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DONALD MOORE: Thanks, Andy. I heard him use a reference about me having grown up. I think you might notice that I still have some growing to do, height-wise if not width-wise, anyway. But thank you for those kind words of welcome. I thought I'd tell you a little bit about myself. I'm just adding to what Andy said.
Yes, I grew up in Northern Ireland. We left Ireland when I was 11, literally when the bombs got a little close to home. So we were refugees, as you put it, Andy, down to New Zealand, where I finished growing up.
And New Zealand's a wonderful country. If you haven't visited, you need to go and see New Zealand. It is really a stunning example of some of the best scenery in the world. The only thing about New Zealand is it's a little far from everywhere else in the world.
And so for the last 20 years, I lived in New Zealand. I used to spend somewhere between one and three weeks of every month outside the country traveling to foreign markets, because the New Zealand economy is predominantly about an export-based economy. And so whether that was in the consulting industry when I used to be a consultant, or in the dairy industry, I spent a lot of my time traveling around the rest of the world and indeed mostly in Southeast Asia-- but anyway, a little bit about me.
I thought it was worth mentioning that I'd been with the Global Dairy Platform for eight years. And prior to that, I worked for little dairy company down in New Zealand called Fonterra, which some of you may have heard of them. During my time with Fonterra, I was fortunate enough to represent them on the boards of a lot of joint ventures in Japan, and Korea, and Taiwan, and China, and Israel, and South Africa, and Europe.
And that gave me an opportunity in my time with Fonterra to go and visit a lot of different dairy markets around the world and often speak to groups of farmers, groups of processors. And sort of the lasting impression I have from those years is that the language was different. The accents were different. But the problems were the same.
So it didn't matter where you were in the world, whether you were in [? Apoto ?] in South Africa talking to a bunch of dairy farmers there, or you're in Australia, or indeed in the US. They had the same concerns and the same issues in front of them. So it was a great opportunity for me to get a fairly broad rounding on the dairy sector. On behalf of the dairy sector, I run Global Dairy Platform now. We're a small organization. But we are an organization we like to think has some reach.
And so on behalf of the dairy sector, I chair an international research consortium that has pretty competitive research from the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Canada, the United States, and Australia. And we meet as a group twice a year physically and about four more times a year by conference call to talk about some of the key issues in the dairy sector and what we need to do as a research organization to address those. And that consortium has about $85 million worth of research underway at the moment.
I also chair a group that I'm going to talk about this morning called the Dairy Sustainability Framework. And so I wanted to spend more time talking about that. And I chair a group-- Doug Young. Welcome, Doug, one of the faces I recognize.
I also chair a marketing and communications group on behalf of the industry called the GDP IMP Marketing Group. And then on behalf of agriculture, not just dairy, I chair a number of things within the UN. So I was elected as chair of the International Agri Food Network, which represents all of agriculture.
And within the agriculture, of course, there's livestock. And within livestock, there's dairy. So it's a great way for us to work as an industry with other industries to address some of the key issues we're facing in society.
And I also chair a thing called the Private Sector Mechanism. The UN has got an amazing capability to name things. The Private Sector Mechanism is, if you are any private sector company-- it doesn't matter whether you're Unilever, you're Dannon, you're Chobani-- who are I think are here this morning-- or you're Nestle, if you want to engage with the Committee on World Food Security, you have to become a part of this thing called the Private Sector Mechanism. And I now chair that group on behalf of industry. So our strategy within GDP has been to try and get the dairy sector into a position of influence within different groups in the UN, et cetera.
Andy sort of mentioned this a little bit-- GDP, we were formed back in 2006 by the CEOs of four dairy companies. And literally, they got together in a hotel bedroom in Melbourne. So you're now getting the true story here.
They met in a hotel bedroom. There weren't any chairs. They sat on the bed together. This is starting to sound like the sort of story I shouldn't be telling.
But they sat on the bed together. They basically said, look, as big dairy companies-- and they were all cooperatives-- we have a lot of things that we compete on. But actually, there are a number of challenges and indeed possibly opportunities that are pretty competitive. And wouldn't it be a good idea if we got together and worked on those things collaboratively?
So I think you used the word collusion, Andy, in your opening remarks-- not collusion, collaboration. Collusion would be anti-trust. And we certainly wouldn't be wanting to do that. So we've run this organization now-- or I've run it-- for eight years. It's been around since 2006.
We now have about 90 members in 36 different countries in the world. Our membership is split between commercial companies and industry associations. And the industry associations tend to be the face to the industry in the different markets.
