 It's my pleasure to welcome today's panelists and our online audience at our press conference entitled The New Agenda on Food, launching a decade of action at the World Economic Forum 2020, the 50th annual meeting. Today, I'm joined by Shonda Klin, member of the Executive Community at the World Economic Forum, Gilbert Hougbon, President of the International Fund of Agriculture and Development, Hanna Kefeber, President of Food and Refreshment at Unilever, Johan Roxtrom, Director of the Pottsum Institute for Climate Impact Research, Ej Jakar, Chairman of Berat Krishgar Jamaj, and he will correct the proper pronunciation of that institution, and Veeber Dreyer, Chairman of the Managing Board of Rabobank. Welcome everyone. We're here because an urgent call has been made by the UN Secretary-General. He called this the decade of action to deliver on the SDGs. And today is quite an epic day for the World Economic Forum. It's the first day that we're having an all-vegetarian menu for all sessions during the at the Congress Centre and at the Media Centre. So food has been on the agenda and on our plate for the day. So we're very excited to be discussing on this very important topic. So, Sean, I turn to you to ask us, how can we deliver on this urgent call? What is the World Economic Forum doing? Thank you, Alem. So, I mean, food systems are universal. Everyone must eat. And because people interact with food every day, actions to transform the underlying system are full of opportunities to drive progress towards a more prosperous, healthy and sustainable world. But it also speaks to the heart of the sustainable development goals. But what is urgently needed is to work out how we move away from simply a model of food production which produces as much food as possible, as cheaply as possible, simply based on taste and how it looks, to a food supply that is healthier to all of us as humans, that is more sustainable for the planet, and it also improves the lives, particularly, of those in rural areas. And so unless we do this, food security will continue to rise. Diet-related costs will become insurmountable. And the impact on our natural world, its water supply, the destruction of forest and nature loss will add to the climate and environmental crisis that we currently face. And so in a way, we have to see, as in other sectors, where we've seen a transition we need in food to see a transition to a healthier, more sustainable, more efficient, more inclusive food system. And a major challenge is working out who is going to pay for this transition. I mean, farmers alone cannot bear the cost and there is also a limit to how much consumers can be expected to pay. And similarly, we're seeing, as we have with investment funds and pension funds looking to step away from fossil fuels, we need them to invest in sustainable food supplies. And governments must become a lot smarter in using subsidies to promote this move to more sustainable food sources and to encourage a healthier way in which we eat. And so, and companies and also must look at their entire supply chains to move towards as much more sustainable sourcing of foods as possible. The UN Secretary-General has actually called this the decade of delivery to deliver the sustainable development goals, including through the recent announcement of the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021, with the intention of offering a catalytic moment for actionable commitments and public mobilisation. And so we're here today to present some of those key initiatives that will support food system transition towards those sustainable development goals. This includes the launching of the incentivising of the food system transformation report that has just come out, which outlines four pathways for incentivising food system transition and presents a roadmap for change. The announcement of the Food Systems Economics Commission, whose overarching objective is to further transition to healthy, inclusive and sustainable food systems by providing a comprehensive assessment of the economics of the current food systems and their unaccounted forecasts and to fairly distribute its impacts of the transition. And finally, the Food Action Alliance, a next generation of coalition of a large number of organisations and initiatives to support country-level action that promotes food system transformation. Thank you, Sean. I'm going to skip above all of these wonderful boundinists and go straight to Gilbert and ask him how, as Sean said, food is key, is crucial to everyone. And food cuts across all the SDG goals. So how can the UN priorities focus on this? And how are they trying to achieve that? Thank you so much. One of the key reasons why the SDG decided to launch this call for action comes from the fact that as we know very well, all 17 SDGs are really interrelated. Frankly speaking, it will be a tactical and strategic mistake to just try to focus on one SDG or two SDGs and not looking at the others. This is really, that's why at the UN level, we want to promote all at the same time. That being said, we also know that the SDG 2 is one of those SDGs that are lagging behind. This is really why it's important for us to really have a specific initiative for the SDG 2. We know very well that when you talk about the food, we talk about water. And therefore, you talk about climate. You talk about gender because the women are at the front line in the production. We talk about the voice. And therefore, SDG 16, you talk about the health. SDG 4, you talk about education. All starting with SDG 1. So my point is that by pushing and focusing on the food, not only are you going to address the SDG 2 itself in terms of food security, but when you unpack all the metrics of SDG 2, you realize how you have a direct impact on the others. I would give you one specific example. If you take SDG 2.3, the target 2.3, it's talking about doubling the productivity and the income of the smallholder. So you're not just making sure that they are food secure on that. So it's going to be crucial. My last point I want to at this stage is to come back to what Sean was saying. If we really want to make a decisive impact on the SDGs, we need to see how we are oriented or taking action-related initiative. We need to fix the policies. We need to coordinate. We need to work in partnership. But walking the walk, not just talking the talk. So