Follow the Money: Investor power and the Future of Food

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dan Saladino finds out how groups of influential investors are using the trillions of dollars they control to shape the future of food. It's argued that it is their decisions, not those of governments which will determine if we can solve the biggest challenges we're facing, from climate change to obesity.

These funds, including our savings and pensions, are invested in the global food system. This money makes it possible for fast-food chains to expand, for supermarkets to grow and farming businesses to survive. How that money is allocated, and which food businesses are now seen as carrying too much risk, is an increasingly important factor in deciding how we will farm and eat in the future.

Dan Saladino meets Jeremy Coller, a Chief Investment Officer who controls billions of dollars of assets about the power of investors. In 2016, Coller has set up the FAIRR Initiative (Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return), a source of data and analysis of business performance in the meat industry. Coller, a vegetarian, argues that future global risks such as pandemics and climate change are being increased by factory farming.

Instead of waiting for governments to act, he believes networks of investors, and their decisions on meat based businesses (from processors to burger chains), entirely based on risk, will transform the food system.

Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.3	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:19.8	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.4	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.7	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:44.5	Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio Falls, the food program.
0:49.2	I'm Dan Saladino.
0:50.6	Welcome to our world.
0:52.4	From cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy
0:57.0	this edition.
0:58.0	This is a programme about Lute, Wonger, Dosh, Go, Lolly, Money, and a question, whatever are individual
1:10.3	values and choices and beyond the actions and policies of governments,
1:15.0	are the world's biggest food problems going to be solved by money.
1:19.0	And as we're all increasingly aware, the list of problems is growing.
1:24.6	New research reveals the extent to which we may be contributing to this destruction in the Amazon
1:31.3	through the money in our bank accounts and the food on our plates.
1:35.0	Our current approach will lead to a dead end.
	...

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