So Andy said, you won't really have heard of Global Dairy Platform. I'm delighted if you have. But actually, we don't really try and promote ourselves to the public or to the general population. We tend to work behind the scenes getting collaborative efforts in place and then pushing them out through our membership.
By way of starting off this morning, I thought it would be useful if I just gave you a quick bit of context using a video that we produced. So I'll play this video. And then I'm going to carry on my conversation from there.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- Some experts [INAUDIBLE]
- Half of the world's employed people are working [INAUDIBLE] where access to good schools, health care, and other critical services [INAUDIBLE].
- More than 3/4 of poor people live in rural areas and depend on farming for their livelihoods.
- [INAUDIBLE]
- The vanishing rural [INAUDIBLE] and an aging farmer population [INAUDIBLE]
- Roughly 1/3 of the food produced in the world every year, approximately 1.3 billion tons, gets [INAUDIBLE].
- The near future will be about food security and producing enough nutritious food more safely and sustainably.
- Dairy has the power to dramatically change the livelihood of individuals, families, and communities.
- Milk production and consumption are the most important, stable sources of year-round cash flow and nutritional intake of millions of rural small holder livestock keepers.
- In addition to this, through the production of milk and meat, the farming family has better nutrition. And in times of surplus, this production can be sold generating valuable cash flow.
- Right now, dairy is central to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, creating jobs and income on farms and off.
- Women empowered by dairy farming have increased income and influence over household expenditures, which boosts their social status and economic capital.
- A cow is an amazing asset. They support smallholders by pulling plows and helping transport crops to market. In mixed farming systems, they often provide enriched fertilizer or even file for cooking stoves.
In addition to fertilizers, technology now allows us to simply and viably turn manure into biogas for clean energy. This is especially beneficial in rural areas where there's no access to other energy sources, as well where deforestation and indoor pollution from cooking and heating are an issue.
- And so, why dairy?
- The Dairy Center has the unique ability to bring individuals, families and communities all over the world [INAUDIBLE] safer for a better life.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
DONALD MOORE: So I hope you were able to hear it. I heard a couple of snickers when the guy from New York came on the video there. I'm not sure whether he's recognized by people in the room. But the digester was actually filmed here in New York State. I'm just not sure the name of the farm.
SPEAKER 1: Noblehurst.
DONALD MOORE: Sorry?
SPEAKER 1: Noblehurst.
DONALD MOORE: Noblehurst, thank you. Thank you. So as you see, the dairy sector, we've got an amazing story. And there are many elements of that story, particularly from the perspective of sustainability and indeed dairy development.
At GDP, what we want to do is we want to strengthen the understanding of the role that the dairy sector plays in sustainable and responsible production. And as an industry, we want to make sure that not only to those people in our sector understand that, we want to make sure that the UN, government agencies, and the public more generally at large also understand the role that dairy can play in improving people's lives. We want them to understand the enormous power that this one sector has to transform livelihoods in different parts of the world.
But I guess, let me start by perhaps talking about the elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room, to me-- those of us in this room probably understand the role that dairy plays better than most. But when we're representing the dairy sector at conferences, at meetings, at the UN, et cetera, we face quite an uphill battle at times.
Because there are a lot of people out there who have a different view of the role that dairy plays. They see the dairy sector in a more negative light, indeed, livestock in a more negative light, if I can just put it in that context. And sometimes they even see a general agriculture that might be, in their minds, more intensive in a negative light. And so we have something of an uphill battle that we have to address.
There is a UN committee about to start doing what they call high-level panel of expert's report on agroecology. And agroecology, in and of itself, is not a bad concept. You're more familiar with this than me. It's about the interaction between agriculture, and the environment, and the ecological systems.
The civil society groups tend to use agroecology as code for low-input, low-intensity farming. And indeed, some of the civil society people have even gone so far as to say, any farmer who produces more food than he needs to feed his immediate family is, by definition, an intensive farmer. And so you see that we're sort of struggling a little bit in the sort of Western view of agriculture in some of those meetings. And so there are a few issues we've got to address, particularly as it relates to livestock.
And I'd like to tell you that some of these issues are coming from a fringe group. But in reality, they're not often. And while there may be no real compelling evidence, it doesn't stop people, particularly in this sort of post-truth era we live in at the moment, it doesn't stop people sharing their views and their thoughts on this. And so I've got a couple of quick examples. I'm sure you can probably all tell me about 50 more than this.
