A clear consensus has emerged that the feed and food markets are ready to take coordinated action on sustainability, with retailers and financiers actively endorsing supply chains to adopt shared practices.
GMP+ International, the world’s largest scheme for safe and sustainable animal feed, brought together nearly 90 delegates from across the feed and food sectors to discuss how to align their sustainability efforts. Hosted during the VICTAM International event in Utrecht, Netherlands, the discussions included adopting a standardised Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology and data transparency to address the fragmentation of efforts.
Coordination in the interest of the entire feed and food chain
Animal feed is a significant part of the environmental impact of the food chain. Global animal protein production is the cause of 12-16% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with animal feed responsible for on average 41% of those emissions.
Many companies in the global feed and food supply chains are adopting different practices and initiatives to tackle this, but they are in isolation from one another. That increases the burden on farmers at the beginning of these supply chains, makes measuring and comparing progress complicated, and holds retailers back from being transparent with consumers about the impact of their food.
Fortunately, a growing consensus was on display from representatives of the many different interests in these sectors to coordinate on critical tools like methods for measuring the environmental impact of products, and what data should be collected and shared throughout the supply chain. Doing so is pre-competitive, and would improve transparency, address fragmentation, decrease reporting burdens, and enable comparability, credibility, and scalability across the value chain.
Experts, retailers, banks, farmers, and companies all want collaboration
Lucas Simons, founder of sustainability consultancy New Foresight, highlighted that while transitions are complex and value chains differ, the change strategy is the same. It requires a shared end-state-vision, scaling up new initiatives and phasing out the old regime: “It’s not just one radical thing we need to do. If we want to make this sector more sustainable, we need to do quite a few things radically different. Every transition is different, because every sector is different. However if you zoom out, it’s all the same... we are all doing, but it is just noise... and it’s not that we can’t solve this, we’ve already done this with feed safety... it’s just that we’re not organised.” The good news, we have already started with this transition.
Representatives of finance institutions and supermarket retailers also spoke and asked the market to take coordinated action.
Laura Jungmann, director of sustainability for supermarket retailer Albert Heijn, shared how through collaborating with the suppliers behind the soy used for animal feed in their supply chain they reduced the CO2 emissions of their chicken range by 38%, and reduced their overall scope 3 emissions by 3%. Sharing their collaborative approach, Jungmann said: “Working together [with the whole supply chain] was absolutely crucial... This is challenging the status quo. This is transparency, traceability, data, and partnership. To achieve this we worked together with our supply chain, with a harmonised ask, and made sure everything is aligned within one solid protocol. The fact that GMP+ International has launched a standard for this is the best news ever. Because we want this to be scaled. Imagine if every supermarket in the world did this – that's 3% reduction in emissions, everywhere. That can only be achieved if we standardise the ask to the market.”
Alex Datema, director food and agri for Rabobank – whose customers include 80% of farmers in the Netherlands – said: “We shifted our way of looking at the whole food and agri system. From ensuring we have farmers in our portfolio with the low cost price and good yields per hectare, to also looking at a key success factor which is how sustainable is this farm. If you can’t keep up with the sustainability developments from society then you are not the successful customer of the future. We are looking the same way at farmers we finance in America, Brazil, and Australia as we do farms in the Netherlands.”
Attendees also heard from a range of expert panellists, including Frank Gort from Wageningen University, Veerle Van linden from ILVO, Coen Smits from MyFeedPrint, Laura Nobel from GFLI, and Anton van den Brink from FEFAC. Among the observations from the panel were that the methodology for many of the product environmental footprint category rules were already 80-90% aligned. That means data can be harmonised, and the market can be ready for transparency on sustainable data, within a few short years.
An international standard, and more proposals to come
The multistakeholder dialogues came shortly after the development of the first international standard for MI5.7 Feed Life Cycle Assessments, launched by GMP+ International last month. Following the day of discussions, more concrete proposals will also be developed for data sharing across the value chain.
Martine Boon, managing director of GMP+ International, reflected on what was learned from the exchange: “It was a valuable discussion. Feed safety remains our backbone as GMP+ International, but sustainability is crucial to the success of both feed and food going forward. What was immediately clear was that the market is ready, we all want to see progress here. It was also honest: we know it is complex, and we know it won’t be perfect, but we have to bridge the gap. And we can do that together.”