In today's podcast, we're discussing Fast and Furious. But it's not the movie series starring Vin Diesel. Instead, the catchphrase describes rapidly increasing and somewhat confusing food system environmental impact reporting. Food firms, farmers, and governments all have a clear need for more quantitative environmental impact data in order to measure and understand factors such as carbon footprint, sustainable agricultural practices, and food supply chain processes. But there is no single standard for such reporting and different measurement methodologies make it difficult to assess progress. What's more, greater transparency regarding environmental impacts and food systems will affect trade and supply chains. Our guest today is Koen Deconinck from the Trade and Agricultural Directorate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD for short. Interview Summary You and your colleagues at the OECD recently published a paper called Fast and Furious: The Rise of Environmental Impact Reporting in Food Systems. Can you tell me a little bit about the paper? Sure. A while ago we were talking to one of the world's experts on sustainability in food systems. He alerted us that there was a major change happening in how people think about sustainability in food systems. He told us in the past, it was thought of almost as a checklist, right? People would say, here's a list of practices that you should or shouldn't use. And then we'll come and confirm whether that's the case on your farm. Then you either get certified or you don't. And he said, you should pay attention because there's a big change underway. We're more and more moving towards actually quantifying things like what is your carbon footprint? What is your water footprint? And so on. He convinced us that this was actually a major change that was happening. Oddly enough, outside of the role of the practitioners, not that many people have been paying attention to it. That is why we wrote this paper. This is a really important shift because just thinking about this in terms of economics, evaluating outputs versus the methods that you get to those outputs can have really significant implications for the various actors involved. So, this seems like a good move, but it seems also kind of complicated. I would love to hear your thoughts about that particular move. Why did you think, or why did you all realize this was a challenge and opportunity at the same? That's a great question. It actually gets to the heart of what we're describing in the paper. Starting with the good news, we do think that this has an enormous potential to improve sustainability in food systems. Because we know from the scientific evidence that there are big differences between different kinds of food products in terms of their average environmental impact. For example, beef tends to have more greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of products relative to poultry and then definitely relative to plant based alternatives and so on. You can see these kinds of average differences. But then the data also shows that within each kind of product category, there's huge differences between different farmers. And what you can do if you start quantifying those footprints is it actually unlocks different kinds of levers. The first lever, if you think about carbon footprints, which is maybe the most intuitive example. The first lever is people know the carbon footprint of different kinds of food products. They could shift their diets away from the products that have a higher footprint towards products that have a lower footprint. For example, less beef and more towards poultry or towards plant-based alternatives. That's one lever. A second lever is that if you can also start to get even more precise and use data that is specific to each producer, not just an average, then also within each product category, people can start shifting towards the producers that have a lower environmental footprint. So, for example, people will still be drinking milk, but then they can shift towards milk producers that have a lower carbon footprint. And the third interesting lever that you can unlock is if you have that data at a supplier level. Suppliers could then say, well, I changed my practices. I changed my inputs. I've done things differently to reduce my impact. You actually can stimulate innovation by each individual farmer, each individual company in the supply chain to lower that impact. And that is something that you can do if you're quantifying those impacts, and that is very difficult or even impossible to do with this previous checklist-based approach. So that's one of the reasons why we're, we think that this has tremendous potential if we get it right. That's right. Just saying that you're doing sustainable practices isn't sufficient. It's really critical to evaluate what kinds of greenhouse gas emissions or other environmentally problematic outcomes of that producer or firm is what ...