But The Guardian-- not a bad newspaper from the UK if you're into British newspapers. But whether it's mainstream media, such as this article from The Guardian where this columnist is sharing his views about the impact of synthetic food products and it'll have on the end of suffering to farm animals-- now I was at a livestock meeting at the UN about-- oh, gosh-- four months ago now.
And there was a guy there from the Donkey Sanctuary. Has anybody ever heard of the Donkey Sanctuary? It's an enormous NGO-- very, very good work they do.
And during the livestock discussion, he raised his hand and basically asked the panel, well, isn't this all a waste of time? Because with synthetic meat, we're not going to need livestock any more. And it was unfortunate that his question was probably the last of the day. And the agricultural minister from the Netherlands actually answered and kind of just sort of patted it down a bit.
And we all went to drinks. And during drinks, I went up to the guy from the Donkey Sanctuary and said to him, that was very brave, and I commend you. Because no one else was willing to raise the issue of GM in this meeting. And he went pale. He was like, what do you mean GM?
And so I then explained how the industry can create synthetic meats. And the guy just about bolted out the door. So there are a lot of people out there. They think they understand these issues. But there isn't really a deep understanding about it, even from someone like that.
The next one I would mention is my friend Richard Branson, populist icon. He's recently invested in a synthetic startup. And frankly, here he's talking up the opportunity for his investment.
But that's not even the most worry. These sort of things worry me even more. And this is a commentator who's determined that many of the problems we face in society today that can be attributed to one industry, whether it's climate change, non-communicable disease, obesity, heart disease, et cetera. This guy's determined that, by eliminating our reliance of meat and dairy products, all will be well with the world.
But again, the most frightening thing here is not that this is being said, but where it's being said. Now this sort of rhetoric I wouldn't be surprised to see from an NGO like a PETA-type organization. But in this case, this has come from a guy who is the managing editor for The Georgetown Environmental Law Review.
Now those are three examples of the sort of challenges we're facing. And I kind of put them into three buckets. We're facing people who are challenging the livestock sector-- and so within livestock, dairy-- from the perspective of health.
There's those people who will tell us that dairy is not good for our health. There are people who will tell us it's not good for the environment. And there are people who tell us it's not ethical to treat animals in that way.
And so, as an industry, when we're thinking about sustainability, we need to think about how we address all those different challenges and issues that are sitting in front of us. And if you're a consumer, all this sort of rhetoric is creating enormous confusion. And as dairy organizations, dairy companies, one of the challenges we face is that our consumers today are more and more separated from farm.
Now when I grew up, as Andy mentioned, I grew up in Northern Ireland. We grew up in the countryside. We didn't have a dairy farm. We just had a place in the country.
But the house next door was a dairy farm. And I used to hang over the fence and watch the cow barn, watch the cows being birthed, et cetera.
[AUDIO OUT]
But what I wanted to do was start off by saying more people out there like to think that they know--
[AUDIO OUT]
Am I my back on? You can hear me again, good. It's important we dimentionalize the dairy industry. And so for years, we've talked about dairy in terms of its nutritional impact. Let's start talking about dairy in terms of its social impact.
And we got these numbers together with the agriculture and livestock group, within FAO. And the first thing we'd found out is there are 1 billion people in the world whose livelihoods depend upon dairy. Now I'm not saying there's a billion people employed by dairy.
But if you take those people employed by dairy and their families-- so my kids-- and you add them into the number, we get the figure of a billion people. And that's made up of 600 million people around the world living on dairy farms. It's a huge number when you think about it, 600 million people living on dairy farms around the world. There are 133 million dairy farms in the world.
And if you take into account people whose livelihoods depend upon dairy upstream and downstream from the farmers, another the 400 million. So we're talking about an industry that represents a billion people's lives. And there are no other agricultural industries in the world that have that sort of reach and impact.
So when we're having discussions with UN agencies about the role of dairy and the impact that we have, we don't start with this billion people story. Because that has a lot more impact than when we go in and say, well, you should consume dairy because it's good for your bones. Yeah, they can understand the nutritional aspect. But when you start explaining to them the social impact that we have as an industry, it becomes a lot harder for them to see ways that they might substitute dairy for other things.
Never mind the fact that there are 6 billion consumers in the world who regularly rely upon dairy products for nutrition. And milk is actually one of the world's most produced and most valued agricultural commodities. In fact, I think it's the third largest agricultural commodity in the world. Milk and dairy products provide a third of the world's protein source.
And it's interesting. We did some research with consumers a few years back in, of all places, Australia. And un-aided, we asked them, what are the sources of protein in your diets? And we got down meat, and eggs, and chicken, da, da, da, da, da, leafy green vegetables.
