Karen Betts’ speech at Ambition 2030 launch event

Yesterday we launched our latest sustainability strategy, Ambition 2030. The strategy focuses on the impacts of climate change and nature’s decline, which are being felt right across the globe, posing a growing threat to food production and food security. The strategy also highlights the need for a united approach across the entire food system to tackle the impacts of climate change on food production. 

As part of her opening address Karen Betts, Chief Executive, The Food and Drink Federation, said:

"Ambition has a mixed reputation.  The Shakespeare students among you will know about Macbeth’s ‘vaulting ambition’ or Julius Caesar’s blind ambition. For those unfamiliar with Shakespeare, it’s safe to say that ambition didn’t work out well for either of them in the end.

Industry’s ambitions, ours, others, not least on climate, haven’t always had a positive reception either.  In terms of success, we’re certainly in net positive territory.  But we haven’t always succeeded in what we’ve set out to.  And on that, rightly, we’ve been held to account.

But setting our ambition, setting our sights if you like, on how we address the challenges we face is critical.  It’s how we inspire ourselves, stretch ourselves, to achieve things we think are possible when we don’t know exactly how they’re possible.  Ambition enables us to collect ourselves and regroup when we try but don’t succeed.  It’s how we hold our nerve.  It’s how we hold ourselves to account.

In short, we need ambition to achieve difficult things.  We need ambition to ensure the food system, of which we’re part, responds to the causes and consequences of climate change.  Where we reduce, as far as possible, greenhouse gas emissions.  Where we restore nature and biodiversity.  Where we use the world’s natural resources responsibly – from energy and water to commodities.  Where we reduce, reuse and recycle the packaging we need to keep food fresh and safe.  Where we reduce food waste dramatically.  Where we make healthier diets more accessible and enable people to make better choices to protect their long term health.  And where, all the while, we reimagine and reengineer how we feed the world’s growing population in a resilient and sustainable way.

I believe it’s through ambition that we’ll retain the focus, the drive, the dogged determination, the optimism we’ll need to succeed in the face of wicked problems to which we have, right now, only incomplete answers.  Because the world is rapidly and visibly changing around us – as witnessed earlier this month in the devastating hurricanes that hit Florida – and there’s no time to lose.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Karen Betts, Chief Executive of the Food and Drink Federation, and I’m delighted you’ve been able to join us to launch FDF’s Ambition 2030.  I’m going to speak for the next few minutes about Ambition 2030, and then about what happens beyond 2030, which of course we need to be working on and planning for now.

So first, Ambition 2030.  It’s really great to see so many food and drink manufacturers, suppliers, professional partners like banks and insurers, NGOs and government here today.  Many of you were involved in crafting Ambition 2030 with us, and we’re grateful for your collaboration. 

But even if you weren’t, if you’re here now, my challenge to you today is that we, each and every one of us, own the responsibility for ensuring we meet Ambition 2030.  This, as I’m sure you know, is about ensuring the food and drink manufacturing sector, hand in hand with our suppliers and customers, moves far enough and fast enough along the road to environmental sustainability to meet our individual and collective responsibilities and targets. 

A central objective of this work is to make the complex simple, to make the landscape more accessible, so our members can take the right decisions on what to do, when and how.  98% of food and drink manufacturers are SMEs, and I can’t stress enough how intimidating putting the right environmental sustainability actions in place is for them, with less bandwidth and fewer specialised staff.  For some, it’s not knowing where to start.  For others, it’s about accessing practical guidance on measurement, target-setting and action, and finding tailored support.  For everyone, it’s about making sustainability part of what we all do as businesses and spreading the costs in a  manageable way.

Ambition 2030 also provides clarity on the complex range of initiatives and reporting frameworks.  It provides confidence to businesses in making the right choices and doing the right thing.  It connects FDF’s members with our Professional Affiliates for bespoke advice and support – such as Ecosurety, our generous sponsor today.  We’re proud of Ambition 2030 and everything it offers. 

But we also know that, in itself, it isn’t enough.  And that’s the second thing I wanted to say today.  What happens after 2030?  Because we need to be planning for that now.

Future planning will be closely informed by what’s going on now – which is detailed, scientific and impressive.  But it’s what we’re doing now that means we can see that the path ahead isn’t fully mapped; that the knowledge and the technologies we’ll need to get us to our final destination haven’t come into focus yet, or haven’t been invented yet.

