World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

Asian carp are decimating native fish populations throughout the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes in the US – and my dog, Peaches, couldn’t be happier about it.

Most agricultural methane emissions (around 70%) come from ruminants, such as cows and sheep. This is primarily due to manure and gastroenteric releases—or, simply put, cow burps. Most methane for cattle, particularly beef, is released in the grazing phase of the supply chain. When cattle roam for grazing, it is difficult to track methane release or to mitigate emissions due to the nature of grazing. Furthermore, scalability and traceability are challenging, particularly for small-scale grazing operations.

Rice, one of the most abundant crops grown and consumed globally, makes up 12% of global methane emissions – and a staggering 1.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions. When rice is harvested, a ton of rice stubble and straw is left behind for every ton of harvested rice – 750 million tons globally in 2015. Currently, to clear fields for future crops, farmers either burn the rice straw, which results in significant carbon dioxide emissions as well as methane, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and particulate matters, or they flood the field to encourage swift decay – which also leads to extensive methane emissions.

Global leaders in Glasgow recently signed the Global Methane Pledge and recognized that addressing methane emissions is imperative if we’re going to achieve a 1.5° C future. In fact, the IPCC calculates that methane emissions will need to drop 37% below 2017 levels by 2030 and 55% below 2017 levels by 2050 to keep that goal within range. At COP 26, President Biden announced the US will join a global coalition of more than 100 countries pledging to cut global methane levels by a minimum of 30% by 2030 and rolled out an action plan for US methane emissions reductions.

To most people, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is a low-cost way to send a letter, but here at the Markets Institute, we believe it has the potential to deliver more than just mail.

In spring 2020, people stayed at home and cooked more, grocery store shelves were bare, and farmers serving commercial food businesses were stuck leaving healthy food to rot in fields. And this was all happening as food insecurity skyrocketed. These problems weren’t new, but exacerbated, so we began to rethink how we get healthy produce to people. This sparked conversations with farmers, food hubs, the USPS, USPS unions, elected officials, hunger relief groups, and others, a business case, and popular interest. The result? An idea for “Farmers Post,” a third-party led platform to allow farmers to ship produce directly to consumers via the USPS, improving market access for small and minority farmers while simultaneously expanding access to healthy, fresh, local produce for consumers across the US.

Last year marked a turning point for nature - protecting our forests, grasslands, and oceans has become a business-critical issue for companies around the world. As we saw at COP26, nature is now right up there with climate change on the business agenda.

In fact, a new consensus is emerging - across global and national policymakers, major investors, NGOs and consumers - that our global economy must not just become net zero but also nature positive.

The elephants in the room these days appear to be credible traceability and transparency. Downstream buyers want to know more and more about where and how their food is produced. To date, this has generally been left to food manufacturers and government agencies to ensure, but in the age of social media and infinite cloud-based information that’s changing.

Companies can no longer set up their own verification programs and expect them to be considered credible. ‘Trust but verify’ is increasingly the norm—and for good reason. The more we find out about global supply chains the less comfortable we are. Most companies are relatively good about knowing their direct suppliers, but it’s clear the trust and expectations can’t be extended further upstream. A piece this week on açaí illustrates the point—companies cannot depend on certification programs to credibly verify conditions of isolated producers. And where there is chatter on social media about problems, companies cannot hide behind systems, they need data. Much can be done to fix this issue, some listed below, but it will be interesting to see what exporters actually do.

To be clear, the goal is not de-commodifying the trade of all food products. That would create chaos. The goal is to maintain the efficiency of the commodity trading system but to add additional data about where and how it was produced. Changing the rules about commodities is not uncommon—the color of #2 “yellow” corn was not officially agreed upon until the late 1960s, and GMO-free commodities are traded to the EU where the market requires that information. So, the system is flexible enough to change and robust enough to incorporate new data.

Still, it’s surprising that systems to eliminate slave, bonded, and child labor, as well as deforestation and other habitat and biodiversity loss and GHG impacts, are so prevalent in supply chains, but apparently are not always working. Traders have said that rules of commodity trading should be left to them, but to date, they have been unwilling or at least unable to address these issues. With regard to labor abuses, we have seen governments (e.g., the US and EU) take much tougher positions for anyone who touches a product produced with illegal labor (with the notable exception of illegal farmworkers in the US). We have not seen the same response for key environmental impacts—though countries are in discussions about deforestation. Perhaps the way to address that is for everyone who touches products with embedded GHG emissions to “own” those emissions until they are mitigated. That would speed up change. Think about it.

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This post is an excerpt from the WWF Markets Institute's Rethink Food weekly newsletter containing analysis of emerging issues and commentary on recent news stories. Subscribe here.

Trade is fundamental to well-functioning economies. It’s also critical for sustainability and for building more resilient food systems that can address the variability of the COVID-19 pandemic in the short term, but also for the chronic and urgent weather shifts from climate change. One might not realize it, but up until recently, food was mainly produced, sold, and consumed locally.

While that’s mainly still the case, since 2000 the amount of food traded grew from 6% to 20-25% in 2019. Trade fills gaps during bad years. And while we’ve clearly seen it can experience disruptions, trade also allows countries to achieve food security even, or especially, when what they do best is not food production. Many countries use food exports as a key part of their economy, like Brazil. China also generates a lot of food globally as does the US, though it’s a much smaller part of the economy.

So how do we monitor and govern food traded across international borders? Short answer, it’s complicated.