 food systems specialist for FAO. We'll talk to us about multi-stakeholder platforms as a best practice for supporting sustainable agriculture in fragile ecosystems. Oh, good afternoon, everyone. I do realize it is only me that is keeping me away from the wine and drinks after, so I'll try to be as brief as possible. First of all, I'll present myself. My name is Federico Mattei. As mentioned, I work for the Mountain Partnership, which is an FAO institution. We work mostly with mountain agriculture, also through the Gillespa, which is the global island and fragile ecosystem partnership, also on coastlands and deltas and these kind of things. And I have to say that last week or a couple of weeks ago when my office told me I had to come here, I was initially not skeptical, but initially confused. And I thought, why would theoretical physicists be to having an event on sustainable food systems? And then first of one of the first things I did was to Google the definition of physics. And apparently it is a branch of science that deals with how the fundamental constitutes of the universe interact with interact being the main word there. And also listening this morning to some of the speeches when we were talking about the sustainability of everything, I did realize and in fact physicists might be the most pertinent to talk about the complexity that we are facing because you are one of the few or one of the few people who are specifically interested in looking at the minuscule, so how things interact at a very, very small level, but then how these things interact in the complexity of something very huge. And this is exactly the challenge that we need to face. And I think so it is very pertinent that you are having this discussion. I was then surprised I have to say during this day because I had taken a few notes of what I was going to say and I kept noticing that everyone was making my points. So I had to change my my my thing every every time. It's like okay I'll talk about it. That's the problem of speaking last. Exactly. So about you know externalities and about the complexity and about so many things. So I have to keep changing changing my my my thing. Multi-stakeholder platforms, I will say something about this. And I think this is a multi-stakeholder platform. There is nothing new about this. And I think there is a kind of change in the last in the last decades in the last years of bringing together all the different stakeholders in food systems to a table and trying to define programs projects and how to implement them together. There is there is word coins I think by slow food if I'm not mistaken which is the co-producer. So it is bringing is the act of bringing consumers into the discussion of production methods as though they were co-producers because it is through their consumption patterns that they really create and and define production practices. And maybe this could also be used in a way for for science. I think you know science is neither bad nor nor good. Inherently it is a tool. Sometimes we really need to understand how the science or what the objective of the scientific instruments and tools what are their objectives. And I think by bringing in the people who then are going to use these scientific tools into the discussion as early as possible we can kind of co-create scientific approaches, tools and methodologies. So maybe co-scientists could be could be the term you could take from this. One thing that was mentioned this morning which I would like to touch upon is the price versus the cost of food. And I think this is a very very crucial point. I am an economist unfortunately so I tend to think in economic terms and one of the first things I learned as a young man studying economics was externalities. Externalities I won't go into too much detail of the economic theory because it's apart from fact it's economics 101 but you can find it quite easily on the internet but it's really the when we do a price cost function some of the benefits or some of the costs of any single economic operation are external to the actor who does this. Let me make a specific example so you might find it easier to understand. If I have to build cars I would look at per unit cost what is my cost of production so the materials the steel the workers and so forth the electricity and obviously how much I can sell those cars for. I will come to an equilibrium so if I produce enough cars I will able to break even and get enough profit. The problem is that a lot of the costs and sometimes the benefits are externalised and so when we look at things like pollution in the in the sense of the cars the pollution the the serious the negative effects on the population these are not borne by the car producer but rather by the collective. Someone today mentioned that no one is paying for these external costs but right in fact everyone is paying for them to a varying degree and so one of the things we need to understand is that when we go into a supermarket a shop or whatever it is and we see the price of a food the price is what we see on the label that is not real cost food in most cases there is cost which is much superior to that price this cost can come from environmental degradation from health from social aspects and so forth sometimes there is an extra benefit which is not part of that cost either so if we look at some of the more for example I found it fascinating Dr Edie Mr Edie was talking about before regenerative agriculture some of the benefits of that regenerative agriculture are not included in that price so and I think economists and I think scientists in general really need to find ways to re-internalise these negative and positive externalities and by