With that in mind, as we look beyond 2030, FDF thinks something’s missing.  And that’s a broader, more strategic roadmap.  Agreed, at least in principle, across all parts of the food system, and with government and NGOs – a guide, if you like, to UK food systems change.  A roadmap that sets the direction, timeframe, and collective effort needed to achieve the ultimate change we need to see.

I hope this is what government Ministers have in mind when they speak of the need for a ‘food systems review’.  In our view, a guide to UK food systems change, or a new food strategy, needs to set out:

• First, the vision – where we’re trying to get to and with whom;
• Second, the options and potential solutions for getting there, including laying markers where we know we lack answers;
• Third, an action plan that sets practical direction and priorities, and that’s flexible enough to adapt to changing threats, risks and opportunities;
• And finally, it needs to create a new platform where the supply chain actively collaborates.

Our view is that there are four, central issues that a new strategy must address.  They’re interlinked.  They’re not sequential.  The trick will be in achieving change in each iteratively, rationally and reasonably.  And based on sound economics – because without a doubt we need economic growth and productivity gains to generate the wealth to pay for this vital work. Progress, then, across each issue must collectively amount to the visible, measurable change required to counter climate change, ensure food security and promote human health.

The four issues central to successful food systems change are, in our view:

• First, supply chain resilience and food security, where we ensure supply chains nationally and internationally are robust and sustainable; and take into account the projected rise in the UK’s population from 68 million people now, to 78 million by 2050;
• Second, environmental sustainability, where we farm our land efficiently and effectively while evolving and innovating to drive down emissions, restore nature and biodiversity, conserve water and energy, create a truly circular economy for packaging, and lean-in further to ending food waste;
• Third, healthier diets, where we help everyone, in all communities, whatever their circumstances and whatever the resources available to them, to follow healthier diets, with more fruit, vegetables and fibre, and less fat, salt and sugar; and
• Last, investment and productivity, where we drive growth and innovation into our agri-food industry to invent the industry of the future. In this, we need to address how we finance change – how we attract the funds, structure and incentivise them.  We need to achieve a downpayment on change that’s equal to the task ahead, and which manages when and how costs reach consumers.

The actors in our strategy are straightforward to identify – they span the businesses across the farm to fork sector – alongside a range of government departments, agencies, NGOs and consumer groups.  We need to come together not only to represent our interests but also to rise above them to find the right path to change – because we know with climate change that there will be no prizes for going it alone. 

How we collaborate is critical too.  A central issue at play is framing collaboration that achieves the right change within a competitive market.  This needs further thought.  Competition in food and drink has served UK consumers well over the years.  Our grocery market is famously competitive, which has kept prices down.  But there’s a tension between competition and systems change, which can – indeed, already is – leading to negative and perverse outcomes.  So we need to work with government and others to find new, innovative ways to retain the benefits of competition while de-risking innovation and ensuring advances are widely disseminated and widely applicable.

I recognise that none of this is easy.  Systems change, deep, transformational change is really hard, otherwise someone would have done it already and shown us the way.  It will ask difficult things of us, individually and collectively.

But we should remember two things.

First, we’ve changed the food system before.  In the seventy-five years since the end of the Second World War, our food system has changed massively.  We made food plentiful while responding to societal change.  Looking back, it’s tempting to think the challenges then were simpler than those we face today.  But I don’t believe that’s true, we simply don’t feel the force of the uncertainties felt by our predecessors, who also no doubt thought they operated in a complex, unpredictable and alarming world. Today, there are equally strong drivers for change.  And we have skills and capabilities far beyond the resources our predecessors had.  But, like them, we have ingenuity, motivation, agility.  And ambition.  And we can change our system again. 

Second, the challenges we’re facing into are fundamentally the challenges of evolution – that all species must adapt to survive.  Nowhere is that more obvious than in the nature around us here at London Zoo, and in the scientific and conservation work carried out to support it by the ZSL team. 

"Life on Earth is an extraordinary adventure” David Attenborough, our most famous naturalist once said.  And he went on: “the story of life is about how we‘ve adapted and evolved in response to changing conditions."

Ambition 2030 sets our next critical steps in responding to those changing conditions.  With our partners, we now also need to grip systems change beyond 2030.  It will be that extraordinary adventure, the challenge of our lives.  And with the right ambition, we will succeed.

Thank you."