Untitled - June 1, 2026

00:00:00 Speaker: Hello and welcome to a special solo edition of the Sustainable Commodities Podcast. I'm Barnaby Patchett. This week I'm going to take a look at a recent conference I attended, Future Chain twenty twenty six, which was held in London at the end of April. I'm going to give some of my thoughts on the event, the programme and some of the big themes that came out of it. Uh, first, before I do that, I want to extend a big thank you to the organisers, Kosako research for allowing me to attend and record. I really do appreciate it. I always learn so much at conferences like this, and it helps to ensure that the content we put out on the podcast reflects the current state of the sustainability movement. I thought they put on a really well organised event. The programme was really relevant to the current trends in sustainability. The setup was excellent. Good food, good tasting and opportunities to network and a good room of people from from across the space. There were Retailers and the food majors there. Someone from the EU Commission, NGOs and as always, a lot of service providers and MRV specialists. Perhaps the one demographic missing from these events is always the farmers themselves. I don't blame the organisers for this. Um, there were a few farmers there, including on one of the panels, uh, but they were conspicuous by their absence as a group. I know it's hard to get them to events like this, and the program itself wasn't really geared towards them, but I think for a regenerative agriculture movement that talks a lot about farmer first, getting their voices in the room would add add some real value, but on to the conference. It had two separate elements. So it was the Regenerative Agriculture Summit. I attended this in Amsterdam last September. Uh, we have an episode on that if you'd like to listen and the Raw Materials Risk and Resilience Summit. The fact that these two were together was perhaps the biggest reflection of the current state of sustainability and regenerative agriculture. The trend we've seen over the last year has been one of sustainability as resilience. I think really, we're just moving beyond the ideological at the moment, the hard economic realities and the program and conversations in the room really reflected that. Everything boils down to supply chain resilience, risk and finance. And this has been building, obviously over the last few years. But in twenty twenty six, I think it's come to a head. The Iran war has only strengthened that narrative. You know, businesses and consumers are waking up to the fact that a lot of the work done in sustainability isn't ideological anymore. It's about long term survival of the systems. We've become so dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizer. Our energy systems and our food security. But the closure of a twenty mile chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz, can cause massive instability at a global level and even on the regenerative agriculture track. And even on the regenerative agriculture track. Most of the agenda focused on resilience and risk, whether that was resilient farming systems, ingredient resilience, or reducing risk for farmers and those financing the transition. There were a couple of real standout sessions for me. My absolute favorite of the whole week was the coconut case study from Lush and Alone. It was about a landscape approach in Indonesia for the sourcing of coconut. I think the reason I liked it so much was it was the approach I want to see. It's focused on impact, directly supporting the smallholders, improving the way they work on the ground, securing a better financial deal for them and connecting them with the retailer in Europe. It was one of those approaches where everybody wins. It's the kind of work I think we need to see lots more of if we're going to scale regenerative agriculture. I also really enjoyed a panel on, um, the interconnected state of supply chain resilience, which had more of a procurement focus. So it had the VP of procurement from Mars, a former VP of supply chain at Procter and Gamble and a former chief procurement officer at AstraZeneca. The reason I liked it so much was it directly addressed one of the key barriers that is preventing scaling. The fact that sustainability teams and procurement teams are really connected. And there's a Charlie Munger quote that I often use, which is show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And it's true. You know, while price and cost remain the only real goal of most procurement teams, it's going to be very hard to make decisions based on sustainability. It's always going to be an afterthought. It does feel like the big businesses are genuinely taking this seriously now, which was great to see. Uh, one other key session that stood out for me, perhaps for the the wrong reasons was, uh, Christine Muller of the EU Commission key policy and regulation trends affecting supply chain and regenerative sourcing. Honestly, I don't want to single out Christine, because this is an EU legislator wide problem, but this highlighted just how disconnected EU regulators are from reality. The reality of business, the reality of consumer lives, the reality of finances and priorities, and above everything else, the realities of the unintended