Source: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 9/28/20

So many major food and agribusiness companies have now made climate commitments, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with them. These splashy corporate pledges might be barely registering in the news, amid a global pandemic and a presidential election, but there is still a surprising amount of momentum in this space.

General Mills last week announced it plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent and halve its food waste over the next decade, as well as go fully carbon neutral by 2050.

Big Food goes big: Consumer-facing food and beverage companies have been the most aggressive in making such commitments, but the elephant in the room is that many of them are going to have to extract substantial changes in practices from their supply chains, including a hard look at how all sorts of crops are grown.

Keeping tabs: Field to Market, a nonprofit that works with many of the power players in the food and ag supply chain, last week released a compendium of many of the major commitments that have been made so far, from grower groups to retailers. About half of the group’s members have publicly committed to specific, measurable targets on the reduction of greenhouse gases, from Cargill to Unilever.

“We believe there is an important correlation between setting public targets, reporting on progress, and ultimately improving performance on key environmental indicators,” said Rod Snyder, president of Field to Market.

The group hosted a confab on Zoom to coincide with Climate Week, with a major focus on how to accelerate changes at scale so the flurry of corporate commitments can actually be met.

Talk is cheap: As POLITICO’s Catherine Boudreau wrote last week, “it’s one thing to set a goal, and another to actually achieve it.” Catherine (an MA alum who’s now author of The Long Game) noted that Kraft Heinz recently acknowledged the company won’t meet its 2020 environmental goals. Walmart, too, has said that eliminating emissions across its supply chains relies on innovations that aren’t quite ready for prime time.

But the pledges keep coming: The many challenges of actually achieving net-zero emissions have not dampened the appetite for public commitments. The UN last week said the number of net-zero pledges across various sectors have doubled in less than a year.