I’ve heard great things about this. First of all, you have to stand still, and secondly,
the slides change when they want not when you want. But here, we’re trying to pull
together several pieces in order to get Davos to support action on a silent crisis. It’s
silent, but it’s huge. What you see here is that half the world’s population are
really poor and they are very well-represented in the 3 million people who are under-nourished
or micronutrient-deficient. Immorally, at the other end of the scale, there are 2 billion
people overweight and obese. Both the malnutrition side and the overweight obesity side stretch
across big and small, poor and rich countries. So you can find over 30% prevalence of overweight
and obesity in the US, male and female, but also in Brazil female. And in under 10%, where
people are doing a bit better, you can say that the male and female French population
is there, but so are Russian males, for example.
So this is not a rich-poor problem. And the fundamental vision is that there’s no reason
why poorer people should not have better health, but we need to work to bring together food
and nutrition and agriculture in order to fix that problem.
Here’s a really complicated slide showing that the drivers for poor nutrition, lack
of food security, agriculture destroying the ecosystems, they all fit together. The key
message to take away, I think, is that the environment and health movements regard themselves
as separate. We have to fix that, but we haven’t yet managed either to convince those who say,
‘The economy is my sphere’, that actually what’s happening in the environment – I
think we’re getting there – and on the social side, these are really crucial, not
just to the sustainability of the global economic growth model, but also to the sustainability
of any given business.
So the question is, ‘Can we, through Davos leadership, energise a clearer vision that
this matters to everybody?’ At the moment, we have single strand policies or short-term
interventions, and some of them work, so here are some that work: the World Food Programme;
the Belgian Salt Iodization Project, just to remind us that iodisation and other micronutrient
deficiencies aren’t only in poor countries; the EU Nutrition Platform, which is a multi-stakeholder
civil society-business coalition to drive down obesity rates. And you could say: the
World Trade Organization, the FAO.
But we need, somehow, to bring these partners together and to make them actually succeed.
Before I did health, which is what I do now, I did trade, and we work for years and years,
but we don’t get efficient breakthroughs. So we need to find a way of getting to a higher
vision, which will motivate not just the owners of these systems, but those of you who haven’t
previously thought that nutrition, food and agriculture matters to my business, or to
my more focused social activist network.
I put in a few details, because I thought we should be ‘techie’. What we want is
actually, firstly, to have a multi-stakeholder World Economic Forum leaders group to steer
a two-year process to create a 2030 vision. That group would have to have roots into each
region, because the regional strengths of Davos, I think, are the underexploited part
of our Global Redesign Initiative, and we believe that by achieving such a vision, we
could more clearly bring through the need to go beyond what’s happening in each of
the individual global governance silos today.
So the challenge I leave on the table is, you know, we have questions. ‘What’s the
best indicator? Is it stunting or mental development or maternal mortality?’ There are questions
we have to fight through, but the real question is, ‘Will you, after this week, go home
and say, “I want to be part of that”?’ Because I think, if you go back saying, ‘Yes’,
then Davos can make a difference.
In order to make a difference, we need that common vision. If you believe it’s important,
go home and say, ‘I’m going to change it’, but the meaning that we have for our
activity will always be different. I don’t have to agree with Coca-Cola to cooperate
with them. We cooperate, actually, very well. In between – this is my temple, but – we
need more actors. That’s you. They have to have roots. That’s what most UN organisations
only have to an inadequate degree. Communities and new actors, therefore, matter. People
like me in public government, that’s not what matters. And the key threshold beyond
ambition is saying, ‘Yes, I want to do it and I will do it with relevant ways, coherent
ways. I will neither greenwash my actions, nor cheat. And I know I don’t know the answer
today, but by iterative learning, through monitoring and evaluation against these high-level
indicators, we will get better. We will achieve more and we will begin to deliver some of
this in every region of the world.’ Thank you.