including them in the price then the consumer is able to make let's say informed or rather real decisions on what they want to do I'm very much against dictating what people should buy or should not buy how they went to spend their own money but the price of those goods should respect or should reflect all the different externalities in that product. One thing I've noticed is there has been a lot of talk today about really kind of large-scale agriculture I found some of the presentations fascinating especially the one I'm thinking on now is the one for Professor Basso and I was trying to think how could this be used I am a farmer myself I have a small-holder farm how could I use this and I thought you know it's kind of difficult I couldn't get the magnitude and we have to kind of remember that depends how we consider a small-holder farmer but anywhere between 30 and 80 percent of global food production comes from small-holder farms 30 is if we consider under two hectares I think but two hectares is a very small farm in many contexts and something like 30 percent of the world's population is occupied is employed in agriculture directly or indirectly so how do we then respond and many of these of course are in small-holder farms especially in the global south and how do we use technology to also provide them benefits and to really tailor the technology to their specific situations I think this is a challenge for the future. So for example when today agriculture has been very much defined as a source of CO2 we've looked a bit less as agriculture as a source of livelihoods and how many people worldwide depend on agriculture. One of the things that I think science can be very very useful in this respect is one of the main disadvantages of small-holder farmers is the inability to have for example economies of scale obviously if you have a very small smart you won't have the money to buy certain kinds of machineries for transport for stocking and so forth and traditionally this has been in many ways not resolved but through cooperatives so putting a lot of small-holder farmers together you can then have much more economies of scale you can have investment opportunities and so forth but maybe we can also see how science specifically tailored science can help those small-holder farmers and can maybe limit some of the disadvantages they have from a lesser economies of scale like lesser economies of scope and I think we've come to a point where physics is science is very mature in that respect in which it can be tailored things like the internet of things we've talked about them a bit today and how can we make it a lot more flexible a lot more pertinent for the small-holder farmer. When we were talking about multi-stakeholder platforms and in general science and scientific innovation I think there's different ways that we need to then use this so for example we talked about a lot about environmental sustainability a bit less about social sustainability health has been a very important topic but we also have to see how for example we can really understand certain things so we've talked about land use for example and how agriculture is always seen as degrading the quality of land this is not necessarily true we had a fascinating conversation at runtime with about alpeggio alpeggio is is a practice as a cultural practice here in Italy where mount or cows were brought up into the mountains and alps especially during the summer months and then brought back down to the villages in the winter and this the conversation we were having about this was how some scientists or many scientists seem to believe that this actually increases the biodiversity of these ecosystems because through grazing they open up meadows in what are fundamentally coniferous forests and these meadows seem to have after our conversation higher biodiversity both of plants and insects there's more lights coming in there's more interaction these kind of cultural practices can be important sources of regeneration same thing for example I spent quite a lot of time in the Philippines working with rice terraces up in the in the Cordillera province and they have these terraces and there's a whole cultural a set of cultural norms associated to these kind of food systems which are very important so for example one you can imagine the the management of the water obviously the person who has a farm on the top of or they'll plot on the top of the terrace if he uses all the water it will not be enough to come to the to the lower levels this causes social tension and so there's cultural norms which have been present for generations which manage and which monitor the use of this water another example is for example when when when a daughter is married the family of the daughter plants, tendries up above the rice paddies and these are clearly attempts to avoid soil erosion because obviously if you deforest the parts of land just above the rice terraces leave it one generation or two and it all comes down another for example link between and I think this is very important that food is very different to other things for a number of or for two fundamental reasons one is culture and so we've touched upon it a bit now another example which is more of a local example has to do with pelagra pelagra is is a disease that was prevalent in 1800 up until the 1800s and it was a vitamin deficiency which was very prevalent here in what was before the ocean Hungarian empire but the Italian part and it arose because when corn was brought from the new world to to the old world it's proved extremely beneficial for food security for for yields for income it it was massively planted here in the in the Padanian plains in the Paw