Skip to content
Greenknight
  • Home
  • Services
    • Resource efficiency
    • Strategy
    • Stakeholder alignment
    • Materiality & risk
    • Audit and review
    • UN SDGs
    • Engaging people
    • Supply chain
    • Consortium building
    • Conferences and Events
    • Chairing and facilitation
  • About
    • Associate organisations
    • Publications
  • Contacts
  • Blog
  • Testimonials

Net Working

Last month FoodWasteNet (FWN) ran a 2-day conference in Nottingham looking at the valorisation of agricultural field waste. I chaired the first day and presented in the first session of the second day before having to dash down the road to Derby for an event organised by Stringer Together, the anti-slavery collaboration, of which more below. FWN is coming to the end of its 5-year life as a BBSRC-funded Network in Industrial Biology and Biotechnology (NIBB – one of 13) bringing together members from academia, industry, regulators and other groups to find ways use biotechnology to solve problems of waste within the food system, with a range of successor networks recently announced. One of these will be the Biomass Biorefinery Network (BBNet), with Professor Simon McQueen Mason, of the University of York, as the lead academic. Running from 2019 to 2024, BBNet incorporates elements of 3 of the Phase 1 NIBBs including FWN, and I’ll be involved on the Management Committee.

In this conference we departed a little from the usual technical format and featured speakers who brought a number of different perspectives. These included an economist, one of the IFSTAL team who discussed their approach to systems thinking and a long-time researcher who gave insights into the somewhat bumpy history of the topic in the UK. On day 2 we had Dan Crossley from the Food Ethics Council who gave a very thought-provoking talk on the ethical considerations of choices made during the research into and exploitation of waste streams. A central thrust of Dan’s talk was the need to consider any alternative uses to which such material could be put, which was a nice link back to the systems thinking espoused by IFSTAL. My contribution was to discuss some of the drivers for commercial organisations to engage, or not, with new technologies which sat alongside Dan’s contribution as framing for how new projects could fit most effectively into the overall agri-food system.
The Stronger Together conference looked back at the first 5 years of the organisation and forwards to the challenges of the future. Modern slavery remains a significant problem worldwide but, by its very nature, is challenging to get to grips with. Estimates for cases in the UK run from the official figure of around 13,000, which is bad enough in itself, up to an aggregate of as high as 500,000 based on the experience of the country’s police forces. Estimates for the number globally are around 40 million. Of course, not all of these cases are equal in the impact they have on victims, but that is hardly a consolation. The event was very interactive and included a question on the challenges to tackling modern slavery, with 3 groups’ responses shown below. Lack of resource was a common theme, which of course could be said for any number of other ESG issues.
The word slavery has connotations with imagery from the 18th and 19th centuries, and often appears in inverted commas in media reporting, which is not helpful to having it taken as seriously as is needed to tackle the issue. Maybe terms such as forced labour and trafficking should be more of the norm as they feel to have more contemporary resonance. Stronger Together was borne out of a recognition that organisations need to form partnerships up and down the supply chain and offers a range of excellent resources to help businesses address the challenges of modern slavery, including compliance with the UK’s Modern Slavery Act. With equivalent legislation recently arriving on the statute books in Australia, the global response may finally be catching up with the global challenge.

It may not seem that there is an obvious line to draw between food waste and modern slavery, but both are features of the global agri-food system. As I type this, the impact on movement of labour of the UK’s departure from the EU, now perhaps uncertain in itself, is far from clear. The government’s official advisory body on immigration, Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), has launched a consultation on occupations for which employers are struggling to recruit. In previous years the shortage occupation list has focused only on high skill roles, but MAC are now looking to receive information on skill shortages at nearly every skill level, in light of the uncertainty over what the post-Brexit immigration system will look like. This consultation presents the opportunity for labour providers, growers, food & drink manufacturers and logistics companies to demonstrate to government the skills shortages faced across a wide spectrum of roles. Farmers, growers and manufacturers are already experiencing difficulties in recruiting and there has been much talk of crops ‘rotting in the fields’. Leaving aside the hyperbole, if access to the right people is legitimised, some of the drivers for forced labour can be avoided.

Moral Maize?
PRIME factors

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Ethical Corp newsfeed

  • Society Watch: Drive to make ecocide an international crime gains momentum

    Ecocide is an emotive word. First used to describe the human and environmental devastation caused by the use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, it became the subject of regular discussions at the United Nations throughout the 1970s. In 1998, the destruction of the environment was proposed as an international crime against peace, but ultimately wasn’t adopted as part of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Rome Statute, which includes genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.Image: Channels: Climate and EnergyNatural CapitalTags: Stop ecocide internationalInternational Criminal CourtRome statuteEU Environmental Crime Directive

GreenBiz newsfeed

  • Building the Circular Buildings Revolution
    on April 20, 2023 at 7:15 am

    Join GreenBiz for our conversation covering the approaches building product manufacturers are using to make products more circular and keep materials in play after their first use. The idea of buildings as material banks is not new, but deserves examination as it hasn’t taken hold at the scale we would expect.

Theme by Colorlib Powered by WordPress
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT