Food businesses cannot claim to be sustainable if workers across their supply chains cannot earn a living wage or if avoidable waste remains embedded in how products are sold. Duncan Williamson argues that businesses must address carbon, fairness, food waste and packaging together.
Duncan Williamson is a retail speaker and food systems expert with 25 years’ experience across food, farming and environmental policy. He is the founder of Nourishing Food Systems and a former head of food policy at WWF UK and former global head of food systems at Forum for the Future.
In this exclusive interview with the Sustainability Speakers Agency, Williamson explains how agricultural biodiversity supports resilient communities, which supply-chain practices businesses should prioritise and why the transition towards localised food systems must begin now.
How can agricultural biodiversity strengthen food security, nutrition and economic resilience within local communities?
Agricultural biodiversity is one of the most exciting areas that you can work on. It is important for delivering healthy, sustainable diets and healthy, sustainable food systems. It’s around the variety of plants and animals that can be cultivated or reared to deliver food that we eat.
Often, in local situations, you should be growing the foods that are right for your climate. If you grow the right foods for your climate, they’re probably going to be more resilient to changing weather patterns or extreme events that come up.
Agricultural diversity is about a diverse range of crops and livestock. It’s not having one monoculture or just two crops across a vast area of acreage, whether it’s soybean in the Cerrado or palm trees in Indonesia.
It’s about having a variety of crops interspersed with a variety of livestock, which can work together to build resilience. Maybe one crop doesn’t work, but that’s okay because you’ve got other crops that still provide you with food.
Harvest will also happen at different times. Instead of having everything harvested at exactly the same time, you might be able to stretch out the harvest over a period of three, four, five, six months and beyond.
This is important for delivering resilience, but also giving local communities a regular income that keeps happening. They’re not just having all the income at one stage.
If you want to have a healthy, sustainable diet, it needs to be built on a wide variety of plants and animals and whole foods.
What operational and supply-chain changes should businesses prioritise to become genuinely sustainable?
They’ve got to look at how the business is run. You’ve got to look at your own operations and your own immediate supply chains to see how you can make sure that you deliver those in such a way that they are net positive.
We’ve got to go beyond net zero. They have to now be net positive, and you have to be actively reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
You have to make sure that everyone in the supply chain is treated fairly – justice is a core part of it – and everyone is getting a fair share of the income that is generated. A business can’t be sustainable if someone two or three rungs down their supply chain can’t have a living wage.
They should also be advocating very strongly for reducing waste throughout the supply chain. That’s not just in their own operations, but also through their suppliers, and working with others to help people and citizens reduce their own food waste.
Food waste is a low-hanging fruit. It’s a waste of natural resources, and it’s something that can be avoided if we’re careful. Businesses need to look at their marketing, what they’re selling, how much they’re selling and how they’re selling it. We need to make sure that we eliminate food waste in the value chain.
Another thing a business can do is look at the packaging. Are they using excessive packaging? There are still examples of excessive packaging where it’s not needed. That has to be tackled as quickly as possible and in a responsible way that doesn’t encourage food waste.
What action do you want to see business leaders taking?
I hope that business leaders recognise that we are in a situation where action has to happen urgently. It’s no longer a case of waiting for future generations or for the next five years. Change needs to happen now because we are at risk of significant crises hitting us one after another that we’re not prepared for.
It’s also important to recognise this isn’t a reason to be negative. It’s not anti-business. We have most of the solutions now.
We don’t need to wait for technology. We know what foods we need to be eating, so let’s work to deliver those. We know that agricultural biodiversity is a central part of our food system.
We know we’re going to need to move away from a global homogeneous model to a diverse, localised model. We’ve got the solutions. We can do it. We can start working today to deliver the future we need.
If we start working now, delivering a deep and urgent transition to the food system, we will be in a very strong position in the next five or 10 years to adapt to climate change, adapt to the biodiversity crisis, and ensure that, as a race and as a business, we thrive going into the future.
This exclusive interview with Duncan Williamson was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.