Valley but one of the cultural norms associated with it was not brought to Europe which was an externalization which was a way of cutting the the the carbohydrates so that they were then accessible by our human body and this caused pelagra and it took them quite a long time to realize that pelagra this debilitating disease was not some kind of airborne virus or something something in the water but it was a nutritional deficiency and this nutritional deficiency came from a lack of cultural understanding of the crop this obviously is no longer pertinent but and it shows you how sometimes we try to detach food and especially the genetics of plants from these cultural norms and sometimes we cause problems let's say the other one and i've promised i was going to be as brief as possible and so i will shut up in a few seconds is that food is desire and this is something even less it's even more not understood by scientists i worked for quite a long time for the CGR which is a very scientific based institution and the and then i moved to to slow food which was an NGO working in a very very different way and i realized that one of the things i did learn about in slow food was that food is passion food is desire food is taste and we tend to forget this and so for example you know when we go to i myself sometimes go and eat fast food or drink a cocoa cola and just the pleasure it gives you the sugar the the chemicals inside is makes it harder for you to make a rational decision which is very different from most products in the same way food is linked to culture food is linked to conviviality we tend to eat together there tends to be traditions social traditions on how we eat and what we eat and and so the last thing i'll say is one of the first speakers today i think it was dr sergo talked about michael polin and the omnivorous dilemma which i think is a wonderful book i've actually based one of my farm on one of the farms in the book but i would like to to mention another book by polin which is the botany of desire which is a much less known book by polin but i think it's just as worthwhile especially for people who are very scientifically approached because it shows you all the different links between these four different agricultural products i think it's apple it's apple to potatoes and another two about the link between foods desire and culture and pleasure and these kind of things and i think in such a scientific environment i wanted to add this because maybe i can add it and others can't to always remember that food is very very much linked to pleasure to desire to conviviality to culture and without taking into consideration these aspects it is very hard to then change consumer behavior the last thing i want to do i want to say is though i do think consumers and working with consumers or consumers have a very very large responsibility in how the the food system is shaped i think it can the responsibility of sustainability cannot be left 100 in the hands of consumers and there has to be policy there has to be a legislative environment that allows consumers to make the right sources or points them into the right direction and so i do think that for example once we have once we are able to measure externalities we need to re-internalize them through prices things like subsidies we need to subsidize positive externalities we need to tax negative externalities because we need to create a living a level playing field when when we go to the supermarket and see those two prices and see the price of for example traditional Filipino terrorist rice and you know important GMO rice from Thailand it's not the fact that it's GMO is the problem is the fact that that we the consumer does not really understand that price differential what it entails and for example one thing that's quite useful which quite a lot of different institutions have been using right now is tourism and so bringing consumers to the productive places to see the farms to talk to the farmers to eat with them and they kind of understand a lot more what they are subsidizing with that different price so they understand that those ecosystems those farms those people because we often forget that there's people there's literally i said about 30 percent of the world's population working in agriculture and sure we can maximize yields we can create economies of scale but then we have to find something for these people to do so i think there is a balance of course we don't want an inefficient food system just to keep people occupied but we need to take a take into consideration these billions of people that work in in small order farm and provide solutions for them we do not have to go back in time there is you know the anti-science is is one of the worst case scenarios for the future even worse would be going back to some sort of itadak past which doesn't exist or maybe it did exist before the before agriculture when we were still hunter gatherers but since then it hasn't it hasn't existed we need to move forward we need to leverage science and we need to count on scientists more than politicians in guiding us but the science has to be targeted to provide solutions for the smallholder farmers for the consumers for the companies for the private companies rather than for those huge huge for the large multinationals or rather for those who have money enough money to spend on research so there's a lot of people that cannot do research and i think it is the responsibility of science to also find solutions for them thank you thank you so i'll start with one question about FAO views i mean one of the things that we hear a lot lately are these big programs to reforestate the planet the 1000 billion trees that