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23 January 2023

At a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel session on January 18th, Gro Intelligence’s CEO Sara Menker joined United Nations World Food Program executive director David Beasley, Bayer AG’s CEO Werner Baumann, Hanneke Faber, president of Unilever’s nutrition group, and CNBC anchor Steve Sedgwick to debate the challenges facing global food systems, global food security, and what a reputable transition to a resilient agrifood system would require. 

For the panelists collaborating within the WEF’s Revolutionizing Food Security discussion, private sector involvement, enabling policies that take farmer profitability under consideration, and a long-term game plan centered on sustainability, decarbonization, and maintaining yields are the critical components of the resilient global food system that the world needs to construct. 

While that could be a tall order, Gro’s CEO Sara Menker said that there’s lots that agrifood systems can learn from the worldwide energy market transition. 

“It has taken numerous private capital to maneuver to the conversations that we’re having today about clean energy, and the catalyst for that has been data,” Menker said.  

With the intention to get people to concentrate to food system risk, the agricultural commodity market must find a way to articulate risks more clearly, she said. Lenders and investors need timely, granular data to measure, price, and transfer risks more effectively, she added. 

Because relatively few agricultural commodities trade on exchanges, market participants currently have only a few options for managing their risks, especially medium to long-term exposures. “In the event you take essentially the most liquid agricultural product on this planet today, it’s corn within the US. And [today] if you happen to can sell that two years forward, it’s still a miracle,” Menker said. 

Yet to make actionable and credible long-term plans that align with sustainability and decarbonization objectives and feeding the world’s 8 billion people, market participants across the spectrum need real-time data and reliable projections. 

“[They need to] know the way much of that offer exists. What the provision risks are, and what the demand goes to be” Menker said. “[Without that information] how do you really systematically price that risk, not only for tomorrow, or for the subsequent 12 months, but for the subsequent 10 to twenty years?” she asked. 

Menker believes that robust data and analytics could be a cornerstone of a worldwide agrifood system transition that decarbonizes because it improves food security. Data and analytics which are methodically rooted in science can grow to be the infrastructure that facilitates risk management, risk sharing, and risk transfer, and in this fashion, data and analytics can enable different stakeholders – banks, corporations, and governments – to play their role, she explained. Bringing these stakeholders and forces together can spur a transition, while helping to deal with global food insecurity, she said. 

Between 2019 and 2022, the number of individuals facing acute hunger soared 155% to 345 million worldwide. Currently, 49 million people in 49 different countries are on the sting of famine. 

Although food price inflation is cooling globally, food security must remain top of mind for world leaders, because the fallout from the last three years’ high inflation lingers, Menker said because the panel discussion concluded.  

To learn more in regards to the tools that Gro has developed to assist users track the growing conditions of crops that will not be traded on global exchanges or to schedule a demo of the Gro Climate Risk Navigator for Agriculture, please reach out to our sales team at sales@gro-intelligence.com.