in annual services
with farmers like Enis.
That’s the point and that’s the problem,
a complete lack of collaboration
and coordination across the industry.
has made for a remarkably
inefficient investments
and has caused many organizations
to throw up their hands
and say it is too hard
and too expensive
to engage small farmers
in the deep rural areas.
But let’s go deeper.
Enis farms on three hectares.
On one hectare, she’s contracted
to produce soybean seed with Good Nature.
Two other common value chains
where she operates are maize and cotton.
On this one hectare,
she will engage with Good Nature
on those same core services
in the model we’ve already discussed.
If we have any margin left over,
we’ll invest in the foundations.
Our entire view of Enis right now
comes from this one hectare.
In the next field over also Enis’s field,
another company, a cotton company,
will make many of the same investments.
They’re also assisting Enis
in addressing her five key questions,
but on a different crop
in a different field.
The inefficiencies are compounding.
And in the third field,
Enis’s final field, maize,
it’s a completely different story.
She is almost entirely unsupported.
Markets are open,
buyers may come or they may not.
If financing becomes available,
it will be because a project
decides to implement it
for a short period of time.
It will come when the project comes,
and it will go when the project goes.
The incentives to work together
are obvious.
We must begin to collaborate
on the annual costs
if we are to ever establish
the foundations,
because when we work alone,
we all learn to deal with the challenges
of engaging smallholder farmers,
the distance, the roads,
the lack of visibility.
But when we work together,
we can solve those challenges.
Earlier this year,
Good Nature commissioned
the build of a digital platform.
It’s an opportunity for shared investment
through shared information.
It’s going to be really cool
and it uses some impressive technology,
but the technology is not the solution.
The collaboration is.
It’s a place where
all of the agri businesses
who engage Enis,
all of the agri businesses
and other stakeholders
who want to engage Enis
and most importantly Enis herself,
can come together to connect.
Where we can identify
where efficiencies can be gained
and where we can all afford
to invest more deeply.
If and when multiple companies
bring their currently narrow
credit profiles together,
we can get a holistic
financial view of the farm,
Enis’s farm,
for the first time.
And Enis is well on her way
to being banked.
If and when we can agree upon
and implement methods
for moving to digital
payments and savings,
we can use the information that’s captured
to steer other stakeholders,
like telecommunication companies,
to where they should invest in rural areas
and Enis is well on her way
to being connected.
Together, we can have
a depth of information
that currently feels out of reach.
We can preserve margins and reset
our relationship with farmers
in such a way that the farmers
can, many for the first time,
see a viable path
to their long term financial goals.
We can afford to start investing
in farmers like people again.
Annual success comes from answering
the five questions with farmers
and answering them well.
But there is a sixth question.
The most important question
that farmers all over the world ask:
“What do I want?”
“What am I working for?”
When we ask farmers
what they want to achieve,
what their financial goals are
across five years,
the answers range widely.
Many want to invest deeper in their farms.
They want to purchase assets
like motorcycles and trucks and tractors.
Some want to move to the city
to take a job,
or to start another business.
Nearly everyone talks about
education for their children and ensuring
that the next generation has a choice
of whether they farm or not.
These are middle class goals.
But who hears them?
Who works for them?
This question is a health check
for our entire system.
If you’re an organization who, like us,
is built around engaging
smallholder farmers,
do you have someone on your staff
who knows what every farmer
you engage is working for?
Probably not.
The way systems are built right now,
it’s very, very hard to do.
But can we all agree that this is how
a healthy system should function?
That we all want to be treated
as individuals,
not as insignificant, because
of the size of our operations.
We don’t have multiple generations
to achieve our goal
of feeding ten billion people.
We have one generation.
And in front of us, we have
two alternate 2050s.
We could continue to focus on scale.
We could continue to prioritize
the number of farmers reached
over the depth to which we engage them.
We could continue to roll out
disposable solutions
and give ourselves the illusion of change
as we engage many, yet affect few.
Or we could slow down.
We can take the time to invest
in the foundations right now.
The foundations that will allow
the solutions that we already have,
as well as solutions
we haven’t dreamed of yet,
to effectively engage farmers no matter
where they are over the coming decades.
We can prioritize depth
of engagement over scale,
because we know that a supported farmer
is a successful farmer.
Which will we choose?
Thank you.
(Applause)