Crypto News: Supply Lines: Climate-proof agriculture

If you were vacationing in France last year, you may have noticed shortages of mustard on supermarket shelves.

Harvest failures in Canada and France and the war in Ukraine meant that Unilever, the biggest seller of the condiment in the country, found itself without enough mustard seeds to make its classic Maille product. But if the world can survive without mustard, then it should take a note of drought threatening Spain's tomato crop this year, according to Hanneke Faber, head of nutrition at Unilever.

Food security is inextricably linked to sustainability, she says, and the food giant is looking to overhaul agriculture as part of initiatives ranging from tackling plastic packaging to cutting food waste.

"We have to change the way we farm, we have to farm more sustainably to mitigate the effects of climate change," Faber told me at Bloomberg's Sustainable Business Summit in London on Wednesday.

Regenerative agriculture programs the company pursues in places like soybean fields in Iowa and tomato farms in India form part of Unilever's push to reach net-zero by 2039.

They include practices like planting cover crops or rotating them, or ditching tilling — to nourish the soil, sequester carbon and to protect water resources.

"It's not rocket science," Faber said. "It's the stuff our grandparents were doing."

Other Efforts

Unilever isn't alone. Companies from Walmart and Cargill to PepsiCo and General Mills have announced programs in recent years. But the uptake among farmers is still small given the sheer vastness of global farmland.

Government and private commitments toward regenerative practices and soil health will exceed 40 million hectares by 2030, about 4% of the total crop and pasture acreage of the US, Canada, EU, Australia and New Zealand, according to an analysis by Rabobank. It's by no means an exhaustive list, but still shows more needs to be done.

So what needs to be done to incentivize a greater shift among farmers, who more than ever have been squeezed by high input costs? Greater collaboration and knowledge sharing, regulation, an effective way of measuring the impact of practices, and of course plenty of financial support.

"The time for pilots is really over," Faber said. "We have to do this at scale."

—Agnieszka de Sousa in London

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Supply Lines will take a break Monday and Tuesday for the US Fourth of July holiday. We'll be back in your inboxes on Wednesday July 5th.)

Russia's grip | Russia has tightened its hold on the world's wheat trade following its invasion of Ukraine, bolstering the Kremlin's role in global food supply to secure political support and hard currency. With Russia's internal politics in disarray after an aborted armed mutiny and its international standing damaged by the war, grain remains a major source of influence, and Moscow has been expanding its sway over the market at home and abroad. Another bumper harvest is starting in fertile farmlands like the North Caucasus region and Russia will be the source of one in five cargoes of exported wheat in the season that starts July 1, according to the US Department of Agriculture. By contrast, Ukraine will see its share halve from levels before the invasion to about 5% as production suffers long-term damage from mined fields and broken logistics chains. (Read full story here).

The UK is weighing options to blunt the cost of post-Brexit border checks on European food imports due to start in January over fears they could exacerbate the country's inflation problem.
It's blistering hot across China and people will be trying to beat the heat by indulging in iced teas and cold desserts, a trend that may spur one of the world's biggest sugar importers to step up buying.
A feed additive called Bovaer reduces methane from cow burps by 30%. Despite having emission-cutting goals, JBS, Danone, Nestle and Starbucks aren't racing to use it.
Nestle has abandoned pledges to make major brands including KitKat and Perrier carbon neutral, joining a nascent corporate pushback against programs that let polluters compensate for their own greenhouse gas emissions by investing in efforts to reduce them elsewhere.
Big chocolate companies are welcoming new EU rules that protect forests, but which risk further hitting consumer wallets.
China's momentum to surpass the US as the world's biggest economy may be thwarted by current dynamics.
From swiping 17.5 tons of olives to nabbing 60 containers of bull sperm, the world's thieves have been busy.

China's food security | Chinese lawmakers are mulling a wide-ranging food security law to fend off risks as the nation's food supplies increasingly come under threat from trade tensions to climate shocks and disease outbreaks, Bloomberg News reports.
Deforestation risk | Nestle and Unilever are among the largest consumer groups whose supply chains will be scrutinized under new EU deforestation regulation, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
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