A Ted Talk About Big Brands and Environment

¶ … TED talk, Jason Clay talks about how the major buyers in the world like Cargill are the key to creating a sustainable future. Clay started out working on the side of the small farmers, going the traditional route of purchasing products at fair and equitable trade and driving consumer demand for sustainable products like Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream.

Then, Clay and his colleagues realized that they were not going to achieve their goals of massive transformations in the ways goods are produced without working with the big key players -- the organizations responsible for tearing down the rainforests to place cattle pasture or rainforests to plant palm oil plantations. Beef, lumber, soy, and certain types of fishing are among the top fifteen global products that are singularly responsible for much deforestation. With current consumer-driven demand, there will be insufficient resources on the planet in the near future.

Therefore, we need to "use less and produce more," while driving down patterns of consumption. Clay focuses more on the "produce more" than the "consume less" side of the equation. He claims that it is possible to make production inherently more efficient, so that less land is needed to produce the same (but ideally more) of the same product. Clay also calls this approach a "precompetitive issue" because it is not driven by demand but by the simple needs of increasing production.

Clay also found that a small number of companies -- about 100 -- control 25% of all 15 of the world's top commodities. Working directly with those 100 companies systematically has allowed Clay and his organization to identify top priorities specific to their industries and fields, and make it so that policies, regulations, standards, traders, and all sides of the supply chain participate in the roundtable discussions.

As a result, it becomes possible to create new models for production that generate the type of "accelerated change" Clay claims is important for ensuring the future of the planet. Although there are some aspects of Clay's talk that are confusing, as he tries to fit in a lot of information into 20 minutes, the overall message is sound. As a viewer, I would have preferred more detail about exactly how Clay intends for these major commodities producers to actually produce more on less land.

As he points out, the cocoa that Mars is developing is one that is genetically modified. That raises questions in and of itself, and might even cause problems on the European market, where support for GMOs is much less than it is in the United States. Moreover, not all of the products that Clay talks about can be modified in some way that would make it possible to produce more on less land. Clay does not discuss what might happen in situations in which it were simply impossible.

I also believe that it will be important to discuss the "consumption" side of the equation, and wish that Clay would have talked more about social justice issues and matters related to the global labor market as well as the commodities market. However, I do agree that all people have a responsibility toward social justice and sustainability. I appreciate the "roundtable" model that Clay has developed because it involves a large number of stakeholders in diverse areas, all of which can find points of agreement.

The model is admirable, and I.