Overview OVERVIEW The Challenge Today It is a massive challenge to satisfy a growing population’s demand for goods, services, energy and food. To fulfil these demands, while preserving the environment and protecting individual well-being, requires committed and sustainable use of resources, talent and collaboration among all stakeholders. Subsequently, to meet this challenge, all stakeholders must be incentivized to communicate knowledge and shared access to better supplies, services and an inclusive network, which allows all partners to be justly engaged and compensated. To make this possible, it is crucial that the entire community, whether they be an individual, start-up, small or medium size enterprise (SME), large multinational, non-governmental organization (NGO), university, or government, take a fresh look at questions around our values, how to organize all stakeholders in an interconnected and diverse world, share cleaner data, and incentivize partners to further build ecosystem relationships that achieve doubleand triple-bottom-line returns (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015)
In the history of domesticated agriculture, have we ever had so many resources, data and new contributors in pursuant to the goals to feed the entire world a healthy and sustainable diet? It is clear that to feed a global population of eight billion people in 2020 a healthy and sustainable diet, and one billion more people expected by 2030, the Agri-Food industry needs to reconsider the many keys parts of the food system, but certainly, people and transparency should be the focus (United Nations, 2015).
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