Horses for resources

Julian Kirby

08 March 2013

I've just had an email from a French documentary maker telling me their film about tin mining impacts in Indonesia has been postponed because a more immediately topical piece on globalisation and supply chains will be aired tonight instead. No prizes for guessing what the imposter concerns: horse meat. Ah, the story rolls and rolls.

The Bangka film will screen early next month so there's no reason for the Make It Better campaign team to be disappointed. I'm pretty pleased actually, as the on-going horsemeat saga does a very good job of making much the same argument that our campaign does. Without transparent supply chains you can bet your burger that bad stuff will happen, and chances are the company selling you the final goods won't even know about it 'til it's too late.

With transparent supply chains, on the other hand, it becomes much easier for companies to trace where the component parts of the product come from, whether it's a sausage or a smartphone, and identify the risky areas. Even better, they allow companies to measure how much of the world's limited natural resources are required for their products and business models. They can then use that information to guide their product designers to think about how to reduce the material demands that cause the sorts of problems we've documented on Bangka.

This Wednesday we had the pleasure of co-hosting with the inestimably marvellous RSA Great Recovery Project a truly stonking mix of the biggest companies, product policy brains and design gurus who'd come together to discuss how, put simply, to make products better. Set against Oxfam's excellent "Behind the Brand" food and drink supply chain report, the imminent launch of our own report on Europe's increasingly untenable land footprint, and of course the ghostly whinnying of the dodgy lasagnes, it was really encouraging to see the appetite of not just the NGOs but also big industry players to move this agenda forward.

Their motivation needn't be ethical. Increasing demand is forcing up commodity prices and affecting access to resources, both causing and resulting from further environmental damage. Big business increasingly gets this, as does much of government, but in the UK at least, as we showed this week, the Treasury remains a block to understanding and acting on the crisis.

We'll publish a note of the meeting soon and plan to build on the assembly of academics, policy makers, thought-leaders and businesses to grow the movement to make products and production better for everyone, planet included.

Meanwhile, next time someone raises the horsemeat scandal, how about asking them how sure they are that there aren't equally unsavoury things going on in the supply chains of some of their other favourite products, including the inedible ones?