We’re losing 30 soccer fields of fertile land every minute

“The free market economy can hardly be considered free as long as you’re passing on climate costs to future generations, Engelsman - who was voted the Netherlands’ most influential sustainable thinker in 2017 - begins. “The anonymity of products is a problem: commodification is a dangerous development. We should be fully aware of what we are putting other people through, or the planet for that matter. With awareness comes the power to decide to make a change. Averting your eyes is a choice. You could say: profit can only be profit if it doesn’t jeopardize people and planet. That’s the philosophy we’re trying to put into practice.” Frans van Helden cannot help but agree: "It's a matter of common sense. But are data nothing more than a complicated distraction, or are they a useful tool?” Undoubtedly the latter, Engelsman agrees: "With thousands of products and thousands of growers on six continents, data management is inescapable. Big data, remote sensing, online grower and chain assessments: the more data are made available, the more input you have for robust decision-making. However, your first point still holds true: anyone with half a brain can see that our current approach to business is unsustainable, it’s tantamount to digging our own grave."

"Eosta practices true cost accounting*," Van Helden summarizes, "but if Eosta is the only one doing it, aren’t you cutting your own throat? Are you advocates of making it a mandatory feature of auditor’s reports?” Engelsman’s response is firm: “We’re not advocating anything. The argument that we shouldn’t be doing what we are because the rest isn’t following suit doesn’t fly for us. We are frontrunners, which makes us the prototypers of the new normal. We answer to no one apart from our own conscience. That said, we’re operating in a market with an uneven playing field, in which polluters have a competitive advantage. The private sector should never wait around: where there is a will, there’s a long way round. You have to develop a USP that puts you in the vanguard. Rather than competing to sell mangoes at the best possible price, you should compete in thought leadership.” The public sector, by the way, has been asked to contribute to a more level playing field, Engelsman explains, through taxonomy and tax incentives. As of 1 January 2023, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive will enter into force for all large companies in the EU. In the financial sector, balance sheets and P&L statements are now subjected to climate stress tests. "In financial management, accountants monitor the lower limit of transparency," Van Helden adds. "That limit shifts with initiatives like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is good news in general and for you, specifically.” Engelsman explains that accountants are joining forces in the World Business Counsel for Sustainable Development, chaired by Paul Polman, to create new protocols for natural and social capital. In the background, the OECD is building the "Better Life Index" examining macro indicators such as Gross National Product, as well as Gross National Prosperity, Ecology and Culture, and more. “You need a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating a multitude of indicators, regardless of whether you’re a bank with a risk profile or like us, at Nature & More. It’s all about developing models with a symphony of frontrunners that need to be prototyped before they can be let loose.”

*True Cost Accounting (TCA): a new type of bookkeeping that does not just look at the usual financial values within a company, but also calculates the impacts on natural and social capital; or said differently, it calculates the impacts on the natural and social environment in which the company operates.

According to Engelsman, it all comes down to doing what you can and doing what makes you tick within your own sphere of influence. In other words: "Dream, dance, deliver. Anyone with a vision, or dream, will have to co-create. Prototype the new normal ("dance") in a coalition of the willing, because you’ll never make it on your own. And before you know it, plenty of celebrities and influencers will join you on the dance floor. It’s not because our mangos are that much more delicious than others, but because they’ve realized things can’t go on this way. And that’s where the ‘delivery’ of change comes in. And although our team deserves credit, so do the company’s stakeholders. 33.3% of leadership is vision, 33.3% is people and 33.3% is momentum. The momentum is now in the financial sector, in the EU Green Deal, and in frontrunners who are willing to take the leap.” Van Helden: “ORTEC employs lots of math and physics graduates and we often find ourselves talking about numbers. And still, we’re also out there dancing on our own. We’re doing great things, such as with the recently founded ‘Analytics for a Better World’. How do you think mathematicians can best do their part?" "Reductionism in agriculture and food undoubtedly makes things easier for mathematicians," Engelsman responds, in that it essentially dissects complicated phenomena and reduces them to their simple constituents, but the boundaries of the reductionist paradigm are fuzzier than we thought. Since we can't solve problems with the kind of thinking that produced them, we'll have to accept that there are a lot of factors we don't yet understand. Data experts and mathematicians are more than welcome to join in and share their input."

