How to Develop Responsibility

From the preamble of the Milan Charter

“Only our collective action as citizens, together with civil society, businesses and local, national and international institutions, will make it possible to overcome the major challenges related to food: combating undernutrition, malnutrition and waste, promoting equitable access to natural resources and ensuring sustainable management of production processes.”

Is it possible to bring marketing, technology and innovation together to face challenges to sustainability? What does this mean for the feed&food world? What is feed&food? What are the biggest challenges facing this sector made up of markets, but more importantly, missions, value-oriented enterprises, and individual and organizational solidarity?
Feeding the planet is no simple task. It is a truly ambitious mission without clear paths or simple solutions. While coexistence between the opulence of some and the happy survival of all is possible, it requires several parallel and occasional convergent plans of action. These plans must quickly diffuse and increase efficiency (in supply chain waste reduction, for example) and investments to generate exponential technological innovation, the only innovation capable of responding to the caloric needs of the men and women that that populate the planet.

It is thus necessary to create an articulated plan to create a more equal food chain within opulent markets and to create new feeding technologies within the world’s poorest markets. We must all prepare ourselves to becoming fully responsible for innovation, for food and feed, as both individual citizens and large global nterprises.
The goal of the event/debate, taking place during the final month of EXPO, is to therefore contribute to the debates launched by EXPO with an articulate proposal that involves all important actors within the feed&food innovation ecosystem. It is an ambitious debate that aims to expand the concept of responsibility and the ways in which it is developed, with hopes of developing a European innovation path that guides us from Expo 2015 to the future.

Such a vision will inevitably inspire questions which we hope the event will be able to respond to in a concrete way on a variety of levels: institutional, political, governmental, corporate, social, civil and individual. What propulsion can Expo 2015 give to feed&food innovation? What are viable options to increase supply chain efficiency in the near future, starting with incremental innovation in production, distribution and consumption?
Further down the road, but not less urgent: what strategies can be employed to launch radical innovation capable of keeping up with the exponential growth of the planet’s caloric needs? Above all, what organizations can be created to launch an innovative, large-scale and self-sufficient feed&food process?

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