We ended our symposium with a challenging panel discussion on food policy & execution from 3 perspectives: bilateral opportunities, public and private partnerships & global policies.

Willem Schoustra introduced the 3 panelists one by one:

Myrtille, you work for Solidaridad as Head of Corporate Engagement and Partnerships. I think you are very experienced in inclusive innovation and multi-sector impact coalitions. A lot of difficult words, but you are an expert on that. You have 24 years of experience working all over the world and can really see things from different perspectives. I think you have worked in Europe, Africa, and especially in Latin America, and also in Southeast Asia.

The second person, all the way from Paris, is Roger Martini. You work for the OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate. You are a senior policy analyst in agriculture. What you also do on a day-to-day basis is country reviews. I'm sure that you also had a close look at the Netherlands and you are undoubtedly unlocking some of your thoughts on how we deal with food system transformation here. Also, I believe you are Canadian. It's also nice to have that transatlantic bridge to the other side of the Atlantic.

The last panelist is from a little bit closer to home, from The Hague, where he works for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for the Department of Inclusive Green Growth, Wijnand van IJssel. I think Wijnand, you can also summarize your career with World Food Security because you have been working on food security for a long, long time and you have also worked for different organizations in different parts of the world. You have been working for the FAO, for S&P, but also for the World Bank.

Wijnand, we started today with geopolitics. We have also learned that food has become more and more part of the geopolitical arena. I was also wondering how this topic is seen through the eyes of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, especially how you see it, or want to include it in your aid, trade, and investment policy? Is this already included in that policy or should there be a change in your policy perspective?

It was also a good introduction by Rob. This also connects to what is happening at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I don't know how long we have had a Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands, but I guess it must be something like 150 years at least. I don't think that during those 150 years a minister of Foreign Affairs ever attended an international conference on food security. This happened last year for the first time. Actually, it's a bit sad, but the war in Ukraine has really changed the game in terms of the political profile of global food and nutrition security. It's been rising on the agenda very rapidly, in part obviously because of the disturbance of the global supply chain. That triggered a lot of stuff. It also obviously became a security issue. All of a sudden, I became involved in writing notes for ministers in our own National Security Council here in the Netherlands. Not just once, but on a weekly basis. It really has been a change in thinking.

I don't think that it will go away because it's not only about conflict, it's definitely also about climate change. We are in a potentially dire situation also because of climate change. Now, you read the papers: five years of drought in the Horn of Africa, flooding in Pakistan, trade blockades in India creating disturbances in global markets and food price rises. There's a lot more to come. Both conflicts and climate change threaten our global food and nutrition security.

It does change a lot. The change in power dynamics changes the discussion, and also the agenda on foreign trade and development. If you see the response to the crisis, there's a lot of renewed European unity in actually responding to the global crisis. We have some homework to do as a European Union in order to have a stronger, more united, and clearer voice in these global power games.

Rob mentioned that a lot of political parties lack a geopolitical perspective in their programs, at least many of the political parties. Roger, what would your advice be to the politicians should we have to form a collation?

I'm really happy to be here today at a conference that's called ‘Food Systems Transformation’, because it could have been called ‘Food Systems Incremental Change’. We're at a particular point in our history right now, where transformational change is really necessary. What makes this conference even more important is the fact that it hasn’t been organized by the big organizations that think they own these ‘big think’ ideas like the OECD, but a specific commodity-producing organization. The real actors for change are companies like Agrico and the things that they do and the decisions they make.

We live in a world of magical thinking. We want everything to get better, but we don't want anything to change. We hang on to our sacred cows and we refuse to really come to grips with the problem as a whole and solve the whole problem. We want to make progress where progress is easy by being satisfied with and declaring victory when we make progress towards sustainability. We like to negotiate and we value consensus building and negotiation, but in that sort of give and take situation, we don't ask ‘are we really solving the whole problem’? At sector level, everyone who's here and part of an institution has to think about how to break out of that magical thinking. Politicians have to embrace transformational change, understand the whole problem and put policies in place that solve the whole problem.

