Feike Sijbesma

Thank you, Peter, for your warm-up, but that's not true, because Peter unites all of us in his story about collaboration. Thank you all for being here. Thank you, John, for organizing it. I very much appreciate this, and we discussed these topics when I was chairman of the chemical part in Davos of the World Economic Forum, preaching to the converted. That is my biggest risk I have here, because you come here because you believe in this topic. I would like to take you a little bit deeper in this topic.

I don't know who a few are from business. If you are from business, oh gosh, you will regret that. So now we saw all your hands. And I have a question to you later on, and not only for the people from business but especially for them: are you happy? Totally not understood by me.

Let me take you only a few minutes, and Peter did it already. You heard the news this morning, I assume, although you were here, about three thousand people being killed. You followed it this morning on the internet? Anybody followed it? Huh? I cannot hear you, but one followed it, the rest not. Three thousand mothers lost their children. It was three thousand fathers and mothers who saw their own children, who they put on planet Earth, dying in their own arms. Nobody assaulting the internet, nobody saw it. It was not in the news. It happened again this afternoon, and it happens again this evening. And Peter was talking about that every six seconds.

And we talk about people die in traffic accidents and other things, and we make a big in the news. In 3000 in the morning or whatever, yeah, we know what's happening. Every time I think about that, every time I talk about it, I don't understand that this just happens out of shortness of food, shortness of micronutritions, and then we get over it and back to normal. It's happening all the time.

One billion people every day not knowing whether they will survive the next week. Almost one billion people. Another one billion people being short of micronutritions. More than three million people die every year because of malnutrition, being stunted. 165 million children who are stunted for the rest of their life. You know about Ricardo and Manuel? We discussed about that together with David Nambarro, who's not here last year. Both are 12 years old. One is 90 centimeters high, the other is one meter 20. Manuel, 90 centimeters, is stunted for the rest of his life. How many micronutritions we will give, how many good food we will give, whatever we will do with Manuel, Manuel will never ever have the life of Ricardo. Our food composition isn't right. A large part of world's population doesn't get access to the right food, doesn't get access to the micronutritions they need.

Whilst another 500 million to a billion people suffer from another problem, more in the richest countries of the world, even in the richest country of the world, in the United States, more than 50 million people do not have the money to buy the right food, or sometimes the right food is not provided at all. It started with the great invention: corn fructose syrup. What a great invention. You know what it does? It's not only sweet, it provides texture as well, and it is cheap. Sweet taste, texture, and cheap. What an ingredient for the food industry. I mean, it provides the basis of all you need: some taste, some texture, and it is cheap. Let's put it in almost all foods you can imagine. And that's what happened. That's really what happened. And therefore a lot of people became addicted to sugar, I'm addicted to carbohydrates, and are suffering from it. Our food composition isn't right. A large part also in the western world doesn't get the access to the right nutritious food and shows therefore all kinds of deficiencies.

Those deficiencies are causing diseases. You know what the pharma industry nowadays is doing? 50 percent of all drugs we take are food and lifestyle related. When I started my career, I worked for a short time in the former part of our company, and I as a young assistant were doing all the calculations. Five of the top 10 pharma products were antibiotics. In the top 20, there are no antibiotics anymore. And we saw your statistics, maybe we will never get those antibiotics there anymore because we ran into problems now. The top 25 pharmaceuticals consist of products treating hypertension, cholesterol, diabetes, and all that stuff that is in the top 20. That is interesting statistics. So we live around here in the world for almost hundred thousand years, and in 30 years we made ourselves that ill that we find half of the global pharmaceutical market now. That is really an accomplishment which we did. And by the way, they treat us pretty well because in the meantime life expectancy went up. But is this the solution? To find the solution end of pipe instead of beginning of pipe and looking into our way we have composed our food.

You answered, I think you were happy. Let's make it worse, much more worse even. I don't know what your income is, but we can do a poll, but I don't know. But there is a high likelihood that you belong to the billion richest people in the world. Do you realize? The billion richest people of the world consume 40 to 45 percent of all resources, agricultural, non-agricultural, etc., and think they have to write because that's what they also do to produce roughly 40 to 45 percent of all waste in the world. If we would be with 2 billion people, that's an equal distribution. If you have 7 billion as we are today, or growing to 9, this is not only unfair, this is not only unequal, this is also unsustainable. It will not continue that the small part takes it all, which the upcoming middle class in India and China who want their part of the pie, and rightly so. So we need to adjust.