was pushed forward by the g20 initiative and i was at the an international meeting in Rome at the academia delinche where this topic was discussed and one of the issues was okay if we reforested in europe that will involve a very small surface the real problem is to reforestate in latin america for example and the issue was who is going to tell the farmer that his land is no longer going to be farmland and that it will become a forest and who is going to compensate him for the lost income that is a very good question i sometimes think i come from i have a farm in central italy and sometimes when they talk about reforestation it's you know we planted i don't know a million half a million trees and i always think to myself who's going to water them who's going to take care of them until they actually live because i mean anyone who has planted trees not in alaska or you know in places where there is a lot of water knows that if you don't take care of trees they'll die very quickly i think that's there's two different approaches to this one is what you are saying of saying we need to reforest this we need to create this as a kind of a green lung and so we need to move people out of it and and the another one is trying to find solutions which have a space for all of these stakeholders and so for example we were talking about coffee before shaded coffee is a very good example of this forested coffee we can choose between coffee which is grown in monocrop in fields with no trees with no forest but coffee as a plant is a forest product comes from this forest plant and so by working with the with coffee producers in ensuring a they don't cut down forests to plant higher yields coffee or if they already have those higher youth coffees how can they can transition back to forest agriculture to shade the kind of coffees is an example of how you can sequester carbon re recreate forest without negatively affecting the producer if anything we can if we also manage to then trigger a price premium on his coffee because it is forested coffee then the producer is even happier because he has a more fortified livelihoods FAO in general i think is a very seen from inside rather than from seen from outside is very heterogeneous so there's a lot of different thoughts in FAO i think FAO recently has taken more of this approach but i think inside there's a lot of different voices and sometimes it's fine it's hard to understand where these what these voices are and who the the people you can talk to these things that are about have a question about prices because it's in theory it's it's very tempting the idea of internalizing of taking externalities into account when making the prices of things but just imagine how difficult it is who decide about these prices how do you protect the system of pricing from lobbying on all from all sides how you can distort the markets because prices are an essential signals in the economy you're an economist and how would you for example handle situations such as the one was mentioned by Michele this morning about animal husbandry being six times more efficient in an intensive way than in Africa so how do you value all this competing interest i think it's it's fascinating but incredibly impractical i'm afraid up to a certain point i think authority an all-powerful authority that doesn't have to be i think you're looking at is a kind of a truth which comes down from god and we need to find that that's not exactly what i'm talking about it's more trying to understand what i talk to a lot about with his government officials so ministers and i look at but unfortunately they're the ones that tend to create a digestive environment and they tend to think the cheaper food is in supermarkets the happier my people will be it's a question of food security we don't want people starving we don't people wanting malnutrition and so when we talk about the sustainability of food prices go up and so they're afraid of not having enough food for everyone you know however if they then go look how much are you spending on your medical bills so on on the on the medical industry to solve all those problems that that cheap food is creating when you're surviving mostly on high fructose corn syrup as a source of of calories and then you're spending a huge amount of money for obesity for childhood childhood obesity for these kind of things you're paying a lot more when then your ministry of environment comes in and says look we are losing quite a lot of money every year due to deforestation due to soil erosion and so forth all of these things need to put people together so the decision cannot be taken only by looking at how can i get cheap food for my people how for your question is how do we determine this is what i ask you no this is what i what is the amount of litigation that would no it's i mean it's you know you can look at it right now on on the common agricultural policy there is quite a bit of subsidies for agri for sustainable agricultural policies who decides how many what are those subsidies who decides who gets the group of panels a group of experts it is the the the policy makers that decide these we will never arrive at a true price of something but we cannot just avoid the question because we are scared of of of getting precise measurements look at for example the the tax on carbonated drinks in Mexico okay we don't know if that tax is exactly equivalent to the negative externalities due to those carbonated drinks we do know there is a huge problem of obesity in Mexico we do know that that's obesity problem is at least to a point linked to an inadequate nutrition and a use an excessive use of carbonated sugary drinks so by taxing those we reduce