Don't just accept progress as good enough and we can declare victory. That requires vision. One of the key things that we say is the government needs to have a vision of what the future looks like and make sure policy is working and moving in that direction. Having that strong vision, the government has to lead with that, but it can't just create it out of nothing. There have to be consultations. It has to bring everyone around to believing this, because transformation can't be imposed. It has to be embraced, that's a really tough problem. To make it a success, the vision has to be mixed with a certain amount of adaptability and agility.

You gave me another bridge: a shared vision. We learned about food system transformation today and also about its complexity. From SeedNL, we learned that you need a shared vision amongst different kinds of stakeholders involved in the food system, and that you have to work on a common strategy or a common roadmap. Myrtille, you have a lot of experience in that. How do we do that? What are the key factors in doing this in actual practice if tomorrow we all leave this room and return to our day-to-day jobs?

Thank you so much for having me here. It has been very interesting to listen to all the different presentations and the experiences that have been shared. I have to say that I relate very much to this ’being about the passion of the people, who we have to engage with. Let me start by saying that the focus in my case will be on emerging markets. I fully agree with previous speakers that we have to accept, in the Netherlands and also in Europe, that we are not the center of the world in food development opportunities. What we’ve already seen over the past 20, 25 years is that the growth is over there. The opportunities are over there. The resources are also over there and the space for innovation too.

In my own experience, if we talk about who to engage with to be successful, I think that one thing I learned when I was still the director of the Base of the Pyramid Innovation Center, is that we should not underestimate the capacity of local entrepreneurs in emerging markets or local small companies or local bigger companies, because they have grown. They have performed in the institutional environment of these markets. They understand these markets. They have already connected in a certain way with the market that has the biggest growth potential. When you also engage from a foreign perspective in these markets, I think that these are parties that are interesting to consider.

Then the second thing is that you really have to understand. I think that Michel’s presentation was also so inspiring for me. You have to understand the culture and the practices. You need to engage with the people that you want to do business with and put them in a leading position too. If we look at my own organization at Solidaridad, at the moment, we are based in 40 different countries. We actually work primarily with local staff. We have more than 1,000 people working for us. In all the countries there are people from the country itself, because they know the practices, the legislation, and the economic opportunities, etc.

Then I think that another thing that is very important is to not underestimate, of course, what we can share also in terms of knowledge, technology, and innovation capacity. I've seen so many times where local companies, cooperatives, whatever type of organizations, or people try to work in the food system at a local or regional level, but lack the knowledge to really produce efficiently, in an environmentally friendly way. What I've also seen is that what we often lack is the knowledge of the local distribution system. It made me laugh that you cited this example of this tractor. One of the insights that I got actually, is that we underestimate the importance of local retail systems and local distribution systems in countries. It's very important to partner up with parties that really understand it, because that’s the key to success, to really reach out to the different groups.

Then, of course, to come to my own type of organization, we help to bridge the different actors, bring them together, and help to create the trust base that is needed to experiment together, to get through the risks that you have to deal with, and to pilot experimental things, and see if you can do this in such a way that, later on, you can scale it up. I think that all these things are really important to take into account.

Also listening to this, I am in full agreement. I always slightly regret this aid and trade frame because, for me, it should actually be an aid and investment frame rather than aid and trade frame. It's important to make local investments and add local value. I think the ambassador of Kenya also referred to that earlier this afternoon.

In the past, it was all about agriculture. Now, we're talking food systems. It becomes a little bit more complex, because you also need players other than just from the agricultural sector. I think we are very often very ‘downstream’ in what we do. It's good to work with farmers. It's great to work with farmers, but you have to have some vertical integration. You also need to do upstream work to achieve true results. Otherwise, you can keep on working with farmers, but if they keep on working in the same context, nothing will really change. I think we have to do more work on this. We currently lack the collaboration. There are too many projects.