And then we said, well, what about dairy? And they said, oh, yeah, dairy probably has protein, too. So we've got a challenge out there that maybe, as an industry, we haven't done a great job of communicating some of those benefits.
There are 240 million jobs in the dairy industry. If I break three of these, what are you guys going to do to me? Do I get a bill for this?
SPEAKER 2: Well, we'll see.
DONALD MOORE: Oh, OK. I'm not sure. I must be like the Energizer bunny. They keep plugging them in and see how long they last.
So 240 million people-- I was talking to someone here yesterday. And during the TTIP negotiations, California did some analysis of the value of the dairy sector in California. And they used a much more generous factor for how many off-farm jobs are created per farm.
And they ended up with a figure that-- you can look it up on the internet. It was kind of interesting. They said that the dairy sector in California is worth more to the Californian economy than Hollywood is.
And from a standpoint of equality, actually, the dairy sector has quite a heavy reliance upon women, particularly a lot of the developing world. There are 37 million dairy farms around the world that are headed by women. And there are over 80 million women who are working within the dairy sector. And I was talking to somebody here yesterday about India as an example. And we got to talking about Amul, which is, I think, the biggest co-operative in the world.
Rick Smith, who runs Dairy Farms America, is on our board. And Rick and I have had several discussions. He's got-- I think it's 14,500 or so farmer shareholders that he has to keep happy. Well, Mr. Sodhi, who runs Amul, has 3.6 million farmer members, each of them with about two cows. And most of them are women that manage the dairy herds in those markets.
So back on this 363 million dairy cattle in the world-- now the bit up here that I think is interesting from my perspective is those of us based here in the US, or if you're in the UK, or in you're in New Zealand, or whatever, you think of dairying as being your large-scale herds. I'm not sure what the average in the New York area is. But I think the average across the US is about 300 cows now. And the average in the UK is about 90.
The average globally is 2.9. So the average herd size in the world is 2.9 cows. So when we're thinking about the challenges of sustainability-- and quite often, we think of them as challenges of scale-- the challenges of sustainability in large measure in other parts of the world are more to do with, how do we scale these changes, these opportunities down to something that a farmer with two cows can implement? And so when I mentioned before when I talk at the UN about issues to do with agriculture and with sustainability, they are not worried about the US dairy farmer who's probably producing-- in greenhouse gas terms-- he's producing-- can I use kilograms here? He's producing a kilogram of milk for about 1.5, 1.6 kilograms of greenhouse gases.
The guys in the UN are worried about Sub-Saharan Africa. The average in Sub-Saharan Africa is 9.6 kilograms of greenhouse gases for each kilogram of dairy. But in Ethiopia where I was recently, it's as high as 24 kilograms of greenhouse gases per kilogram of dairy produced.
So some of these challenges, you can see, that's where the UN and other groups are interested. Ethiopia has 80 million people, 12 million dairy cows. But the average yield in Ethiopia is 1.7 liters of milk per day. So you can see the some of the challenges that we've got in different parts of the world are very, very different.
Moving on, GDP-- back in 2014, 2015, we spent some time as an organization. And as Andy said, when we were first formed, we were really formed looking at some of the problems the dairy sector had, things like milk fat, things like the greenhouse gas emissions. Back in 2014, we took a slightly different tack.
And we said, we're at a point now where, as an industry, as a sector, between ourselves and the International Dairy Federation, dairy is actually in a reasonable position globally. And we have an opportunity to move from being so reactive, so defensive to being a little more proactive. And it's time that we, as a sector, started to align ourselves on the opportunities that dairy present and explaining them in terms of how they help to address some of the key issues that are affecting society around the world.
2015, as well-- I'm pretty sure most of you in the room will be aware-- the UN launched the agenda of 2030. So these are a set of 17 goals called the Sustainable Development Goals that every country in the world is required to develop a plan to address. There are 17 goals. And this little badge I'm wearing here is a representation of the 17 goals.
I got in an elevator in Ireland recently. And there were two Australians got in the elevator. And they looked at me and said, is this one of those gay pride pins?
And at that stage, if you knew of what was going on in Australia, they had a referendum on gay rights in Australia whether or not they would allow single-sex marriages. And so I spent the entire elevator ride with these two burly Australians trying to explain that, no, it wasn't a gay pride pin. It really was something to do with the UN.
But back in 2015, they launched these goals. Now these followed on from the Millennium Development Goals, a set of 15-year goals. The difference between the SDGs and the MGGs was the Sustainable Development Goals apply to every country. The Millennium Development Goals were only required to be implemented by developing countries-- so a set of 17 goals.
