The Game: Tackling Future Food Challenges

Last week, as I was on the 13:02 train from Marylebone, I saw field after sodden field, many still submerged from recent flooding. Add in the scorching summer heat across much of continental Europe. Many yields will be low. Again. Earlier in the day, I’d been the last speaker on the 10-strong panel at the Lord Mayor's World Food Day Colloquy⁽¹⁾. Sitting opposite me was a young hospital medic—bright, articulate, and highly educated. Yet he hadn’t considered the impact of constant rain on crops, nor the effects of the heat-wave across Europe on our food supplies. He was also unaware of the vast quantities of food needed to sustain a population. Not untypical, I guess. Remarkably, even some of the Players of The Game are surprised by the quantities of food a population needs. Yet it's easy to compute, back-of-the-envelope stuff⁽²⁾.

I’ve yet to meet a food sector professional, though, who doesn’t grasp the scale or complexity of the organisational operations involved. They’re all concerned about sourcing and walk the talk about ‘sustainable supply chains’. In truth, though, such a thing doesn’t exist for long. It's a constantly shifting landscape when it comes to securing produce.

Are we too late for the party, as baldly stated by a logistics manager who recently played The Game? Maybe.

To up our chances, as I repeatedly said in my Mansion House talk, we can choose to be prepared for the exigencies ahead. This is the reason behind the creation of The Game in the first place. Our 2017-18 horizon scanning project highlighted that the already intense global competition for food could only increase^{(3, 4)}. Project contributors, though only in private discussions, suggested that in the best-case scenario, millions would die; at worst, humanity could face an existential crisis. Possibly soon. Their consensus, like that of many others at the time, was we mustn’t talk openly about such scenarios because, they argued, if people knew what was coming, they would be paralysed, unable to act. The Game is predicated on a radically opposite stance. Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst case scenarios is naive risk management at best, and fatally foolish at worst⁽⁵⁾. This is serious, heavy stuff. As Players quickly learn, we do serious. But not solemn! The Game is huge fun to play. Players are responsible for maximising the chances of ‘their’ population to have access to sufficient supplies of safe, nutritious food in the face of ‘events’ we deal to each team. Here they are story-makers, emotionally immersed and engaged in fictional decision-making. This allows freedom to discuss what to do, and eagerness to learn from other perspectives around the table; so much diversity, so much in common as a recent Player wrote on his review sheet.

We felt a deep-rooted responsibility when preparing to run The Game at the Warwick Crop Centre. Most would be young researchers. We asked ourselves how we would manage them, given the stark plausibility of the ‘events.’ Theirs may be the generation brutally forced to learn what a new carrying capacity for humanity on Earth is. Our concerns were misplaced. This generation of agri-food researchers are fully cognisant of the dangers ahead. They do feel their lives might well be curtailed, but not inevitably so. Thus, they walked into the room with their spirits high, delighted, thrilled to be where their expertise, and ideas for radical change, would be heard.

Last week, I began my Mansion House talk with these three statements⁽⁶⁾:

Most people just don’t get climate breakdown. Our leaders don’t understand how bad it's going to be … it's going to reach into our economy and society and tear its heart out.

With population growth, by 2050, we need to produce 70% more food on 30% less land with yields being 30% lower.

Yet already 1.8bn people are living with absolute water scarcity, another four billion in highly water-stressed regions. Many already on the move, as you would be.

The collective intelligence of the Players of The Game has taught us that we can choose for human civilisations to have a future.

I continued:

We can choose within this decade to invest in technologies from agri-tech precision to farm-free produce, from micro-climates to novel packaging materials, from crop pathogen surveillance to a gamut of distributed, efficient, fossil-free energy sources.

We can choose within this decade for the state to scaffold collective resilience through investment in maintaining and enhancing natural, physical, human and social capital — so enable self-organisation in and across communities to act for their own food security — which must include distributed systems of rotating buffer contingency stocks.

We can choose within this decade to curb corporate power, to choose which companies, as we do with tobacco corporates, to prohibit from advertising their wares and from having business deals or partnerships with universities, government, schools, the NHS. We can choose to put controls on their branding and packaging, and make them subject to a specific fiscal regime⁽⁷⁾.

Professor Ken Sloan has described our team as thought leaders in the field, with a passion for progress that is truly infectious. How and why? It's because of the diversity of the Players, including the likes of the IFST Board member Tom Hollands, who sees The Game as superb education tool for leaders, Jon Miller, Sales Director at Partners& Insurance for whom it was a really valuable exercise for assessing risks and potential solutions in our food system and what they mean for the wider society. Sophie Hosking, a strategist with Cornwall County Council, who wrote as soon as I heard about The Game, I knew I had to be there — and it didn’t disappoint or Sam Baillie, PhD agri-food researcher who’d not only recommend it to my peers, but everyone involved in the food system. Brilliant!

We will keep delivering The Game, updating it each time due to the accelerating frequency and severity of emerging threats to our food supplies. Either bespoke for a particular client or, as we did for the first time this month, as an open event, the next one perhaps in the spring.

We’d run The Game three times when, in March 2020, half of the UK's food supplies were literally locked up overnight for months on end. A few Players called me up, grateful they’d had foretaste of what could happen.

I thought back then The Game was a dead duck. We were in it!

I signed up for on-line workshops, we interviewed several Players, and several times, too. They welcomed recording events of those fraught early weeks, often forgetting what they’d experienced days earlier. Talking to us helped them clarify what had happened, what to do next⁽⁸⁾.

It was a farmer who also happened to be an academic supply chain expert who mentioned, almost in passing, that the UK ‘of course’ didn’t have any buffer contingency stocks. That off-the-cuff remark stimulated us to create a new design of The Game. I think of it as a reverse-ferret scenarios exercise. It comprised three small-scale virtual workshops with three ‘teams’ of Players. Each team was put into this scenario: It is the late 2020s and in response to the new Government's preparedness planning, you were tasked to set up a buffer contingency stock system. It has proved robust during this second pandemic. This meeting is to review the system you built, what worked well, what didn’t.

Remarkably, this process generated (what would appear to be) a feasible model. This tells us there must be many possible models for contingency stocks in the real world. And the Birmingham Food Council now has a prototype process for The Game II.

I conclude this article with a story from the mid-1970s. Back then, I was a young teacher, inevitably given a Friday afternoon graveyard slot. Citizenship with Year 9. We took a newspaper story, this week about the ravaging hunger in Maharashtra. Drought. Again. Pics of pot-bellied infants with flies crawling around encrusted eyes staring dully, unblinking at the camera. As the usual rather desultory chat began, I noticed one of the teenagers was suddenly distraught helplessly trying to cover up here emotionally charged state.

I quickly got her out of the classroom and sent in a colleague to oversee the other kids. Gently asking her what the matter was, her eyes stared, unseeing into mine. At first slowly, the tears flowed again. I was one of them, miss. I still can’t imagine her infant desperation, her abject misery.

No-one knows how many died in the 1966-67 Bihar famine. Millions for sure. Drought. Again. This child, twisting the hankie I’d given her, now living in a draughty Victorian back-to-back with an outside loo, was one of the survivors.

I can’t remember why I recently told this almost-forgotten story to the Chair of the Birmingham Food Council. Her response surprised me: Oh, so that's why you do what you do.