Three Leverage Points for Transforming Food and Agriculture Systems
2024 is here and it's time to dig for rivulets of optimism beneath sodic soils of gloom and doom.
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Three Leverage Points for Transforming Food and Agriculture Systems
If you ever get serious about becoming a parent, whether you will eventually enjoy the process or not, one thing is for sure. It is the best freshman course out there to teach you Human Evolution 101.
When I became a parent a few years ago, one of the fascinating things I discovered was how pregnancy is a process of imitating human evolution. In every birth process, we are replaying human evolution in a fast-forward mode inside the womb for forty weeks.
If that sounds esoteric, consider this.
Your best introduction to understanding nerves in the human head comes from sharks.
Your best introduction to understanding human limbs comes from fishes.
Your best introduction to understanding the structure of the human brain comes from reptiles.
The fact of the matter is this: The bodies of these creatures are early-stage beta versions of our human bodies.
When you study the food and agriculture systems of the world, you discover something equally fascinating: We are replaying the evolution of food and agriculture systems across different time and place contexts simultaneously across the world.
Marcel Mazoyer’s History of World Agriculture is a good book if you want to delve into this further.
When you organize the food systems data across the world based on 1) Agriculture, value added per worker 2) % Dietary energy from staples 3) Supermarkets per 100,000 inhabitants within a country 4)% Urban population, as researchers did in 2021 in an interesting study, you get five exhaustive, mutually exclusive five food system types that largely make up the world’s food and agricultural system.
rural and traditional
informal and expanding
emerging and diversifying
modernizing and formalizing
industrial and consolidated
If you travel around the Middle East, you will find all five types of food systems; four in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Here is where things get interesting.
Really interesting.
As much as we are discovering that it was quite silly of us, keystone species called humans, to call ourselves “Homo Sapiens” (Latin: “wise man”), we are now discovering that “industrial and consolidated” systems aren’t necessarily the end-state of our evolution of food and agriculture systems.
And so, if we are serious about transforming our food and agriculture systems, the important question is this - How do we discover the leverage points that could help us transform our food and agriculture systems?
We will explore them in the increasing order of effectiveness. Shall we begin?
#1: The Future Depends on Changemakers who can transform the structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information) in food and agriculture systems
Whether it is biodiversity indices that are measured based on bird calls, sophisticated approaches measuring the hidden costs of agrifood systems, or farm management software that could calculate the nutrient density of the produce, the underlying ‘leverage point’ approach boils down to missing feedback.
“Missing feedback is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.” - Donella Meadows, 12 Places To Intervene in a System
Traceability systems in downstream food and agriculture systems that measure food fraud and food loss have largely failed so far for this reason: They are yet to present vital missing feedback in a compelling form.
There is a lot that can be done if we slowly upgrade our food and agricultural systems on the promise of “contextual capitalism”. Blockchain Expert Vinay Gupta once spelled it out beautifully in a podcast.
"What we currently have is information-poor capitalism. We all agree that markets are really good at making decisions, but we’re also throwing away practically all of the data that people need to make decisions. Because when we built this form of capitalism, information was expensive, but now information is cheap.
So if I look at something in a store, I want to be able to pull out the total transaction history of that object, right back to where the metal was taken out of the ground. I think that’s my right, as the purchaser of that object, to get full disclosure about everything that went into that object.
To me, this is kind of like rich, contextual capitalism. I want to give everybody huge amounts of information to make their decisions, and then what I want is for them to use software to manage the morality and strategy around those decisions.
To me, price signalling is just not enough data anymore. I don’t just want price signalling; I want full bandwidth, read/write access to the entire universe of information about my decisions, including the composition of the things that I might buy, including the options that I could have exercised if I had known they existed, and then I want to use software to crop that complexity down to something that allows me to live"
Although they have fared poorly in the agritech hype curve, traceability Systems have a lot of potential when they become consumer-facing contextual decision-aiding systems.
#2: The Future Depends on Changemakers acknowledging that humans and their values are the foundation of food and agriculture systems
What is the purpose of food and agriculture systems?
When we are working day in, and day out in food and agriculture systems, we sometimes tend to forget the ultimate purpose of food and agriculture systems. I recently discovered this Food Systems Diagram from Craig Cameron and loved his contrarian take: Soil is not the foundation of the food and agriculture system.
“Humans are a part of the food system as a keystone species, everything that we do or don’t do will affect the system. Since our values, beliefs and goals drive what we do or don’t do, then the true foundation of the food system is the human values, beliefs and goals of the general population, which are activated through farmers, by their food purchasing decisions. Farmers and gardeners then use tools to impact roots and ultimately the soil. The soil is the most critical part of this model since a failure of the soil leads to a collapse of the outcomes and success of the soil leads to compounded benefits in outcomes. The other side of this idea is that the problems we produce cannot be blamed on the tools we use but more importantly on the values, beliefs and goals that led to those tools being chosen in the first place.” - Craig Cameron
When we change the purpose of a system, we change the way a system functions. As Donella Meadows beautifully writes in her book, “Thinking in Systems”, if the purpose of football was all about scoring the least goals, the entire play would radically change.
If farming's purpose was all about creating healthy communities, what kind of food and agriculture systems would we create in true service of this purpose?
Not without a reason Donella writes that ‘the goal of a system is a leverage point superior to the self-organizing ability of a system’.
When villages compete with each other to conserve as much water as possible during the rainy season by constructing reservoirs for rainwater harvesting, the goal of the farmers pursuing extractive agriculture is radically transformed.
#3: The Future Depends on Changemakers Transcending Their Paradigms of Agriculture They’re Operating Within.
In her classic work, ‘12 Places to Intervene in a System’, Donella Meadows, rates paradigm at the highest order of effectiveness.
As Donella beautifully puts it,
“Paradigms are the source of the system. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems.”
I discovered the four paradigm levels of agriculture from the work of Carol Sanford and Ethan Soloviev and it endeared me in ineffable ways.
If you want to find out which paradigm of agriculture you operate within, take a look at the relevant keywords below each of the paradigms and observe your strong reactions. It should give you a good sense of which paradigm you are operating within.
This spectrum of agricultural paradigm levels is helpful for multiple reasons.
It challenges notions of Agrifood purism. As
eloquently put it in her “The Great Food Fight”, agrifood purism is like ‘cancel culture but for farming and food production practices rather than people.’It beautifully addresses the question of “What is regenerative agriculture” without tying oneself in knots.
Remember this: There is no hierarchy within these paradigms. There is no one paradigm greater or worse than the other. Each is working well to the best of their worldview and understanding. If you come to think of it, changing paradigms is equally hard and easy.
“You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.” - Donella Meadows
I hope we can change paradigms and transform our food and agricultural systems. How will I know? I will be actively working towards it in 2024!
So, what do you think?
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Love this systems approach. Excited to engage with some of these ideas :)