And they're really important, because they create an incredible context for us in the dairy sector to present dairy and the role that dairy can play as a way of achieving a number of these goals. We've done a lot of work in dairy looking at how we think we particularly influence them. And there are some that we impact directly.
There are others that we have a great effect on. And there are some that we provide some influence on. And if I had more time, I could spend a whole day just talking about the SDGs, in particular. Or maybe I would bore you with the story about how it took four days to agree on one of the measures on agricultural production within there.
They've got 169 indicators they use to measure progress against those. And of the 169, one of them was indicator 2.4. And I was at a three-day meeting where they still couldn't conclude how to measure the percentage of agricultural land in the world that is under sustainable and productive use. So anyway, we keep going.
So back to the elephant in the room, I think you'll agree there are some challenge we've got to face and we've got to address. But by and large, we do have tools at our disposal and ways that we've got to do it. But the first thing we've got to do-- and I mentioned the post-truth era before. We're in this really weird world today where people are more likely to believe other people who have the same views as them-- that sounds a bit strange-- than they are to believe academics or experts.
And you guys probably understand this better than a lot of people. I'm not sure if you've ever followed a global organization called Edelman. Edelman is probably one of the world's biggest PR marketing firms. They produce an index every year called the Trust Index.
And over the last three or four years, they've seen a reversal. Trust used to be a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid, you had experts, doctors, lawyers, academics, et cetera. And down at the bottom, you had the people who the information flowed down to.
With the advent or the adoption of social-media-type technologies, that pyramid's now reversed. And people are more likely to believe other people who have that same outlook and viewpoint as themselves. And they don't look for evidence to challenge it. They look for facts to support their own viewpoints. But we believe still that, ultimately, truth is going to win out in all these areas.
And so the first thing we've got to do as an industry is we've got to produce the data, the evidence to support our position about dairy and its role in sustainable production. So in 2013, as a dairy sector, we were involved in launching an initiative called the Dairy Sustainability Framework. We launched it in conjunction with the IDF World Dairy Summit in Yokohama, Japan.
And the Dairy Sustainability Framework aims to provide the sector overall with a beacon, with a guiding light for a framework that all countries in the world can participate in. And they can align and connect their sustainability activities under, effectively, a common language and a common framework. And just a few numbers for you-- so we launched in 2013, I think I said.
The percentages are the change in the last 12 months. But the important facts on this board are 31% of global milk production is now is represented under the Dairy Sustainability Framework. This is one of the most successful agriculture initiatives at a global sustainability level.
You've probably all heard of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, and sustainable soy, and so on. Well, we went on a slightly different route with a framework rather than a round table. And this framework now has got some quite significant numbers within it.
But the challenges-- and I'm going to come on to that in a moment. The challenges for sustainability in the dairy sector is we've probably got the low hanging fruit, if I can put it that way. The countries that already had initiatives underway in sustainability, we've got them into the framework, by and large. There's a few recalcitrants we'll still work on. But the big challenge in the dairy sector now is moving from the developed world to the developing world, which is, as I said before, where most of the challenges around sustainability sit.
The pins on the map here show you where in the world we have people implementing the Dairy Sustainability Framework. The pins I draw your attention to of the red-colored ones, in particular. Because the model that we've got for implementing the Sustainability Framework is red pins represent aggregators. And aggregator, to us, is very valuable. Because they will promote the model within their own region.
So for example, in the US here, DMI, Dairy Management, Inc, through the Innovation Center, is an aggregator for all US dairy production. So for the Dairy Sustainability Framework, all we've got to do is align our model with theirs, and we get the US data into this framework. And it is so important for us at a global level to be able to report the progress that the sector's making. And so to do that, we've developed a series of indicators. My slides are just slightly out of sequence, apologies.
Governance of the DSF-- the Dairy Sustainability Framework is governed by the industry for the industry. And we've occasionally got a few challenges from NGOs and other groups as to why we haven't got a multi-stakeholder governance group within the DSF at the global level. The multi-stakeholder piece comes at the local level.
So the initiative here in the US does have the NGOs and the civil society groups as part of it. This is the overall governance for the model. So you see there that most of the organizations are global in nature or have some regional role. As I mentioned before, I chair it. And Global Dairy Platform provides about 95% of the funding for this particular initiative.
We do have an advisory council. And in the advisory council, we've got a number of those key NGO-type groups. We have WWF in there as an observer. We have Oxfam. We have World Bank. We have FAO and others as part of the advisory council advising us on the role that the DSF is playing.
