Marc Gunther
Backyard vegetable gardens are fine. So are organics, slow food and
locavores - people who eat produce grown nearby. But solutions to the global
food crisis will come from big business, genetically engineered crops and
large-scale farms.
So, at least, says Jason Clay, one of the world's leading experts on
agriculture and the environment. Clay leads a global effort to reform
agriculture at the World Wildlife Fund, working with buyers and producers of
farm products including Coca-Cola (KO, Fortune 500), McDonald's (MCD,
Fortune 500) and DuPont (DD, Fortune 500).

The problem they face has made headlines lately. Demand for farm
products - food, fiber and fuel - will keep growing, as the population grows
and as hundreds of millions of people move into the middle class and consume
more meat and dairy. Global per capita meat consumption has increased by 60
percent in the last 40 years - that's 60% per person. Meanwhile, the supply
of farmland is limited. Agriculture already uses 55% of the habitable land
on the planet. According to Clay, farming is the single largest threat to
biodiversity; what's more, if farmers destroy tropical forests in Brazil or
Indonesia to raise cattle or produce palm oil, the impacts on climate change
will be severe, because forests store lots of carbon.

"We are reaching the limits of natural resources on the planet," Clay
says. The answer is for farmers to become more productive - generating more
output from fewer inputs. That requires economies of scale. "Any thinking
environmentalist," says Clay, "would want to see more intensification of
agriculture."

Clay, 57, is nothing if not a thinking environmentalist. He literally
wrote the book on sustainable farming - a 570-page volume called "World
Agriculture and the Environment" (Island Press, 2004), which analyzes the
production practices and impacts of 21 commodities, from coffee, tea and
orange juice to shrimp, cashews and bananas. He grew up on a Missouri farm
where his family raised beef cattle and grew soybeans and corn; he was
educated as a scholarship student at Harvard, the London School of Economics
and Cornell, getting his PhD in anthropology; and he worked as an
anthropologist and human rights activist in Latin America and Africa. In the
1980s, he got into the commodities business as a way to help poor people in
the tropics; after meeting Ben Cohen at a Grateful Dead benefit, they
created Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream, to create a market for
sustainably harvested ingredients from the Amazon.

Today, Clay spends more time with global companies like Unilever (UN)
(which now owns Ben & Jerry's) than with hippie-inspired startups. He is
pursuing a big idea - that the world's leading buyers of commodities can be
persuaded to dig deeper into their supply chains, influence farmers to adopt
better practices, and then create global standards so that agriculture can
become both more productive and sustainable. He has convened industry
roundtables of retailers, buyers, producers and environmentalists with the
goal of reducing the key impacts of producing sugarcane, soy, palm oil and
other crops.

The Better Sugarcane Initiative, for example, includes Coca-Cola, Tate
& Lyle, BP (BP) and Cargill, as well as Unica, a Brazilian industry
association. Its goal is to ensure that sugarcane is grown with a lighter
environmental footprint, while maintaining or even enhancing the economic
status of farmers.

"The idea is to develop better practices and ultimately standards for
driving more sustainable production of sugar," says Dan Vermeer, who manages
supply chain issues for the Coca-Cola Co. Negative impacts of growing
sugarcane, he notes, can include degraded soil, loss of forest land and
waste of water. "It's a long way from our operations," he says, "but we feel
we are accountable."

Companies are willing to take responsibility for managing the impacts
of their supply chain for a couple of reasons, Clay says. They can build
long-term relationships with growers, potentially locking in the supply and
reducing the transaction costs of buying commodities. And they can protect
their reputations.

"The business case is reducing cost, reducing risk and liability,"
Clay says. One example: Several years ago, Greenpeace attacked McDonald's in
Europe for buying chickens that had been fed with soy that contributed to
deforestation of the Amazon. In response, McDonald's and Cargill, its
supplier, agreed to work with Greenpeace to promote more sustainable ways of
growing soy.

Clay argues that only big companies have the leverage to bring big
changes to global agricultural practices. Shopping at Whole Foods won't do
it and, besides, he says, it's too much to ask consumers to be aware how
much water or how many chemicals are needed to produce a hamburger or a
latte. He once calculated that a Grande Starbucks Latte - or any brand - has
208 liters of embedded water, most in the water it takes to produce the milk
and grow the coffee, although the paper cup, sleeve, lid and sugar all
require water.

"Do we want to work with 6 billion consumers? Do we want to work with
1 billion producers? Or do we want to work with 300 to 500 buyers of any
given commodity?" Clay says.

Even so, consumers, particularly in the developed world, ought to
become aware of the environmental impact of what they eat. Personal choices
matter, too.

"What would it mean in the U.S. and Europe if the average consumer ate
one less meal with meat every week, or just ate smaller portions?" Clay
asks. "That would go a long way to solving the current grain shortages
around the world. And how many heart attacks do you think it would prevent?"

"The average American pet will consumer more resources than the
average African and have better medical care as well," he says. "These are
the contradictions of our time."


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