we really need to look at actions, actions that are moving us forward. I believe that one of those action is the special envoy that you just announced. Yeah, the special envoy that the SDG has announced, Agnes Kalibata, she's an agricultural scientist, president of the Africa Green Revolution Alliance based in Nairobi. And some have seen her how full of energy and passion and determined to push this agenda forward. What we want to go forward with this system summit is to bring all the stakeholders together. It's not just the UN. It's not just the international financial institution. It's not just the private sector. It's not just the foundation, the civil society, the academia. It's all of us. And I have to say, though, we know that the gap in this financing is huge. We talk about billions, hundreds of billions a year today if we were to achieve the SDG too. But we need to look at beyond the financing. There's so much we could do. And this is what we expect from all of us. And this is a perfect transition to Hanake. We just launched a report looking at how there's four pathways that we can use as mechanism to incentivize a food system transformation. Can you share some of the key findings of that report? Yeah, absolutely. So we're actually, as Unilever and I think the private sector, pretty excited about this report. So it's called incentivizing food systems transformations. Obviously, a really big and important topic for all of us. And what we like about it is quite action-oriented. So it has four action pathways of things we actually need to do together with all stakeholders. So the first one's about policy. And it's about repurposing existing agricultural subsidies in different ways. So we grow more of a variety of crops for a more balanced diet, but also support farmers in a transition that will no doubt be painful. So that's a really critical underlying piece in terms of policy. The second piece is about innovation. We need to prioritize environmental and social, as well as financial outcomes in the innovation that we all do. And to that end, at Unilever, we've just opened a brand new innovation center, 85 million euro innovation center on the campus of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which is the number one agri tech university in the world. And we want to be there so we can work with academia, with students, with professors, with startups, with scale ups that are also on campus to really open up our innovation to beyond just for financial gain, but also for social and environmental gain. So that's the second pathway. The third one is about institutional investments. And the report calls for setting higher standards when it comes to institutional investments. At Unilever, again, we're a big fan of this. We just last month in December, we were the first big company to host a sustainability event for investors. And that was really well received. We're also quite proud to be ranked number one in FAIR, which is an investor network on the protein transition readiness of the company. Again, for investors to look at their institutional investment differently from only financial is really critical, and the report calls that out. And then finally, consumer behavior change is the last pathway. And of course, that's what we're all about at Unilever. So business is going to have to play a pivotal role to make sure that consumers demand better products that are better for their health and better for the planet. And we're doing that with more plant-based products, whether that's vegan mayonnaise with helmets or vegan magnums or dairy-free Ben and Jerry's, which are all delicious, or with the vegetarian butcher, which offers phenomenal vegetarian burgers at Burger King, but also through projects like Knorr's Future 50, which encourages consumers and farmers to eat and grow more than just the five, six crops we all eat and grow, but actually encourage and motivate them to eat 50 different crops, crops we've long forgotten. And as a big brand, we can really make behavior change there, we believe. So those are the four pathways. We're excited about them. Policy, innovation, investment, and consumer behavior. Now we just need to take action together, as Gilbert said. Johan, you've also undertaken another path towards action, which is the Food System Economic Commission. Can you share some of the objective of that commission? Yes, sure. Let me give you the scientific justification, not only behind the Food Economics Commission, but also why this action is so tremendously important. I mean, we're all preoccupied when we meet our endavos of the big geopolitical turbulence in the world. We talk about war and terrorism, and we talk about phasing out fossil fuels and industry, in particular in transport systems. We rarely talk about the fact that food is the single largest threat to people and planet. Three independent studies last year were published independently showing that 11 million people per year die prematurely because of not eating the kind of healthy food that Hanukkah was referring to here, due to obesity, due to malnourishment, due to diabetes, due to cardiovascular disease, due to too high level of sodium, too much starchy food, the whole trend line towards overconsumption of animal-based proteins and processed food. But at the same time, in the Eat Lancet Commission, for the first time, we took the food analysis scientifically to the planetary level, showing that food is a single cause behind transgressing five of the planetary boundaries. So if you want to know why we need to gather in Kung Min in China later this year to resolve the fact that we're in the fifth mass extinction of losing nature, food, the reason why we're over-consuming water, food, why we have the single largest cause of deforestation and losing carbon sinks in climate, it's food. Why are we uterifying our aquatic ecosystems? It's food. We have a broken food system. I mean, we should recognize that we cultivate protein in one part of the world by cutting down forest and losing nature, transported over across oceans to produce meat in industries. Then we consume it and cause health problems and uterify coastal zones downstream. It's a linear production system which is destroying humans and the planet. Now, the drama here is that the Food and Land Use Coalition that is part of the partnership here assessed last year that the food