Farmer's Weekly (South Africa)
Crucial for world to embrace sustainable farming
The international headlines about climate change, pandemics and wars show the challenges the farming community faced this year. With this in mind, the agricultural sector is continuously looking for ways to improve the industry to make it sustainable in the long run for both, the farmer and the consumer.
In December this year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched the First movers Coalition for Food.
The WEF said that this initiative uses the procurement of sustainably produced farming products to speed up the adoption of sustainable farming and innovation.
WEF president Børge Brende said: “Through the coalition, leading global companies will send demand signals to catalyse the acceleration and adoption of environmentally-friendly farming methods and green innovations.
“This collective public-private partnership will help de-risk upfront investments into more sustainable food production systems.”
The forum said that the initiative aims to speed up sustainable farming methods by leveraging a collective demand for low-carbon agricultural commodities. “It will do so through the power of aggregated demand, aiming for a combined procurement value for low-carbon commodities of $10-$20 billion (R189-R378 billion) from coalition members. Corporate partners currently participating in the coalition account for a combined revenue of $2.1 trillion (R40 trillion), with operations globally,” said the forum in a press release.
Starting mid-December 2023, WEF and participating companies and governments will work jointly to identify the demand commitments and pathways to support and mobilise the ecosystem to enable such transformation.
The coalition is expected to publish its initial results of the collaborative work in the summer of 2024.
Minister of Climate Change and Environment of the UAE Mariam Almheiri said: “The way we produce and eat food causes 30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, uses over 70% of the world’s freshwater, and is responsible for 80% of deforestation and habitat loss in tropical areas. If we don’t quickly find new, sustainable ways to produce and consume food, these problems will worsen in only a couple of decades.
Showing clear demand for improvements in sustainable agriculture production methods is crucial for reaching our global climate goals, and we need to act now.”
In their statement the First Movers said that the organisation builds on the success of the First Movers Coalition for Industry which was launched at COP26 in Glasgow by US President
Joe Biden and the WEF in 2021.
The coalition aggregates purchasing demand to create early markets for innovative clean technologies across eight hard-to-abate industry sectors: aviation, shipping, trucking, steel, aluminium, concrete and cement, and chemicals.
To date, the coalition has garnered the support of more than 13 government partners and 90 companies with purchasing commitments of more than $15 billion (R285 billion).
This is the most significant demand signal for clean technologies for industrial sectors that the world has ever seen.