Roger, this may be a question for you because of your experiences through the eyes of the OECD. When we talk about common policy objectives, today, we heard about sustainability, small farmers, income improvement, food security, and nutrition Security, of course, how do we measure impact? We can do everything we want. If we don't know what we are doing or how we can learn from our endeavors, maybe we cannot improve or we don't know if we're doing the right things. Can you elaborate a little bit on that, on how we should perform proper impact measurements, so that we know what we are doing?

It's a fantastic question. It also connects to some of the things you were saying about repurposing of support. There’s a lot of talk about repurposing these days. It sounds really good, but a lot of it just winds up being old wine in new bottles. If you're going to repurpose a policy, really make it do something different. The way to do that is to have a focus on results. I think technology hasn't really been available to let us have a true results-based focus that goes right down to farm field level and we haven’t understood what effect policies are having at a very micro level in a very real way. We're getting much better at doing that now. We have to be able to use remote sensing and on-site sensing, and to collect and organize and understand that data have just gone through a tremendous transformation. Policymakers really need to take that results-based focus.

Myrtille, maybe you can help us with advice, because it's not easy to measure impact. We never know if that measure really directly relates to a certain impact. Maybe with some experience on the ground, what would your advice be if we really want to measure impact better?

I think, first of all, it's important that what you measure makes sense to the people that provide the data. Feedback loops of these data back to the people that have provided it already make a difference. How often has it happened that we collect all kinds of information from farmers, women, processes, and from whoever and that all ends up in reports that we then present to donor organizations or other organizations. I'm happy that people sometimes say, "Oh, we have another visit, but there’s never feedback on my input”. They're completely right. I think that there should be feedback loops, it helps them to understand what they can learn from that information and also motivates all of us to start putting the information in when we create a monitoring framework or whatever.

I think that the second thing that I applaud is that, in some way, this whole idea of the theory of change and focusing on the combination of output and outcomes, so looking at the effect of what you're doing has done its job. People start to accept it and start thinking of what do we really understand. What was the effect of the training that I provided, or the technology that I introduced? Then also to combine it and not only to collect rough data or similar, but to combine it with stories of change, I find that very, very useful actually. It gives you a much better idea of how it benefitted people, or maybe also how it didn't work out as expected. Then, of course, the trick is to add these stories up and work out the common thread.

One thing which comes to mind, we have been talking about a lot of policy interventions, subsidies, and everything. Potatoes have never been subsidized in India. India’s total potato production grows 3.5 percent year on year. Whereas when you talk about wheat, you talk about rice, they are heavily subsidized in the name of food security. By providing all these huge subsidies, are we trying to change the innovation? Why are we eating potatoes? 

Before potatoes, we were eating bananas in India. Bananas were the major source of starch. Nowadays in Hindu rituals, we plant a lot of bananas, but we don't eat them as a main meal, we only eat them as a fruit. Then I realized that as water became scarce and potatoes were more productive, suddenly potatoes came along and bananas were less popular and we were all eating potatoes. My question is, by doing all this, are we putting too many subsidies into the system and thwarting the change that we should normally have or that we had earlier? It is not that we have not changed what we’ve been eating for thousands of years. We have been eating very, very differently. My view is that we should also take into account promoting crops or not intervening. The thing is, if you just don't intervene, you don’t subsidize as much food, you may have a very different food pattern. People may be eating more vegetables. Maybe people will eat more potatoes. The thing is, are we distorting the markets?

It’s certainly an interesting reflection. Of course, the reflection actually involves Indian policies. That is, of course, down to discussions in India. I must say there's a quickly increasing notion that we have to pay a lot more attention to what we now call forgotten crops, which actually used to be very well-known crops, but somehow they received less attention. We all put our money into rice, wheat, and maize. There are a lot more crops which are probably much more climate resilient. Luckily, though a little bit late, we are once again investing in research on this.