system is worth on the market roughly 12 trillion US dollars. But the externalities of everything I've just shared with you cost, no, sorry, the externalities is over that amount. So food is actually subsidized by the planet and by humans at a value which is higher than the market value. This requires us to now internalize all those costs so that we can get a correction of this mega market failure. We haven't done this. We talk so much about pricing carbon. We never talk about pricing food and the parts of the food system that are broken so that we can get the right incentives for farmers and for the value chain across from fork to field or field to fork. Now, the Food and Land Use Coalition will gather the leading economics in the world to do a stern review on the food system and to assess the costs of inaction if we continue as today. And the indications are already, we know this, that we will fail on both the sustainable development goals and on the Paris Climate Agreement just on continuing on food and on its own. I mean, I just, let me repeat that, that even if we successfully decarbonize the whole energy system and get rid of all oil, all coal, all natural gas, we'll probably anyway pass the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold because food in itself is driving so much of the global warming and we'll certainly miss on the STGs. We will put economic value on this. We have appointed the chairs, leading economists in the world, Ravi Kambur and Professor Atmar Adenhofer. They will be backed up by a leading international group of economists and we are kind of soft launching it here and taking this off. It's a partnership between the Food and Land Use Coalition between Systemic and Eat and the Potsdam Institute Climate Impact Research and in two years' time, in conjunction with the Food Summit in 2021, that's less than two years, I realize, we will be presenting the first global assessment from the Food Economics Commission. Thank you. AJ, none of this transformation can be achieved without farmers. What world do they need to play? I think it's generally agreed in the world today that the way farm subsidies and support systems and mechanisms have been designed and how money is being spent is not only not sustainable, it's also harming the environment and a transformation of incentives is required. Now, everybody understands that it's required. Everybody also understands that if you do not transform as you've just told us, it's going to be very bad. So there is a realization. But at the same time, the biggest resistance to this food systems transformation can come from the farmers themselves because they fear that a transformation may lead to lesser profits for them. And that's why platforms like the World Economic Forum where we are sitting together have become necessary so we can all sit together, design, take farmers into confidence, take everybody into confidence, and design a transformation which is not just about food as everyone's talking about, but about farmer, livelihood, satisfying livelihoods. And I think so, satisfying livelihoods is captured in the report by saying inclusive. I think so inclusive includes satisfying livelihoods. Till farmers do not have satisfying livelihoods, a transformation itself is not going to be possible. And this is this opportunity of working together under different alliances into a summit that's coming in two years. I think so it's a great opportunity to get farmers from all countries on board, take their opinion. And I think so this is exactly what's happening and this is what's planned. So it's great to be here. Wonderful. You both, how are we going to pay for all of this? She talked about billions. Everyone has talked about the money. As the finance partner, what are the mechanisms that needs to be put in place to achieve this transformation? Yeah, thank you for the question. And usually when it gets to this question, that they turn to a bank. I'm glad to be a bank in this world of food that on the one hand fully needs this call and this alarm bell ranging of inaction. I think that's an important analysis to do. At the same time, there's also very optimistic analysis done by the FOLU and by the Eat Lancet report that says that if we do act, it's not only avoiding disaster, it is actually also creating value. It's creating a better livelihood for farmers and it's creating lots of benefits and more healthy diets. So it's actually an important thing to do. And the truth is also that there is an enormous amount of money available, but it's very hard to get it moved from the money that's available to the investments that are needed to take place. And so there are a couple of things that are needed from the financing world. It's both the redirection of subsidies. It's going to be finding new blended solutions where you combine different types of money so that it matches the need of the investments. And you need to find ways of ensuring or supporting the transition of farmers in the phase that they transition. And so one of the things that we as a bank and Rao Bank and Rao Bank is all over the world in the food supply chain is created a fund, the Agri 3 fund. And in that fund, you have the United Nations environment participating but also governments funding this fund. And what the fund does, it helps farmers to make the shift to more sustainable practices. Literally on the face in Brazil, for example, that you built an incentive through this funding and this financing that they do not use practices that chop down forest but they limit their land use. So financing is on the one hand is a matter of making sure that money gets to the proper places where you can invest but at the same time, making incentives, the pathways so that farmers can make the shift, consumers can make the shift. And in one of the areas in which we as a bank are also participating is in the food action alliance. And there are a lot of the stakeholders here at the table are participating in country or regional programs aimed at creating that on the ground where the farmers are involved, the multinational organizations are involved and banks are involved to finance the shift. And only if we organize as a system around that will we make the change that is needed. And so one thing I want to close with is you'll hear much in this day of food is about system change. And what it actually is, what