Creating a Safe Space for Humanity
The world is undergoing five major transitions and new thinking about the nexus of food, water, and energy is urgently needed.
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Our Objective
The Food Water Energy Consortium harnesses new technologies to design food supply-chain infrastructure capable of delivering a middle class diet on a lower income budget.
Five Global Transitions
Over the past few decades, accelerating transitions, and the complexity created as they interact, has rendered 20th century planning approaches obsolete. FWE estimates that new technologies must reduce the price of healthy food by roughly 75% before reaching the tipping point of affordability for lower income families.
1 migration TRANSITION
Hundreds of millions of the poor and displaced are moving inside and between countries, reshaping the 21st century world. Migration moves millions each year from rural to urban areas seeking a better life. Multiple ongoing conflicts displace millions each year seeking safety. Low income families from all areas are moving by the millions seeking employment and higher incomes. A large percentage of migrants end up in mega-cities with populations over ten million, creating market demand sufficient to support new efficient food supply-chain infrastructure.
2 nutrition transition
Incomes of poor families in mega-cities are increasing too slowly to make a substantial transition to a healthier diet. Even small increases in incomes are spent preferentially on poultry, dairy, fish, fruits and vegetables, rather than on grains, tubers, oils and sugar. The only feasible strategy to a meaningful transition, however, is to reduce the prices of healthier food.
3 climate / water transition
Temperatures are rising, rainfall patterns are becoming more erratic, and water demands are increasing. All of these interacting transitions create new challenges for food price reduction. In addition, poultry, dairy, fish, fruits and vegetables have much more restrictive and complex climatic requirements than grains, tubers, oils and fish which can be efficiently produced in a wide range of conditions.
4 energy TRANSITION
Energy costs are a substantial part of all food prices but are even greater for healthier foods that all require refrigeration. The energy saving transition from costly and limited fossil fuels to renewable and potentially cheaper renewable sources is especially important in reducing healthy food costs.
5 agricultural TRANSITION
Agriculture is transitioning from small scale and subsistence farms to large scale production. This is also true for the later stages in the supply chain. FWE’s strategy to increase the scale of agricultural operations, is to aggregate family-owned small farms into production cooperatives to increase the scale of agricultural operations. Also organizing, processing, transport and consumer cooperatives will assure that cost reductions at each stage are passed on to consumers in lower food prices.
Corridors
Six ocean corridors link megacities. These corridors present unique opportunities for cost reducing technologies along the food supply chain.
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Community of Practice
The FWE was launched in 2012 to create a consortium of like-minded academic and research professionals and subsequently their institutions along with similarly interested and competent private individuals and subsequently their corporations to promote research and implementation of Nexus initiatives. The consortium is envisaged as a “community of practice” which would coordinate and share intellectual resources.
Faculty and private sector mentors are in the FWE community of practice, but graduate student fellows and interns play an equally vital role. FWE Fellows and Interns, along with their local graduate student co-authors, are the principal ones conducting the field R&D in the six corridors mostly during university vacation periods. Fellows then continue maturing their field case study drafts during the school year.
The FWE mission statement, written by the founders, Peter Rogers of Harvard and Samuel R. Daines of the SRD Research Group in 2012, outlines two types of FWE activities:
1. Pilot demonstration activities on the food-water-energy nexus to address the 5 transitions.
(a) Initially, the founding group led by Harvard in collaboration with private partners, Valmont and SRD, initiate case studies that would demonstrate the practical usefulness of considering the Nexus as an integrated whole. These are in the nature of desk studies relying on existing or readily available data. It should be understood that these initial cases are good for organizing research, and useful teaching and training tools, but they do not represent the ultimate goals of the consortium as it develops over time.
(b) Subsequently, we envisage major field scale pilot projects to provide the proof of concept for the approaches outlined in the academic research.
2. Knowledge generation, sharing and dissemination.
(a) Generation of new / breakthrough knowledge and new models.
(b) Aiding FWE leadership capacity development in developing and middle income countries.
(c) Annual conferences of the consortium members, other conferences on specific topics as they arise involving relevant consortium members, and seminars and workshops as the need arises.
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The transitions are happening so fast that the training and mindset of most senior planners and managers have long since been overtaken by these equilibrium shifts; and well-tried solutions to food, water, and energy management of the past are no longer viable.
A Safe Space For Humanity: The Nexus of Food, Water, Energy, and Climate
Peter Rogers and Samuel Daines
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