After more than two years of pandemic-related restrictions on mobility, socialisation and networking, it is not surprising that people eagerly packed their light luggage and travelled to attend the EIT Food’s Future of Food Conference 2022, even if they could have done this remotely.

Participants, however, did not flock into a crowded conference hall (something which made the European Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, Virginijus Sinkevičius feel a bit uneasy) simply out of hunger for social contact; they came to the same place carrying different problems and expecting answers on how to solve some of the challenges that surround the modern food systems.

One of the strongest messages came from Andy Zynga, CEO of EIT Food, who set the scene for building the upcoming EU food systems innovation agenda, saying it’s a matter of resources (money and investors), inclusion (women, consumers, youth) and vision.

Without doubt, innovation is key to ensure competitiveness and sustainability because if we continue doing what we have done for the past years we will never arrive at new solutions.

We also need to step back in our inclusion circle and think about farmers because without farmers there is no food and there is no future.

We found some time to reflect on how we can take wisdom back home and use it to address some of the failures in our own food system.

We recognise that, as a ministry, one of the first things we must do is to align our mentality and synchronise our activity so that whatever we do – through regulation, policy making and operations – is oriented towards food and has food right at the core of our actions and decisions.

If we want to use the opportunity offered by the food crisis to bring about change, then we must do things differently

With its intention to create a better business ecosystem around the agri-food sector, the development of a national food policy is a good step in the right direction; which is why if this policy is meant to take us to the future, to 2030 and beyond, it needs to feel different than what we have done so far.

It needs to address food security, with the deserved emphasis on food affordability and the requirement to install resilient mechanisms and infrastructure to guarantee food availability also in times of crisis. And it needs to address food sustainability, with the acknowledgement that financial sustainability is the element that sets the ground for social and environmental sustainability.

The case by Damien Jourdan, innovation manager at Danone, on how companies like Les 2 Vaches − a brand of Les Prés Rient Bio, the French organic dairy subsidiary of Danone − are partnering up with organic farmers, encouraging organic conversions, shortening the ingredients list and creating a tailored welfare programme for dairy cows is an excellent example of how the manufacturing industry can drive sustainability at the farm level.

If we want to use the opportunity offered by the food crisis to bring about change, then we must do things differently.

It starts with perspective. On one hand, we need to shed our romanticism and see the sector for what it is: another business sector that is dependent on a sound business plan, access to finance, risk management, knowledge-based production, attention to compliance, adaptive marketing and a firm understanding of what the customer is willing to buy.

What this means, essentially, is that we need to identify the major business failures that, over the past years, have been characterising the landscape of our food supply chain with constant precision.

Doing things differently also means adopting a new mindset, one that revolves around the relationship that people have with food. As always, it starts at home, where parents and family instil the first love for food and healthy eating as a lifestyle.

This is where the benefits are – the good taste, the convenience, the comfort, the ability to show off, to entertain and to celebrate as well as to be careful about special dietary requirements and medical conditions. We then need to extend this model to all other occasions where we use food not just for the need but also for the pleasure it brings.

And, finally, we need to agree that whatever we do must deliver results because a vision that fails to yield positive outcomes is not worth much. Ultimately, what drives this type of vision is the fear of losing something extremely important and this is what our conversation on our trip back to Malta was all about.

We talked about how imagining a future scenario in which we lose our countryside, our farmers, our pork, our milk, our tomatoes and our bambinella (small Maltese June pear), to mention a few, is unbearable and that our joint effort towards registering progress must be driven both by this fear and by the desire for pride in the good food that we can make.

Sonya Sammut is Malta’s National Ambassador for Organic and Sustainable Food and chief policy officer at the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Animal Rights.

Brian Vella is chief executive officer of the Malta Food Agency. He was previously chairman of the board of directors of Malta Dairy Products Ltd (Benna).