From advances in automation to the realities of a distributed workforce, a new era of work has dawned—and with it, a new style of teamwork. This is part of a series exploring Deloitte’s Modern Teams methodology and the nonlinear, diverse, multifunctional teams that put humanity at the center to drive meaningful business outcomes.
“Businesses and nonprofits are experiencing modern, new age problems that need solutions and teams to be just as modern and just as innovative. The World Economic Forum’s 100 Million Farmers platform serves as a perfect example of this within the agriculture and food system,” says Deloitte Consulting CEO, Dan Helfrich.
No one ever said being a farmer was easy. But at this point in the climate crisis, things have gotten much tougher.
According to Lisa Sweet, who leads initiatives at the intersection of Food Systems, Climate and Nature at the World Economic Forum (the Forum), modern food production and consumption practices have taken nearly a third of the world’s agricultural land out of use in the last 40 years. On top of that, up to a third of greenhouse gas emissions come from these same food systems. So, in an industry where tight margins often make it hard to focus on anything beyond the immediate crop season at hand, farmers are depending on increasingly disappearing resources—such as healthy and productive soils, a stable and predictable climate, and abundant biodiversity (such as pollinators)—all while their current practices and tools may be further exacerbating the problem.
“We know that the world—with its current food production systems and consumption patterns—is edging closer and closer to a dangerous tipping point,” Sweet says. “We know that business as usual is not a possibility. We need to be looking at things differently.”
Sean de Cleene
Member of the Executive Committee,
Head of the Future of Food at World Economic Forum
According to Sean De Cleene, Head of the Future of Food at World Economic Forum, "there's this unique opportunity where we can buy time with food and agriculture. There is no other system or industry that is anywhere near ready to sequester carbon and do that in a way that restores nature and enhances resilience as food systems. So that really provides an opportunity for food and agriculture system to do that in a very powerful way. While we’re decades away from carbon capture mechanisms in other industries, in food we can do that now, buy time for world as a whole. And yet, if we don’t do that in a way that brings people and farmers along with us from the start, then that won’t happen”
Transitioning to sustainable farming methods seems like the logical next step, but doing that at scale is a daunting process that can eventually touch dozens of industries and billions of people. That’s why in 2020, the Forum, under Sweet’s leadership, launched 100 Million Farmers, a platform to help 100 million farmers across the globe convert their businesses into more sustainable ones. The platform states its objective as creating food systems that are net-zero, nature-positive, and that increase farmer resilience. The Forum has partnered with Deloitte on the 100 Million Farmers platform to catalyze regional multi-stakeholder collaborations. The aim is to design and deploy innovative solutions that unlock new financing, data, technology, and demand for farmers to adopt today’s best regenerative agricultural practices. These span from cutting-edge, nutrient-management techniques and smarter and more diverse crop rotations to efficient integration of trees into the land—in order to put a genuine dent in today’s grisly climate projections. And that’s all while increasing farmers’ own capacity to sustain the increasingly more erratic climate patterns.
“It’s this huge, massive target—100 million farmers—but that’s specific, because it reaches a tipping point for change,” Sweet explains, noting that number would account for between 15 and 20 percent of the global farmer population. “You’d make a fundamental shift. It’s too big to be ignored.”
Having the ambition to make real change is one thing, but truly tackling one of the world’s most pressing problems takes more than an economic think tank. How can any one group begin to unravel the logistical challenges that stem from a global, multiyear, cross-industry goal?
To start, it takes more than one group. 100 Million Farmers has brought together groups both expected and not. Again, farmers themselves stand at the center of all this—Sweet says 100 Million Farmers isn’t designing ecosystems for farmers, but rather with farmers. Potential agricultural shifts for a fruit farmer in Spain, for example, are tailored to that specific climate, product, and scope of business. Finding a solution that works for a coffee or rice farmer in Vietnam likely requires an entirely different approach.
Farmers alone cannot change food systems. They themselves are responding to broader societal and economic demands from a diverse set of actors—from retailers, traders, and agri-input companies to financial institutions—and are often distant from the end consumer of their produce. Beyond the typical food-value chain actors, it takes even more organizations to find any reality in an idea this ambitious. This is why 100 Million Farmers has also been seeking to work with groups in areas such as tech, where organizations with expertise in big data might be able to leverage AI and satellite imagery to measure the success of farmers adopting regenerative practices that are both at-scale and low-cost. There are academics, NGOs, and government agencies being brought in, too, since those entities might be able to ensure the environmental and social integrity of the work and influence regional policies to incentivize climate-smart conversions.