it takes is that whole ways of patterns of producing and eating need to shift. And the only way to do that is by combining the forces that you see behind the table here, calling for action but also acting in congruence like in the food action alliance that we have formed. Thank you. Fantastic. I know we have a few minutes left for questions. So I'm gonna open up the floor if you can keep it succinct and we might actually group them so that we can make sure that our panelists can get to their next session. If you can state your name and your media outlet. Jopwout, financier dagblatt, financial daily. Question for Hanneke and Wieber of course. In your and my peaceful country there was a lot of farmer protest last year on, it was all about climate policy of our government and the future of our farmers. And what went wrong in your opinion in this peaceful country and more specific should policy makers, what should policy makers do to deal and to address this farmer uproar? Okay. And we're gonna just see if there's any other questions. Okay, fantastic. So thank you for asking that because I think it's also a good example to see that this transformation in the food supply to the world is not something where we focus, for example, focus on Asia, India or Africa, South America. It happens in Europe, in North America. And what the issue that you're addressing here is unrest among farmers. The farmers are feeling more and more, let's say the last piece of the equation, the victim of the transition that is lies ahead. And I think as also as AJ also indicated, is that we need to put the farmer back in the entrepreneurial seat, creating a pathway in which he or she is the success of the transition that lies ahead. That they are the leader of the transition. And I think one of the things that went wrong if you wanna use that word in the Netherlands and we had uproar of farmers in the street is that they felt without space to move. And so one of the challenges that we face in Europe, in the Netherlands in particular, a successful country when it comes to agriculture, is how to make the transition possible that we all want while we create space for the farmer to be successful through it. This is highly possible. It's just that we need to put the stakeholders around the table and think about solutions that help them make the shift. And we are starting to do that and you see that they act positively to it. But we do need to find a way of making the transition that is needed in food, something in which the farmer needs to be farmer-centric in a way so that the farmer can make the shift on the farm level. In the Netherlands, in Germany, in India, in Africa, in South America, and in North America, everywhere around the world, the farmer is a key ingredient in that change. And thank you for asking the question. AJ? Yeah. What must, I think so, and there's another amazing part of this whole discussion that we're having is that whether it be the Economic Commission, whether it be the Summit in 2021, whether it be the Food Action Alliances, that all these thought processes are coming when international commodity prices are low. Normally you would expect such coalitions and such conversations to happen when there was high food inflation and food stocks were low. So it's a time, I think so, this is how you pre-empt the future and try and reverse what's happening. And I think so the timing is absolutely crucial and outstanding that we're doing it when there is no demand for it, but we are foreseeing what's happening and this is an important part, I think. Yeah, I just want to echo what we've said. I mean, we talk a lot, obviously, about feeding Africa and the developing world, but this transition of the food system is going to be extremely painful in Europe and the U.S. as well, and the recent events in Holland showed that. I think what we need to do better in the future is to really have farmers at the table. No one invests more in farming than the farmers themselves, but they also want to be part of designing the future and the transition, and that clearly, I think, was not well done so we can learn from that. I think the other thing is in Europe's green deal, it will be critical that subsidies are repurposed and additional incentives are created during the transition, especially for farmers or this thing won't fly. John? Yeah, so I mean, I totally agree that we need to include farmers and I think this is fundamental to succeed, but I also think there's quite a lot of evidence to say that we are doing a fundamental mistake if we believe that the way forward is to just adapt to every uprising we get on this kind of complaint over moving from inertia towards a new direction, because we know that the uprising in France with the Giaison, we know that what happened on the streets in Germany a few weeks ago on farmers' uprisings and in the Netherlands is simply because we are unable to go in with policy reforms in one area without having socially thought through pathways in another area, and we know now that we can do redistribution of wealth, you can actually increase tax here, but reduce income taxes, you can subsidize in different ways. I mean, everyone complains of the European cap system, the common agricultural policy. Well, my God, everyone complains because of 40% of the European budget, but isn't that a lot of money you can spend on farmers? I mean, that's amazing. What's the impact of that investment? Well, it's that food is so cheap. That's what has happened. Food is so cheap in the world, it's cheaper than it has ever been. The average income level of households put on food today is less than 10% on average. Go 40 years back was over 30%. You know, people do not put money on food today. So, and I'm not saying that science suggests that we just have to increase food prices, but we have to somehow get to smart new mechanisms where we can help low income, both farmers and households to kind of compensate for the fact that we need to somehow get a recalibration. We cannot just destroy the planet to have cheap food and then get scared every time someone complains. As very evident by this incredible and robust conversation, this is a conversation that needs to continue and this is a conversation that cannot happen in silos. So I thank today's panelists for joining us and our audience online and in the room. Thank you very much. Good night.