How the Experts Would Fix the Food Crisis

The challenge of making food nutritious, sustainable, and abundant is hard enough for a nuclear family. Now mix in climate change, volatile markets, and inefficient safety standards—along with a global population estimated to add 2 billion more mouths to feed over the next 25 years—and it’s clear that the food crisis will only become more acute. So how do we fix agriculture? That’s the question Bloomberg Businessweek Chairman Norman Pearlstine put to our panel: Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, Under Secretary for Food Safety, U.S. Department of Agriculture; Richard Leach, President and Chief Executive Officer, World Food Program USA; Charles Sweat, President and Chief Executive Officer, Earthbound Farm; and Craig Wilson, Vice President, Quality Assurance and Food Safety, Costco Wholesale. Their conversation has been condensed and edited.


One of the things that’s a surprise to anyone new to the subject is the amount of food that’s produced but for one reason or another not consumed. Where might there be opportunities for greater efficiency?
Craig Wilson: Most people don’t understand that the code dates you see on food aren’t related to food safety. Those are quality code dates. Quality declines over time with any given food item, be it a refrigerated item or not. So when the quality goes to a point where it’s no longer salable or consumable, it’s pulled. Companies like ours donate a tremendous amount of food to local services and food banks throughout the world on products that are coming close to that code. Look at those code durations: Can we increase them? Can we improve them and continue working with our valued suppliers?
Elisabeth Hagen: Technology is incredibly important. We want to make sure though that we aren’t focusing our technology just on reactive opportunities. Technology should be focused from a food safety standpoint, first and foremost, on preventive opportunities. Food needs to be safe before it reaches consumers’ tables. So we have lots of opportunity to trace back contaminated food once we know that there’s been an event. That’s really important to mitigate the scope of any given event. But we want to make sure there are adequate technologies out there to prevent that contamination from occurring in the first place.


From an organic perspective is technology friend or foe?
Charles Sweat: Oh, a friend. Using technology and becoming more efficient is the only way you can scale your business to drive economic value to the consumer. As recently as 15 years ago we were harvesting a lot of our lettuces by hand and knives with employees in fields. We’ve developed mechanical harvesters now that can cut those crops. Hundreds of people went down to three or five. Efficiencies went way up, and price went way down. So technology’s important from the food product system as well as food safety side.
Richard Leach: If you look at the 866 million people suffering from hunger, half are actually farmers—small-scale farmers, mostly women. And when we talk about “What do we need to increase productivity?” we’re talking about technologies that were being used in the U.S. in the late 1800s—irrigation, fertilizers, roads, warehousing. So we can have a significant impact on productivity without a major advance in technology, using techniques we’ve understood for quite some time.
Sweat: That also falls under your conversation about population growth. It’s moving from rural to urban. And if you look at China, for instance, there’s also a demographic shift from rural areas, which are farm producing, into cities as that middle class rises. So you’re losing that labor force in the farm-production aspects of the countries. If we don’t figure out how to increase productivity, we’re going to actually lose volumes being produced today.

The availability of information being taken out to the farm changes considerably in an era of ubiquitous smartphones. Can you see that making a big difference for hunger?
Leach: It has actually, in varying ways. One is we’re seeing farmers now having access to information about crop disease and other problems. If there’s a problem spreading in a particular part of the country, they can share it among different communities. We’re also seeing it in the sense that there’s access to information about pricing. Someone with a cell phone in Uganda can access the commodity exchange in Chicago and figure out what the price is for maize and actually be able to reap a greater benefit from their maize crop than they would have otherwise.
Wilson: There’s another very interesting point when we talk about cell phone ubiquity. We can use that for reverse trace back. When we have to announce a recall on a given item, we can call 1.4 million people per hour with a voice message. It’s a very effective way to reach people when we compare it to the old ways of contacting people for urgent information in recalls.


Is weather forecasting something you pay much attention to at Costco?
Wilson: We follow the sun, so to speak. When you shop at Costco, you can get Bing cherries at Christmas time. So we’ve got to understand weather patterns. We need to know where products are coming from and source based on the weather. That’s what we’re doing today.


There’s been a movement toward local agriculture, questioning the cost of moving grapes from Chile to New Jersey and so forth. Do you see any broad customer support for this?
Wilson: If we can buy local, we will. But they’ve got to meet the same specification we would have for a global or national supplier. For us it boils down to quality and food safety. If they can meet the same requirements and the same Costco specifications that are going to incorporate Dr. Hagen’s specifications, then the smallest guy up to the largest guy, we’d love to be able to buy from them.
Sweat: It’s probably even more true for organic. Consumers are looking to have that confidence and trustworthiness in how a product is made, how it is grown, and how it’s produced to those specs. As we look at going more global in our production system, we have found things that were labeled “organic” that weren’t necessarily organic. We found things that were not even of the same product type as their label.
Wilson: Dr. Hagen has changed the way the food safety inspection system has worked over the last two years. And from somebody who’s in the trenches every day, this regulatory change is so refreshing. I can have valued suppliers build an item and meet a quality or microbial specification, and the regulators can’t do that yet. But they can come out and say, “This is what we need to do to prevent this.” And then we can support that and push that forward. So there’s a growing industry-regulatory relationship that’s building—not just with Costco but across the board—where food safety is such a focus. Nobody gets up in the morning and goes to work and says, “Well, you know, I’m gonna make somebody sick today, because I’m gonna do this.”


What kind of decisions do you have to make with regard to transparency issues and alerting the public to a problem?
Hagen: Regulators have legal standards we have to meet if we’re going to recall a product or use our authority to seize and detain a product that a company would refuse to recall. But it’s not particularly helpful, I think, to consumers at large to get a notification from the government that says, “We think there’s a problem with ground beef.” You know, there are billions of servings of ground beef sold in this country every year. And the folks in the retail and wholesale world sometimes have the ability to get out in front and notify people before we might be able to put out an official release.
Wilson: Just last month there was a horrible salmonella outbreak. The salmon’s produced in two places: Holland and Greece. I was notified on a Monday evening. By the end of Monday night, we had contacted everybody who had purchased that salmon and said there could be an issue. There were no illnesses—nothing in the U.S. We went through the investigatory process. Two weeks later, it was confirmed that the salmon shipped to the U.S. was excluded from any recall. And so we sent a letter out at that point to let our members know that no, in fact, the salmon wasn’t included. So it’s very easy to pull the trigger on these things because you’re talking, in most cases, about a single item.