I can say, could say a more provocative in order to get the statistics in our mind. The 63 richest people in the world, most likely everyone not in this room. Is there anybody of that group in this room? They own as much as the three and a half billion poorest people in the world. Oops. We have an issue we need to address.

And then of course climate change. I mean, I was astonished by the way we dealt with the recent report of the International Panel for Climate Change. In the beginning of the report they say: 'Do not misuse and do not misinterpret our statistics, because the straight line up of temperature and climate change is not a straight line up, it goes like this, and we show you all the data and the figures so you can misinterpret certain parts of history.' That was a great invitation for some cynical people who started to misinterpret their report. But I think it's clear that 0.6 degrees increase of temperature is already in the pocket, called cynical. We are running into two degrees, and after that most scientists say if we really get it over two degrees, we don't know it also anymore, because then there is a high chance of the permafrost etc. and running to six degrees, which infectious diseases, you know all that story.

And recently was with a group of people running pension funds, and they said: 'What we do? We have anything to do with that?' I said: 'Well, you have a lot of money, you determine where we invest in, you determine whether you believe in the carbon bubble, whether we should burn all the fossil resources we have in the world or not.' One guy stood up and said: 'I'm not so sure about all those data about climate change etc. Are you 100% sure?' 1200 percent. Even if you, I said to him, are not 100% sure, are you 100% sure that this is not happening? He said no, no, no. I said okay, do you dare to play roulette with the future of your children and their children? That's a risky game. We should get you off the table immediately. So, I don't know why you were happy in the beginning, most likely because Johan over-orchestrated and organized such a great conference. But there's a lot of reason not to be happy.

Johan put all the guilty people on the stage who caused all this. It's an irrelevant question. I don't mind who caused it, who can solve it. Let's put the people on stage who can solve it. It's irrelevant who caused it and who can solve it. I know more than half of the room said you were from business. Has to play an important role here as well. Business has the innovative power, business has the strengths to solve and to address a lot of those things. Oh, it's business now guilty? No, business is not guilty. Sometimes maybe the business is very much responsible to solve it. This has changed its mandate automatically without realizing over the last 50 to 100 years. Business has much more impact in the world than it had 50, 100 years ago when companies were small, not the global impact etc. Today with big multinational companies having so much impact, so much power positive and negative on the world, they have automatically increased their responsibility as well. Because one is a dangerous combination: high impact, high risk, high impact, high power and a low feeling of responsibility. There are terrible accidents in the world happened with that combination. So if this has more power, if business has more impact, it should show it's also more its responsibility.

So basis is not only a private enterprise anymore. Business gets public responsibilities. Oh, Feike, what are you doing now? Now you're totally complicating the model we always had. We had the private sector, the public sector, and we had supranational organizations like the UN. That was the world easy. Yeah, welcome in the new world. Not that easy anymore. Private companies have public responsibilities. Oh, you start to play for government now? No, I don't start to play for government now. I start to fulfill, I start to answer my own applications. If you have a lot of power and a lot of impact in the world, you should show your responsibility. And that means by definition the business can only be oriented on its stakeholders, not only on the shareholders. The business should serve more goals. And of course its customers, its own employees, but also society at large. And as we call it in our company, we have a triple bottom line: people, planet, profit. Everything is based on that. Our integrated reporting, our remuneration system, everything is based that we have three bottom lines. Yeah, but one bottom line, the profit is the most important, and the other two you should do responsible. No, no, no, we have three bottom lines equally important. No, no, that cannot be because you are owned by shareholders. Well, yeah, they put our money in your company. Oh, I know a lot of people who put a life in our company, our employees who are totally dependent of the company, society. So three bottom lines equally responsible. Oh, that's a way different way of looking into capitalism, a different way to look to business. That maybe you learn at the MBAs or all the schools. True. But if you have so much power and so much impact as business, this follows automatically out of that. And that means if you listen to that, then you should change the way you run your company. Focus on those shareholders, not only focusing on your stakeholders, and contributing to the issues society is dealing with. Is that possible? Of course that's possible.

