Former US Secretary of State John Kerry told more than 2700 delegates at Australia’s inaugural Global Table food industry conference on Tuesday: “We can’t just sit on our asses and leave the political process to Neanderthals, who don’t want to believe in the future, simple.”
For Kerry, leadership, effort, frameworks, private sector and capital, innovation, R&D are the keys to solving climate change. In his broad sweeping speech, Kerry made pointed comments about the current political state of the US, climate change, global poverty and hunger and food production and manufacturing.
“In an increasingly turbulent world, it is a time we need to bring nations together, not pull apart.” You have to find ways to work together, to compromise, we are polarised everywhere, he said. The “my way or the highway” mentality is at play, too many systems are rigged, and governments are meant to serve the people.
His frustration with the current US political landscape was palpable. “If you read and study history, you have to understand the virtue that has been brought to the world because of the structure that was built in the aftermath of World War II – the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, the alliances, the international financial structure, the rule of law. Too many people are too casually ready to throw that off, that that has much to do with the chaotic state of affairs we witness today.”
He quoted Winston Churchill, “so far to go, so little time”, in referring to where the world stands today in the issue of climate change.
“No leader, prime minister, president or secretary of state gets this done by themselves. It is done by a process in which people take complex issues and break them down. When it comes to job security, agricultural or marine security, the right thing to do for health, the environment, the fact is that usually it is the smart thing to do for jobs and for growth, they are not separate.
“Anybody who persists in putting forward the notion that you have to make a choice either between jobs and prosperity or protect the environment and deal with the future, that is a lie. That is wrong. “It is absolutely clear in today’s transformative economy around the world that people are making the choice to deal with the Sustainable Development Goals, to move to the future and in the doing so, producing the greatest market the world has ever seen,” Kerry said.
The food sector and climate change
The food sector is one part of the larger climate change problem, he said. One in nine people wake up hungry, nearly half of child deaths worldwide are rooted in under-nutrition. “We’re talking about 8000 children dying every single day because they aren’t getting basic nourishment – which we have and know how to create,” Kerry said.
He cited how one third of food produced is wasted, “and yet people are dying and people are going to bed hungry”.
Population growth is not being addressed adequately. “We have to produce more food in better ways that can adapt to a changing planet. We have to increase food production by fifty per cent between now and 2050 just to keep pace with population growth. But growing more food is only part of the challenge. We have to become better stewards of the land and ways we produce food.”
The Sustainable Development Goals are extraordinary goals. Most of the world has never read it, doesn’t understand what they are – but if you take the seventeen goals and implement it you have a pretty good planet.
Think of the natural resources we could save if we got smart about food harvest, storage and distribution. Think of the natural resources we could save water, land, energy, forests if food production was more efficient and better controlled.
"We have to do a better job at building the infrastructure in getting fresh and healthy food to more people.
"Doing these things is the creation of jobs – we’ve got a whole lot of people running around trying to save the status quo when the status quo is actually feeding a lot of jobs that don’t make sense. Nobody is talking about making people unemployed, we’re talking about transitioning people to better jobs," he said.
Kerry called on everyone to make better choices, acknowledged that he is angry about the current situation because “common sense is being ignored”.
He said we know how to innovate and create. "Someone will come up with hydrogen fuel that is scaleable and safe, someone will develop the battery storage, someone’s going to find a way to do NET, negative emissions technology, where CO2 is sucked out of the atmosphere.
Kerry drew upon Nelson Mandela's quote, "it always seems impossible until it is done".
"We can do it. Let’s get it done."
