| INTERNATIONAL FOOD AND AGRIBUSINESS MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION |
CONFERENCE DAY 2 | TUESDAY, 22 JUNE |
TIMES | CONTENT | SPEAKERS |
Tuesday, 22 June |
| 2021 STUDENT CASE COMPETITION CO-CHAIRS:
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Tuesday, 22 June | Welcome to Forum Program Day 2 — Oceania / Asia Region Conference Keynote: Reimagining the Global and Agriculture Food System Through Innovation In 30 years, Sunny Verghese grew Olam International from a small team buying cashews in Nigeria into one of the world's leading food and agribusiness companies with 75 processing and manufacturing facilities, 14 innovation centers, and more than 81,000 team members across 70 countries. Olam sources from 5 million farmers, the majority of which are smallholders in Africa and Asia. Globally recognized as a leader in corporate responsibility and sustainability, in 2018 Verghese re-centered Olam around a new purpose of reimagining the global agriculture and food system to achieve three outcomes: prosperous farmers and foods systems; thriving communities, and re-generation of the living world. Sunny is a vocal champion for building a better sustainable future together, challenging business leaders in all sectors to work together to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. He chairs the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), is Chairman of the Board of the Human Capital Leadership Institute (HCLI), Singapore, and also serves on the Board of Trustees of Singapore Management University. In the opening session of IFAMA's 2021 Global Forum, Sunny will share his vision of a thriving and sustainable global food system, the actions it will take to achieve this, and the role IFAMA and its members can play. | REGIONAL EMCEE:
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Tuesday, 22 June 13:00-14:15 AEST (Sydney) | Session 1: I'll Leave that to My Accountant—Improving the Performance of Natural Capital in Farming The food systems of the world impact on society and on the environment in many ways, both beneficial and harmful. While accounting for finance is a well understood process accounting for natural capital and social and environmental impacts is more variable. Measuring and monitoring performance, and particularly identifying the impacts that agriculture has on natural capital, has become its own industry; how can food and agribusiness firms make best use of this to tell their story?
This session will explore how both large and small ag sector stakeholders can benefit from using information to measure social and environmental variables and how information-fueled management processes connect flows of capital with improved environmental management. Several leading food and agribusiness firms develop strategy that clearly connects to the FAO Sustainable Development Goals, some also highlighting more specific local challenges. Panelists will provide examples of how they have positioned their businesses to capture the benefits of such corporate responsibility, both for themselves and for the globe at large. | SPEAKERS:
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Tuesday, 22 June 14:45-16:00 AEST (Sydney) | Session 2: It's in the Genes: Breeding Plants and Animals to Build a More Resilient Food System New breeds and seeds are driving productivity in our increasingly controlled production systems and supply chains. They are also displacing traditional genetics causing entire breeds and varieties to disappear—many of which had been specially adapted to specific environments and social functions. As we increasingly target resilient food systems, and robust social and business models to support the agribusiness if the future, where does genetics fit? Developments in some sectors see an increasingly concentrated genetics industry providing narrow ranges of genetics for agricultural species. The emergence of diverse approaches to resilience in food systems requires that new cultivar and breed traits be provided, and more information about performance be made available, to an ever-expanding set of stakeholders from resource managers all the way along the supply chain to consumers. The business of breeding will need to adapt, and communicate in new ways with agribusiness, researchers, society and markets. | PANELISTS:
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Tuesday, 22 June 16:30-17:45 AEST (Sydney) | Session 3: Feeding the World 2050: Contributions of Large and Smallholder Farmers The largest proportion of the world’s food is produced by smallholder farmers. Globally, smallholders participate in globalized product and input markets quite differently than large farms. New business models are helping them bypass intermediaries, and technological change is helping them overcome some of the problems of scale and to accommodate social change such as off-farm employment and labor shortages. Large farms, and agglomerations of large farms into super-farms, are also adapting to new circumstances, such as the need to source capital on national and international markets and embrace CSR and other supply chain compliance. Farmers, large and small, are the custodians of the natural and social environment in rural areas and are facing new opportunities and constraints in serving an increasingly urban consumer base. Lack of internet access, vulnerability to natural disasters and a host of other challenges are tackled quite differently by these two cohorts. This session looks are what is being achieved and we ask: What can agribusiness do? | PANELISTS:
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