“DREAM, DANCE, DELIVER”

Dialogue is the best starting point, Van Helden believes. “We use data to provide insight. In mathematics, we have this concept called a ‘goal function’, the sum of everything you consider important and that you’re looking to maximize. In the 1990s, the goal function could simply be summarized as shareholder value. Nowadays, there’s a multitude of parameters in the goal function that should all be kept within a certain bandwidth. As early as the 1980s, we had a method to quantify this issue, called multi-objective optimization. Perhaps mathematicians can show that it doesn’t have to be all that complicated: all you have to do is change your goal function.” Engelsman pumps the brakes: “You might have the same goal function, but the path you take is crucial. The idea that vertical farming could solve world hunger because only 3% of sunlight, 3% of the microbiology in the soil and 3% of DNA in nature is relevant, while the rest is mere junk, may sound logical, but do assertions like these reflect reality or the mindset and limited grasp of reality of the person making them? How can you argue that the planet is too small to feed humanity? Sure, it might be if you use the vast majority of earth’s farmland to grow livestock feed. So don't start talking about vertical farming, start talking about livestock and the protein transition first. We have to be very careful not to simply fit reality to our paradigm and first evaluate observations before even thinking about models.” Van Helden: "I'm not saying it's simple, but there is a tool that allows you to quantify all nine dimensions of the donut economy at once. You can actually model these dimensions to understand how they interact. As for vertical farming, the prevailing view is now that 99.5% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, even though no one really knows what they are yet. That’s way too much to condemn to insignificance, labelling it junk. Human kind should not venture ever deeper into its own laboratory to survive: a resilient ecosystem is a more viable way to stay afloat than an artificial system that requires constant attention.

“We have to be very careful not to simply fit reality to our paradigm and first evaluate observations before even thinking about models.”

Speaking of resilient and robust systems, Engelsman thinks that Covid-19 has been an important wake-up call: "We are putting such great pressure on ecosystems that they are no longer able to develop regenerative abilities and resilience, which nature had always managed to do thus far. Paradigm shifts begin in our minds: our old ideas won’t save us here, so we will have to factor other realities such as dark matter and junk DNA in the solution. I think we owe our success in the market to our leadership model that revolves around self-management. You can capture about 3% of a job in a job description: the rest is junk. We try to unlock that 97% by saying: “Forget about job descriptions. This is our dream, take responsibility. Once you get stuck, just co-create your way to a solution.” That’s how you unlock human resources with significantly greater potential than you could ever see top-down, as a boss, or bottom-up, in an overly democratic system in which no one bears responsibility. I believe in the third way, in the unique dark matter contained in each and every employee." “That approach does rely heavily on moral leadership," Van Helden observes, "and on pursuing an ideal that chimes with everyone in the organization. How could you deploy this concept on a global scale?" "What would you like to scale up?" Engelsman asks. "Transition leadership? For me, leadership never emerges from the majority that follows trends, but from the minority that sets them” Van Helden begins: "Mathematically, the difference between something that can exist and something that cannot is much greater..." "Than scaling up something that already exists, exactly!", Engelsman exclaims, finishing the sentence. “That’s the leadership model that Unilever embraces, incubating prototypes of the new normal that they can scale up with their powerful distribution capabilities, so they can serve as an example for the rest of the range. There's nothing wrong with that. Self-management also means respecting everyone.” Van Helden concludes: "The power of proving that it can be done, that you can lead a successful organization this way, is more important than the quantifiable impact alone."

“Perhaps mathematicians can show that it doesn’t have to be all that complicated”

About Volkert Engelsman and Eosta

Eosta imports, packages and distributes organic and fair-trade products. The company represents growers from all over the world and supplies their products both inside and outside Europe. Eosta is eager to show consumers the social added value of organic farming and is strongly committed to chain transparency, which is one of the reasons it set up its trace & tell brand Nature & More.

CEO Volkert Engelsman is a proponent of a fair distribution of costs in the organic fruit and vegetable sector. Eosta puts the grower first and works with two hundred NGOs to make the earth a healthier place.

Volkert Engelsman studied business administration and economics, before founding Eosta in 1990, fueled by an interest in entrepreneurship and the friction between social idealism and commercial realism. Engelsman calls on innovative and sustainable entrepreneurs to dare to dream and do. “Where there’s a will, there’s a long way round.”

About Frans van Helden

As Managing Director at ORTEC Consulting, Frans van Helden is responsible for a team of 170 consultants, data scientists and data engineers. His mission is to use the inherent potential of mathematics to make an impact. In his work with clients, he seeks to transform their business with data, math and AI, a vision he translates into real-world plans in concert with his team.