Interestingly, there is a group called the Global Agenda For Sustainable Livestock within a FAO. And the Global Agenda For Sustainable Livestock has had us attend several meetings to present the DSF to the entire livestock community as a model that other groups might wish to adopt. So in their view, dairy is slightly further ahead than other groups, even beef that has round table. That, to me, is quite telling.
There are 11 criteria within the DSF. And I don't know whether that's readable at the back. It's actually barely readable at the front of the room. So there are 11 criteria, though.
And the 11 criteria span everything from environmental issues, economic issues, and social issues. And for each of them, we have a statement of strategic intent. So our statement of strategic intent is really a aspirational goal, if you like.
We say, for example, for greenhouse gases-- well, you can't read it. So you can't tell whether I get it actually right or not. But the statement of strategic intent is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through all economically-viable means.
That is an aspirational statement about the direction we want people to take. We don't say, this is how you must do it. Well, this is how you must do it actually happens at a local level.
In terms of the goal-- so at a global level, we are involved in setting the aspirations I mentioned before. So this is good. This is bad. What does good look like?
And what we're tracking there is not absolutes but trends. So our intention is to report the trend. Is the dairy sector getting better at reducing greenhouse gases, or are we going the wrong way? The first thing we've got to do is measure these things so that we can actually put plans in place.
Then at a local level, you implement your own strategic goal. So this is where the US Dairy Industry comes in. And at the strategic level, you'll implement metrics for the US market. And I think-- Doug, I can't remember. Is it 20% by 2025 or something? By 2020?
DOUG: [INAUDIBLE]
DONALD MOORE: Thank you-- 20% reduction from 1990 benchmark or something by 2020. So you'll implement actual objectives and measures for your own marketplace. And then, at a tactical and operational level, this is where the individual enterprise is. So the DFAs of this world, the Land O'Lakes of this world, the agri markets of this world will implement their own plans for how they're going to achieve that at a local level. But all that then rolls back up into-- at a global level, we want to be able to report the aspiration for the sector as a whole.
And there are, as I said before, there are 11 metrics in here. And we're on a continuous improvement journey with the DSF itself. In 2016, we launched the first two indicators. And that was on greenhouse gases and animal care. Last year, we launched the next five.
We've been working quite closely with the University of Arkansas with Professor Marty Matlock to develop the indicator metrics for these. The development of indicator metrics is it seems like it be very straightforward. But actually, it takes a lot of time. Because we have to have consensus across all of the different members of the DSF.
And I was talking with Frank yesterday about what we're measuring for animal care. And at a global level, we've agreed that we will use somatic cell count. And the UN has said, yes, somatic cell count is a reasonable measure. When we get into discussions with our own groups, everybody wants to have 50 different things to measure animal care.
But the challenge we've got is, if you put this up to a global level, and you say, well, I want to measure lameness and I want to measure cleanliness, there are no measures in places like Ethiopia or India for those. But they do measure somatic cell count. So we could also get something that people can work with.
And using somatic cell count as the example, I often say, it's like when I go to the doctor with a sprained wrist or a sore knee, the first thing he does is puts a thermometer in my mouth. And he uses that to tell whether there might be something else wrong. That's what we're using somatic cell count for. So if somatic cell count is not moving in the right direction, we know we've got some other issues around animal care that we need to take care of.
And the last four indicators are planned for development this year and next year. And we're now into some of the ones that are actually a lot harder to measure. And [? Andy, ?] things like, how do you measure the impact on rural economies? That's probably one of the most challenging. And we have a piece of work in place with FAO, as it happens, at the moment as a sector to try and implement a measurement for the impact that dairy has in rural economies.
But at the COP24 Convention this year in Poland, we're going to a host a side event where we present the progress the dairy sector is making against the first seven of our indicators. So we'll talk about the baselines and the achievement we've made. And doing it in the margins of the environmental program at COP24, we think is a good way for the sector to get out there in advance of some of these things.
The last thing I wanted to mention before I move off the DSF itself is that it's garnered a lot of attention. And one of the key organizations that works with the dairy sector is Rabobank. And Rabobank banked $27 billion worth of dairy sector. The dairy sector represents 25% of Rabobank's global portfolio of investment.
So the sector is very, very important to Rabobank. And Rabobank is important to the sector. So Rabobank said, well, we need to take a look at sustainability. And to do that, they used the Dairy Sustainability Framework as their model.