Take only our company. I mean, we're a big company, small company, I don't know. 13 billion dollar sales is a big small. There's much bigger companies. Our collaboration in the last seven, eight years was to go through program with the UN now takes care that we are helping with enriching their food of the poorest people in the world, 15 to 20 million people a year. They're still astonished about how successful that collaboration was. Let's see Martin Bloom sitting here afterward. Proof full program in the room. If a tiny little company as our company can have such a huge impact, then you better use that impact also. Missed it? Of DSM to do that, and we did so. And the same count of other companies. But we recently lived and I see somewhere in the audience Mike Phenomen of Gain and the World Food Program. Which Gain in the World Food Program? We enlarged the Sun Move and Scaling of Nutrition. We used to send business network. What are we doing? We are collecting 99 companies or more, and we are not yet there. We're halfway, so there is still room. Please hurry up, it's filling up fast. 99 companies, and what we want to do is collect all your competencies of that 99 companies, united, and use that for scaling up, speeding up, make doing it faster on addressing all the issues around hunger. Scaling up nutrition by using all the competencies of the private sector. 99 companies which we need. We are halfway. I expect Martin that after this session and Mark, you got a lot of people running to you: 'I need to be a member as well.' And true, true.

If you look through the issues in the world we have, in China the urbanization is going so fast, India same. Every day a farmer moves to the city. We lose a food producer, and we gain a food consumer. And we move further into industrializing our food production, and we need to take care that those people can get access to the right food. We need to take care that their food is healthy. And that means also that in agriculture we should not only look to yields and output, but also to the composition of food. Because as I said in the beginning, both in the developed world and in the Western world, composition of food is not the way we want to have it. We need to take out more fat, we need to take out more salt, we need to take out more corn fructose syrup, because of his unhealthy food. We cannot continue, and the cost of health care will only increase. We need to enrich food, fortification, other programs in developed world. We need not only to provide carbohydrates or calories, we need to take care that people also develop those have access to the right composition of food. Especially because the first thousand days of every child is critical, like I showed you with Manuel and Ricardo for the rest of his life.

Are we moving in the right direction? Yes and no. Of course we have conferences like that and we do things. But let's look deeper to agriculture, not only to the output and to the yields, I said, we'll also doing the composition. But we start after summer with a new project in the United States on biofuels. Oh, biofuels? Are you involved in that one also? Oh, that changes my view on your company. No, no, no, relax, relax. Second generation biofuels. What do we do? We take the waste of crops which is not being used. No, even stronger, which is being piled up till the pile is too big and then we put it into fire, it creates CO2. Because the farmer can use only one quarter of its waste. It remains on the land as fertilizer, and three quarters need to take off the land because otherwise the land dies. And that is being piled up. We worked on the last six years of that waste stream, and we thought: can we not upgrade that waste stream? Very complicated technologically, but we can upgrade that into valuable materials and fuels etc. Whilst doing so, we were looking to that waste stream, and we saw there's lignin in there, there are proteins in there, there's all kinds of components in there which we throw away. In agriculture, the carbohydrate content is by far the most important thing which we take. The proteins we have learned to provide you with proteins by giving all that stuff to animals and then let the animals make the proteins and then eat the animals. But a lot of agricultural proteins are being thrown away. It's a waste. And now we see that we can upgrade also other fractions out of that and provide a different food industry. And I found it astonishing and ashamed of us that after ten thousand years of agriculture industry, not only at the end of pipe at your home where you throw away stuff, but in the whole chain starting even at the beginning, we throw away a tremendous amount.

Well, the oil and gas industry in 150 years have optimized every tiny little fraction of their operations. And we in the agriculture industry have let that happen over ten thousand years. The good news is there's a tremendous potential, a tremendous potential to improve our food in the Western world, in the developed countries, a tremendous potential in agriculture, a tremendous potential in changing the composition of food, a tremendous potential in getting all those companies on board of using your competences. If you change your mindset as pieces: why are you here on the earth for? The economy never started with making money. Instead of business guy who's saying that, yeah, we started with barter trade. You were put in this and he was good in this, let's exchange it etc. And later on the exchange became more complicated, we invented money etc. Especially in last 30 years, in my opinion, we derailed and we made making profit and all the actions of the financial world. The financial world by the way is now bigger than the underlying real economy. I mean, that's not possible, because we have no assets outside planet Earth. So how can the financial world be bigger? Next to that thing or Mars we have, but for the rest there are no assets outside this planet. So we have derailed a little bit, and we need to get back to the basics of economics. Making profit is a means. Making profit was not the goal. The goal was to live well here with seven, they draw nine billion people. If we as business are not going to contribute to that, we're on the wrong track. Last sentence: you cannot be successful, nor even call yourself successful, in a world that fails. So therefore, ladies and gentlemen, we have to change our mindset. And I'm totally with the previous speaker here, who's trying also to collect all those companies. Peter Bakker, my good friend, working for the same course and I do hope together with Peter that a lot of you join us in that journey and make this world a better place. Thank you.