consequences of introducing massive amounts of ill thought out legislation, however well-meaning it is. The session itself focused on lots of upcoming regulations the Empowering Consumers Directive, EU D R, C, S, triple D, etc. and their impact. Um, and, you know, outlining what's happening is fine. I guess my problem with the session was the framing of it. The commissioner talked in, in glowing terms about the more than three thousand new trade regulations introduced in twenty twenty five alone. But it was as if the volume of laws introduced was a virtue. Is that this implicit idea that somehow introducing lots of legislation is automatically a good thing, never mind the impact or cost. More equals better. I, I can't get on board with that. Um, impact is what should matter, but it always seems to be secondary. Second was the idea that consumers are willing to pay more for sustainability, which I simply don't accept. You know, some might say they are, but principles are very easy to hold until they impact your pocket, and consumers have less in their pockets right now. It was one of those kind of nineteen eighty four double speak things. I just couldn't get my head around it. Perhaps the the biggest issue I had was that she talked about a future commitment to deepen and strengthen the existing legislation. This is going to sound slightly blasphemous coming from someone working in sustainability, but let me explain. I agree with the stated aims of most, if not almost all, the legislation coming out of the EU when it comes to sustainability, but almost always the implementation and second order impacts of these approaches leave a huge amount to be desired. I mean, EU Empowering Consumers directive are two great examples of this and the result of the implementation of these bits of legislation tends to be not the advancement of sustainability or the improvement of things. It's just admin and cost. The focus becomes one of compliance, not progress. Uh. I wasn't alone in my dislike for this commitment to expand the European legislation. A delegate from Louis Dreyfus, who I didn't catch the name of and I apologized to her, came back with a response. And to summarize, she said that this commitment made her very worried that it wasn't something to celebrate because they were still dealing with the myriad of legislation that's just come in or is due to come in soon. She had some fair questions. Who pays for it? Why are we making things so hard at the moment? Where are the initiatives to simplify things? The commissioner had an answer. If you're going to make sustainability claims, you need to prove them. And I mean, I agree with this. I have a lot of sympathy with that. You know, what's the point in saying something if you're not doing it? Uh, but again, it's the EU framing of this. When you've got the EU essentially turning the very word sustainability into state sanctioned language, as we have in the Empowering Consumers Directive. What are these companies actually proving? In the vast majority of cases, their resources are taken up by proving compliance, often with things that don't measurably improve sustainability. Lots of this legislation becomes a bureaucratic exercise rather than one on impact, which is what I'd like to see more of. Um, anyway, to be fair to the commissioner, she also explained more about the position on deepening and strengthening legislation, saying that some of this would involve simplification. I like the idea, but I wasn't convinced. Uh, it's very hard to make things simpler by increasing requirements and introducing new legislation. And frankly, given the track record over the last few years, simple EU sustainability legislation is an oxymoron. Anyway, I'll get away from my criticisms of the EU legislators. There's plenty on other episodes on my LinkedIn, if you want more of that. But elsewhere in the programme, there were some really good sessions on soil health and technology, the implementation of AI and collaboration, how big companies can work together to scale, and that's going to be essential. The final session I want to highlight was the one on de-risking climate resilient agriculture, scalable finance and parametric insurance. Yes, a bit of a mouthful, but this really focused down on the finance, how we can build and find the right pathways for farmers, corporates and investors to access the capital needed. How can we accelerate investment in resilient agriculture. I liked it so much because finance, as soon as I heard about regenerative agriculture, finance has been one of the biggest themes. Um, and it feels like I certainly felt this coming out of the Regenerative Agriculture Conference last year that we're in a weird chicken and egg situation. Farmers need finance to transition to regen. You know, when they transition, there is likely to be an impact on their yields for the first few years. They will make less money. And at the moment that isn't something they can afford to do. But to finance this, corporates need to know that what they're investing in works and delivered to bring these together, we need data to prove that transitioning to regenerative agriculture stacks up as a business case. And without the data at scale, we end up stuck in this kind of pilot stage culprits of testing the water with small scale projects