the consumption of them and so we reduce the negative externalities that's why i need that's why i need theoretical physicists like you which are used to looking at the complexity of the universe and telling me this is how we should do it i can identify there is a problem and that we need to move into that direction i don't have the expertise of course to say to determine exactly what that price is this i need to ask people like you people who are used to measuring complexity and who are used to doing an analysis which has because the problem it is complex it has so many different factors which affect that price that we can as you said if we only look at a certain of them we risk being unfair because as he was as they were saying before you know the organic farm the organic farm might be more biodiverse it might have a better use of certain certain resources but then it might have certain disadvantages so doing is it just because it's organic we pay more no it's much more complex that i agree with and that is the difficulty we are facing before we move on to the next question i just want to remind you that our latest Nobel Prize winner for physics georgia parisi won his Nobel Prize for research on complex systems so you see and he's a theoretical physicist okay thank you sir um i'm looking at water financing for a small holder farming and it is a big problem for a dry region like Africa since Africa is one of the dry continent so uh what modalities is f a we're taking regarding water financing for small-scale farmer because that comes with a huge loan and uh majority of the small-scale farmer do not have that money so uh what what what are you people doing thank you first of all once again it's very hard for me to speak for all of FAO because uh you can imagine it's a very complex institution what i can say from my personal point of view is for example one of the uses of technology the kind of use for technology which i think would be very useful for small holder farmers is this kind of thing so using for example precision gps technology to put water exactly where it's needed if you look at most of the irrigation in farm systems is wasted and you can see this driving up and down the port valley uh fields and fields of tomatoes in and i saw them in july in august of this year when in italy we had a huge drought spraying water up into there how much of that water is going to hit the ground when it hits the ground with 40 degrees we're talking about you know i saw them do it uh midday in in july how much of that water is going to the plants 10 percent five percent i have no idea so if you're using for example i think the israelis developed a lot of these kind of techniques because of the kind of of you know desert agriculture they sometimes have to do if you're managed to put that exact water on exactly that plant you need your cost for that water is much less and so someone like a small holder farmer can access some certain things you can use a lot less resources in a much more efficient way so technology can help you being more efficient and and this is extremely important for a small holder farmer yeah i think if i can make a comment that the same concept applies also for the use of uh plant protection products uh if you have adequate modeling of pathogen populations coupled with uh analysis of precipitations you can time the application of plant protection products much better and greatly decrease their utilization and i think this goes to the advantage of small holder farmers if you set up a system where this information becomes available to everybody and not just to the big farmers that can afford to use those fancier models exactly or for example i have a i'm an olive farmer on my free time when i'm not at f a o and i see there that when the the fly the olive fly comes you need to you need to treat it either biologically whatever but you never know when it's there and when it's when you do realize it's there at least me from uh from a farmer point of view it's kind of too late and so most people will spray regardless of whether there is a fly or not already a system which can be used by a small holder farmer which tells me yes the fly has arrived and yes there is the pheromone traps there's things like this but trying to push more into that makes then i can spray when there is a problem it's the same thing as the antibiotic resistance we were talking about before you give antibiotics to to livestock when there is a problem not in general i'll give it to you because i don't care if there is a problem so i'll and it's that same kind of logic it's trying to bring big big systems big technological innovation to a very kind of personal small level which can be used by the the Ethiopian farmer by the by the herder up in in the Andes or or even by myself for example because i'm a small farmer and and that calls for a lot of training and retraining of these farmers because they do not understand these yes you have to bring it down bring it down to a level they can take it in and apply it yes for for the scientists we can always do it yes education and and raising awareness let's say our our key are you cannot there is no innovation without or you cannot spread innovation without then raising awareness and and building capacity on how to use this innovation thanks a lot i think we have come to the end of a very interesting day thanks to everybody to the speakers that gave excellent presentations as well as as to the attendees who were very participative in asking questions and remember if you want to take a copy of the book we have now the cocktail drinks and see you tomorrow morning at nine sharp we'll start to talk about nutrition diets and health