We lived on less than a dollar a day

for about 15 years.

I got a scholarship, went to university,

studied international agriculture, studied anthropology,

and decided I was going to give back.

I was going to work with small farmers.

I was going to help alleviate poverty.

I was going to work on international development,

and then I took a turn

and ended up here.

Now, if you get a Ph.D., and you decide not to teach,

you don't always end up in a place like this.

It's a choice. You might end up driving a taxicab.

You could be in New York.

What I found was,

I started working with refugees and famine victims --

small farmers, all, or nearly all --

who had been dispossessed and displaced.

Now, what I'd been trained to do

was methodological research on such people.

So I did it: I found out how many women

had been raped en route to these camps.

I found out how many people had been put in jail,

how many family members had been killed.

I assessed how long they were going to stay

and how much it would take to feed them.

And I got really good at predicting

how many body bags you would need

for the people who were going to die in these camps.

Now this is God's work, but it's not my work.

It's not the work I set out to do.

So I was at a Grateful Dead benefit concert on the rainforests

in 1988.

I met a guy -- the guy on the left.

His name was Ben.

He said, "What can I do to save the rainforests?"

I said, "Well, Ben, what do you do?"

"I make ice cream."

So I said, "Well, you've got to make

a rainforest ice cream.

And you've got to use nuts from the rainforests

to show that forests are worth more as forests

than they are as pasture."

He said, "Okay."

Within a year,

Rainforest Crunch was on the shelves.

It was a great success.

We did our first million-dollars-worth of trade

by buying on 30 days and selling on 21.

That gets your adrenaline going.

Then we had a four and a half million-dollar line of credit

because we were credit-worthy at that point.

We had 15 to 20, maybe 22 percent

of the global Brazil-nut market.

We paid two to three times more than anybody else.

Everybody else raised their prices to the gatherers of Brazil nuts

because we would buy it otherwise.

A great success.

50 companies signed up, 200 products came out,

generated 100 million in sales.

It failed.

Why did it fail?

Because the people who were gathering Brazil nuts

weren't the same people who were cutting the forests.

And the people who made money from Brazil nuts

were not the people who made money from cutting the forests.

We were attacking the wrong driver.

We needed to be working on beef.

We needed to be working on lumber.

We needed to be working on soy --

things that we were not focused on.

So let's go back to Sudan.

I often talk to refugees:

"Why was it that the West didn't realize

that famines are caused by policies and politics,

not by weather?"

And this farmer said to me, one day,

something that was very profound.

He said, "You can't wake a person who's pretending to sleep."

(Laughter)

Okay. Fast forward.

We live on a planet.

There's just one of them.

We've got to wake up to the fact

that we don't have any more

and that this is a finite planet.

We know the limits of the resources we have.

We may be able to use them differently.

We may have some innovative, new ideas.

But in general, this is what we've got.

There's no more of it.

There's a basic equation that we can't get away from.

Population times consumption

has got to have some kind of relationship to the planet,

and right now, it's a simple "not equal."

Our work shows that we're living

at about 1.3 planets.

Since 1990,

we crossed the line

of being in a sustainable relationship to the planet.

Now we're at 1.3.

If we were farmers, we'd be eating our seed.

For bankers, we'd be living off the principal, not the interest.

This is where we stand today.

A lot of people like to point

to some place else as the cause of the problem.

It's always population growth.

Population growth's important,

but it's also about how much each person consumes.

So when the average American

consumes 43 times as much

as the average African,

we've got to think that consumption is an issue.

It's not just about population,

and it's not just about them; it's about us.

But it's not just about people;

it's about lifestyles.

There's very good evidence --

again, we don't necessarily have

a peer-reviewed methodology

that's bulletproof yet --

but there's very good evidence

that the average cat in Europe

has a larger environmental footprint in its lifetime

than the average African.

You think that's not an issue going forward?

You think that's not a question

as to how we should be using the Earth's resources?

Let's go back and visit our equation.

In 2000, we had six billion people on the planet.

They were consuming what they were consuming --

let's say one unit of consumption each.

We have six billion units of consumption.

By 2050,

we're going to have nine billion people -- all the scientists agree.

They're all going to consume twice as much as they currently do --

scientists, again, agree --

because income is going to grow in developing countries

five times what it is today --

on global average, about [2.9].

So we're going to have 18 billion units of consumption.

Who have you heard talking lately

that's said we have to triple production

of goods and services?

But that's what the math says.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We can get productivity up.

We can get efficiency up.

But we've also got to get consumption down.

We need to use less

to make more.

And then we need to use less again.

And then we need to consume less.

All of those things are part of that equation.

But it basically raises a fundamental question:

should consumers have a choice

about sustainability, about sustainable products?

Should you be able to buy a product that's sustainable

sitting next to one that isn't,

or should all the products on the shelf be sustainable?

If they should all be sustainable on a finite planet,

how do you make that happen?

The average consumer takes 1.8 seconds in the U.S.

Okay, so let's be generous.

Let's say it's 3.5 seconds in Europe.

How do you evaluate all the scientific data

around a product,

the data that's changing on a weekly, if not a daily, basis?

How do you get informed?

You don't.

Here's a little question.

From a greenhouse gas perspective,

is lamb produced in the U.K.

better than lamb produced in New Zealand,

frozen and shipped to the U.K.?

Is a bad feeder lot operation for beef

better or worse than

a bad grazing operation for beef?

Do organic potatoes

actually have fewer toxic chemicals

used to produce them

than conventional potatoes?

In every single case,

the answer is "it depends."

It depends on who produced it and how,

in every single instance.

And there are many others.

How is a consumer going to walk through this minefield?

They're not.

They may have a lot of opinions about it,

but they're not going to be terribly informed.

Sustainability has got to be a pre-competitive issue.

It's got to be something we all care about.

And we need collusion.

We need groups to work together that never have.

We need Cargill to work with Bunge.

We need Coke to work with Pepsi.

We need Oxford to work with Cambridge.

We need Greenpeace to work with WWF.

Everybody's got to work together --

China and the U.S.

We need to begin to manage this planet

as if our life depended on it,

because it does,

it fundamentally does.

But we can't do everything.

Even if we get everybody working on it,

we've got to be strategic.

We need to focus on the where,

the what and the who.

So, the where:

We've identified 35 places globally that we need to work.

These are the places that are the richest in biodiversity

and the most important from an ecosystem function point-of-view.

We have to work in these places.

We have to save these places if we want a chance in hell

of preserving biodiversity as we know it.

We looked at the threats to these places.

These are the 15 commodities

that fundamentally pose the biggest threats

to these places

because of deforestation,

soil loss, water use, pesticide use,

over-fishing, etc.

So we've got 35 places,

we've got 15 priority commodities,

who do we work with

to change the way those commodities are produced?

Are we going to work with 6.9 billion consumers?

Let's see, that's about 7,000 languages,

350 major languages --

a lot of work there.

I don't see anybody actually being able

to do that very effectively.

Are we going to work with 1.5 billion producers?

Again, a daunting task.

There must be a better way.

300 to 500 companies

control 70 percent or more

of the trade of each of the 15 commodities

that we've identified as the most significant.

If we work with those, if we change those companies

and the way they do business,

then the rest will happen automatically.

So, we went through our 15 commodities.

This is nine of them.

We lined them up side-by-side,

and we put the names of the companies that work

on each of those.

And if you go through the first 25 or 30 names

of each of the commodities,

what you begin to see is,

gosh, there's Cargill here, there's Cargill there,

there's Cargill everywhere.

In fact, these names start coming up over and over again.