And they mapped-- again, you probably can't see it terribly well on the screen. They mapped all 17 elements of the Sustainable Development Goals. They looked at the work that was underway within the Dairy Sustainability Framework. And they highlighted several areas where they thought we could be doing more work.
And this was two years ago. And since then, we are. And they also indicated areas where they felt that the DSF was actually doing a great job of delivering on the outcomes. So there are about half a dozen of these analysis done by different groups. This just happened to be the one that Rabobank did to look at the DSF.
But the challenge for us-- and I kind of said it before. I've got two farms on the slide here. One is Fair Oaks. Is everyone familiar Fair Oaks in Indiana?
What is it, 30,000 cows, state-of-the-art milking systems, et cetera, et cetera. It's like Disneyland for dairy if you've never visited it. It really is. It's a great place to take the family and show them what the dairy industry-- and now, actually, the swine industry-- is all about. So there, my example of very developed, very advanced everything you can think of from biodigesters through.
But how do we take that knowledge and that understanding, and how do we apply it to this woman in India who's hand milking her one or maybe two cows that she has in her family? I mentioned Amul before, 3.6 million members. am old the guy who runs animals guy called Mr. Sodhi-- great guy. And he'll tell the story if you ever meet him about the way that the Indian dairy industry really supports the livelihoods of people within that industry or within that country.
So in most of their farms, they're not solely dairy. Typically, the husband has some small patch of land where they are cropping. They may be growing lettuce, or they're growing something else.
The feedstock for the animals is, by and large, the byproduct from the primary cropping that happens on that farm. Typically, the wives on the farm are the ones who look after the animals. And so, on average, Amul pays about the equivalent of $1.00 US a day per cow back to those families.
And so they get, on average, about $2.00 a day. And that $2.00 a day, it doesn't sound like a lot to us. But we were talking with a guy from Columbia-- I don't know whether he's here today-- yesterday, who said, well, that's the average wage in Columbia. In a lot of parts of the world, this is actually regarded as a good income. That $2.00 a day, the reason that-- maybe I'm talking out of school, but the way Mr. Sodhi tells it to me is the important thing here is that the money goes to the women, not to the men.
And when it goes to the women, the first thing they do is they look to improve the nutrition for their children. They look to improve their clothing. And they want to make sure their kids go to school. And that $2.00 a day enables them to do that. So it's very, very important within their society.
But how do we help them become more sustainable? I'll flick through this. I did want to mention this. I'm just conscious of time. I'm not sure how we're going. We're OK? OK,
There's a photo on the screen here of a guy some of you know, a guy called Brian Lindsay. And Brian has been working with us for a number of years as a contractor. And he runs the Dairy Sustainability Framework for us.
But Brian's been working very closely with a group called Dairy Asia. Dairy Asia has the slogan for health and prosperity. So they've got this initiative in Asia where they want to promote dairy for health and prosperity. Dairy Asia covers 13 countries. It's Afghanistan over to the Philippines, Indonesia up to China, roughly-- that sort of regional area.
And it's all about, how do we create a sustainable dairy sector in those 13 countries? Now they have a lot of variance, a lot of differences, but a lot of things in common. Typically, the agencies representing the individual countries are governmental agencies. So these are governments who've decided that they need to promote the dairy sector because of the health and economic benefits-- so health and prosperity. And to do so, they need to develop a sustainable model.
We've been working with Dairy Asia for about three years now. Dairy Asia has been around for about three and a half years. So not long after it came into existence, we started working with them. You'll have noticed on one of the slides earlier, Dairy Asia is on the governance for the Dairy Sustainability Framework. And Brian, who's on this slide, is on the advisory council, I think they call it, or guiding group for Dairy Asia.
Their challenge, of course, is somewhat different to challenges we have in other parts of the world. So they've gone through an exercise where 12 of the 13-- Vietnam hasn't finished it yet-- 12 of the 13 countries, we've helped them to map their sustainability challenges. And they came up with using their own framework, which maps to the Dairy Sustainability Framework. They've come up with what they believe to be the top one and number two challenges across Asia.
And you'll notice that the top challenge for them on this screen is improving milk productivity and farm profitability. So that's the number one challenge from a sustainability perspective. And in Ethiopia last year, we had a lady from Thailand presenting the Dairy Asia Initiative. And she got up, and she was talking about these challenges.
And somebody from Europe stood up and said, but that's not sustainability. And I've started to think of it. And I think is probably a piece of research somebody should do here. Think about sustainability in terms of Maslow's hierarchy. We're from evolved, developed countries. We think of sustainability in terms of reducing gases, improving water quality, and ultimately, caring better for the animals.