Max Krasilovsky
Senior Manager, Deloitte Consulting LLP
“As I reflect on the beginning of this program and think about the multistakeholder platforms that we're trying to build, I personally thought that it was going to take a bit more convincing to be able to say to these organizations, that operate across the value chain, at the intersection of climate, nature and resiliency were going to be an essential vision and agenda that we needed to drive forward together, and that wasn't the case at all. Organizations saw it immediately, they knew the importance of it and bought in."
100 Million Farmers has especially been engaging financial institutions creating new and disruptive mechanisms beyond traditional operating loans or catastrophic insurance policies. After all, shifting a farm toward sustainable practices isn’t fast, nor is it cheap. New equipment and resources increase up-front costs while it takes time for new practices to match or surpass prior crop yields. Traditional financing tools available to those in the agricultural space won’t get the job done.
“Think of transitions to being climate-smart, and these are not one-season transitions,” says Max Krasilovsky, a senior manager at Deloitte who focuses on sustainability programs. “These are multi-year transitions that take a significant investment and, as with any major practice change, have a significant amount of risk. So the historic [financial] mechanisms aren’t fit for the purpose.” This is why the 100 Million Farmers platform team is engaging financial and insurance institutions to help them rethink their product portfolios and allow farmers who want to do the right thing to get access to specific loans or insurances that give them the leeway to do so. The platform is also supporting the design of solutions that enable carbon credits or other ecosystem service payments to complement traditional financial tools by generating additional revenue for farmers, and exploring procurement guidelines and long-term purchase agreements to create steady demand for climate-smart products.
This wide-reaching approach to teambuilding has already shown some benefits, according to the Forum’s Sweet. First, there’s simply the diversity of knowledge at the disposal of the 100 Million Farmers platform, and country or regional collaborations—called “flagships”—which allows for responsive, creative, and holistic problem-solving. Then, there’s the ability to localize, since this network built from such varying stakeholders has also come with regional expertise. Finally, there’s been the buy-in from day one. By engaging with everyone from farmers to bankers during the planning stages, these seemingly disparate but ultimately intertwined stakeholders can all be invested in the solutions that are both being deployed and successful.
Alexia Semov
Community Lead,
Food and Nature at the World Economic Forum
Alexia Semov, who works alongside Lisa Sweet at the Forum on the 100 Million Farmers platform, says "how do we go beyond our tagline and make it a reality? At various levels we are trying to engage in with the farmers, because we really mean it when we want to reach/hear/work with the farmers. We’re partnering and working closely with the World Farmers Organizations, an umbrella organization bringing together farmer unions from around the world to sense check whether if the direction we're taking is correct and use them to connect to local and regional farmer organizations on the ground where we decide to deploy our efforts”
Through that lens, 100 Million Farmers doesn’t merely form a diverse team as part of the solution. Building that kind of team is the foundation that makes a solution possible.
“These problems are huge, and they need many groups operating in the same direction to get it done,” Deloitte’s Krasilovsky says. “What keeps me from being overwhelmed is the fact there is such positive momentum in this direction, from the farmer to the consumer.”
For 100 Million Farmers and the team banding together behind this initiative, things remain in the early stages. The initial goal is hitting that big number—with all those farmers working at some stage of the process from learning to completed business conversion—by 2030. From there, 100 Million Farmers has a secondary target to reach one billion consumers with products that come from those newly sustainable farms, all while allowing more farmers to learn and draw inspiration from their peers regarding their journey into regenerating their farms and businesses.
“We’re early in this process,” Sweet reiterates. “No one linear solution exists. It takes nuance. It takes localization.” And as 100 Million Farmers has already discovered, it takes one big, modern team if you want to tackle one of the world’s biggest problems the right way.
“The conversations we’re having with different organizations at different points in this food supply chain have shifted in the last three or four years. That’s a foundational, positive change,” Krasilovsky adds. “We don’t have to convince people there’s a need for change and a need for urgency, and before maybe we’d have to do that.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Deloitte.
