Let’s Get Smarter About Feeding and Protecting the World
Food for Health exists to solve our country’s most pressing agri-food and health issues
Welcome to the End of Year Edition of Food for Health Matters
2021 has been a big year for food driven by the global pandemic and resulting health and hunger crisis; the global supply chain disruption and the critically urgent climate crisis.
On the international scene there’s been the UN Food Systems Summit the World Benchmark Alliance’s first-ever global Food and Agriculture Report ranking the top 350 agriculture and food companies’ sustainability practices, UN Decade of Action with ten years remaining to achieve the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow COP26.
What have we learned. Feeding the work is no easy job. The system is already exploiting too many resources. Everyone still needs to eat. Current efforts are NOT enough.
Companies for the most part want to lean in and lead the transformation required but some are stuck in the “only interested in sustainability to unlock business value” mindset and need to shift to a purpose-driven performance approach to successfully build the business case.
Advice to CEOs is Don’t Wait
THE NET POSITIVE MANIFESTO
The Harvard Business Review published The Net Positive Manifesto in its September – October 2021 issue profiling the former Unilever CEO Paul Polman and co-author Andrew Winston’s new book, Net Positive. The article challenges readers to rethink the role of companies in tackling planetary issues.
The co-authors say that corporate leaders can no longer sit on the sidelines and treat global human and planetary issues as “someone else’s problem.” Corporate leaders must be active in finding solutions to the world’s biggest shared challenges. And even more important is the message that, “the economy won’t thrive unless people and the planet are thriving.”
The problem is that current efforts by corporations to address planetary challenges are not enough. Their solution is that corporations should strive to become Net Positive. The aim is to improve the well-being for all, every product, operation, and stakeholders – both today and tomorrow.
Their book outlines four critical paths for businesses:
- operate in service of multiple stakeholders – which then benefits shareholders
- take ownership of all company impacts
- embrace deep partnerships and work with critics
- address systemic challenges by trying new approaches to advocacy and government relations
Is Your Company a Survivor or an Innovator?
(Hint there isn’t a single company at the Innovator Level)