and farmers needing to know what they're doing isn't going to bankrupt them. The scaling issue as well. The problem is that regenerative agriculture is such a broad church that you can run a pilot on in one landscape, in one crop, using certain inputs. But how does that apply to the wider movement? So you end up again, it's you end up with another pilot in another landscape on another commodity. Um, and it becomes this sort of self self-fulfilling circle where we're still waiting. It becomes very difficult to scale. Uh, and I think that this session highlighted some really interesting mechanisms, uh, some interesting ways that we can break out of this. It was the first conference I've been to where I saw some light at the end of the tunnel. You know, a lot of pilot programs have now been done and the data is starting to come in at scale. You could see by the number of MRV and data specialists in the room that the ability to measure, capture, and generate insights from data is better than it's ever been by a huge margin. Whatever you want to measure, I don't care whether it's soil or carbon or anything else. There was someone out Future Jane. It was a business at Future Jane who could do that for you. And once that's in place, you know, the perceived risk of financing this drop significantly. And it finally felt like investors and those and banks and people who are going to be putting up this money are starting to get the confidence they need to invest in larger projects. The wider incentives are supporting this as well. Cutting scope three emissions has become a real priority for these businesses, and region AG provides a good solution of. Of course, there's. There's still a lot to do. This isn't like we've got a fully formed solution. Farmers are still taking on the lion's share of the risk. That was clear from the conference. But it does feel like we pretty much recognise this, and that they were bringing in some more interesting mechanisms, blended finance, to provide them with the capital they need. Overall, it was a it was a really good programme and I did learn a lot genuinely. Now on to the best part, the networking. Um, at every conference I find the conversations in the networking space a where you get to the real state of things. I am, as listeners to this podcast will know or if you follow me on LinkedIn, I am a horrible cynic. It's one of my very worst qualities. But speaking to people at the conference at Future Chain, I was reminded that there's so much good stuff happening. It was a room of people who genuinely care and they're doing their best to change things, whether that's with new technology, whether that's implementing projects on the ground, whether it's technical support to farmers or solutions to measure the data, we need to make better decisions and finance things. That alone did give me a lot of hope. You know, I probably spoke to over one hundred people across the few days I was there, including conducting several interviews, uh, for the Sustainable Commodities podcast, which we will release over the coming weeks. The themes that came up in the conversation, I had broadly reflected the themes of the conference risk, not just in terms of reducing it for farmers, but in terms of how we reduce risk across the supply chain. I heard a lot about great solutions, from alternative fertilizers to program ideas, to collaboration ideas and ways of leveraging scope three commitments to drive wider change resilience. What are we going to do to ensure that our food system survive and thrive into the future. From the program and the conversations, I got the sense that big corporates really do seem to understand just how dependent they are on the soil and the climate right now. Um, and while that came through strongly in the narrative and the conversations, I think it's, there's a lag when it comes to, uh, the financial commitment, shall we say. Uh, and that brings me on to, to the biggest theme. Uh, it was still finance. Where is it coming from? Who's going to pay? And there was a sense of frustration in the room about the pace of change there always is at any sustainability conference, but also about the finance gap. The honest truth is that transition is costly. You need to pay the farmers to do it. You need to pay for the data. You need to pay for the administration, the compliance. Every element bears an upfront cost. There are still unanswered questions about where this will come from. It's all about the money and how people can get hold of enough of it to change things quickly enough, especially in the current economic climate. Will it happen? I'm cautiously optimistic. The food majors and governments are already investing significant amounts of money in projects and schemes, and if the data continues to be positive in terms of the impact of region AG and from a business case perspective, that's the path forward to true scalability. Once you can prove the numbers stack up, people will follow. And that should be the focus as far as I see it. We just need to make it happen. I think that feels like a nice place to end this. Um, thanks again to Kisaku for putting on the event, and thanks for listening to this special edition of the podcast. Please subscribe for more and look out for the interviews from the event, which will be live soon.