When you're in a lot of these markets, they're thinking of sustainability more from the economic return, and providing food for their families, and making sure that they have a job the following month. So they're much more at this productivity and farm returns. And the number two priority they had was, therefore, integrating small-scale producers into formal markets, which is a huge challenge in some of these countries.
The one difference to that model was China. And probably not surprisingly, if you look at China here, their number one objective was to protect and enhance human health. And their number two, protect and restore terrestrial ecosystem. So China, if you think back to the 2008 era with melamine and the other food challenges and crises that they've had in China, you probably see why they would have their priorities slightly different.
The other thing I'd say is that the Chinese dairy industry is exceptionally more evolved than any of these others. And so if you haven't had a chance to go visit China-- I've managed to visit it many times. And in the era pre the melamine crisis, it was very much about small-scale farms. Now they've got some of the best farms I've ever seen in the world, large scale, highly automated, very impressive farms. So a slight difference for China, but the rest of them are pretty much in line with this.
Dairy Asia is governed by a guiding group, as I mentioned before. Brian's on it. But the chair of that is the guy who chairs the National Dairy Development Board of India. And India, as we all know, is the largest milk-producing country in the world, albeit from very small-based farms.
So that's our challenge, I guess. How do we move forward with sustainability? And how do we do so in such a way that we can encourage adoption of some of the practices that we've found to work in smaller markets and so on. And then ultimately, why are we doing all that?
Well, as I said before, we're doing it because we want to be able to demonstrate that the dairy sector is a responsible and sustainable producer of foodstuffs. And when we do that, then we can get ourselves into a position where we can build a model that allows us to demonstrate the socioeconomic benefits that are derived from the dairy sector, whether that's all about how dairy helps to alleviate poverty, or how dairy helps improve the nutrition of different families in different parts of rural poor, or how, across the world, dairy farming families-- this is another example from Noble Farm in New York if you recognize the people-- how it provides sustainable employment and how it empowers local communities.
And I was having a fascinating discussion at dinner last night with Tom and a few others about-- to me, I live in Chicago. You can probably tell by the accent, I live in Chicago. And we've also got a little place up in Wisconsin. And I contrast Wisconsin and Chicago.
Wisconsin is America's dairy land, right? And you go up there, and all the little towns are vibrant. They've got-- how many pubs did we decide they have?
SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE]
DONALD MOORE: Yeah, quite a few pubs in most of them. But you go into those little rural communities, and they are vibrant. The stores are moving ahead.
And you go downstate Illinois where it's predominately corn and soy, and you drive into the local townships down there, and things are boarded up. There will be a retirement village, maybe a gas station. You could fire a rifle down-- not that I would ever do that. But you could fire a rifle down the middle the street in the middle of the day and hit nothing. It's just that difference to me of the role that dairy can provide in making rural communities vibrant again.
So I guess I want to conclude. And I've got time for questions, I hope. And I have really talked about one little piece of the work we do in GDP. And maybe I've sounded a little pessimistic at times. But actually, I believe there's incredible note of optimism here that the recent-- gosh, I'll probably get the name wrong, so I'll flick the slide-- the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture that happened in Berlin recently.
At the end of that conference, 69 agricultural ministers signed a declaration really about the role of livestock, shaping the future of livestock sustainably, responsibly, and efficiently. And we believe that making livestock production, animal husbandry more sustainable, more responsible, more efficient worldwide will play a crucial role in meeting. And the responsibility was, how do we feed the world effectively with efficient, affordable nutrition?
And ultimately, we all want the same thing. We all want everybody in the world to have access to safe nutrition that's respectful of the environment it comes from, respects the animals and the farmers that produce it. We all want the same thing. For us, in some of the discussions we get involved in, we just have different starting points. We believe, as the dairy sector, that we need to embrace all opportunities to do that and all technologies to do it. On the other side of the aisle, we quite often butt our heads against the people from civil society who believe that the model, as I said before, should be small, low-input, ideally no-input farming that is more based on that smaller model.
That's probably all I wanted to say. But I am happy if anyone has questions. I probably should have an interpreter here for my accent, at least that's what my wife tells me. So hopefully, if you have any questions, I'd be delighted to answer them about this or about other topics, please.
Donald Moore, executive director of Global Dairy Platform, gives the keynote address at the 3rd Annual Dairy Center of Excellence Symposium, Feb. 22, 2018. The Dairy Center of Excellence partnered with the Atkinson Center for the event.
