The Green Corridor: Global Market Place Propels a Green Future

By Timothy Foote, Director Transportation & Network APAC at Asendia

On October 5th I attended a panel discussion at the Singapore National Library. The panel was part of Singapore’s Design Week and was on the topic of coexistence by design. Can designers build our future world so that our human populations can coexist with nature in a more balanced way?

All of the speakers were conservation volunteers of the Jane Goodall Institute Singapore, and they also worked in fields that impact our future. One was an architect, one a food researcher, one a brand designer and one a conservation leader.

Looking Outside Our Silos

A key message for the audience was that in order to design a future where coexistence is necessary, we need business and thought leaders to look outside of their usual silos for inspiration.

Silos limit progress

I struggle with this myself. In the world of e-commerce, it seems most of the news and environment is about using the same channels for moving products and pressing vendors to do it cheaper and faster. Truly new concepts of moving cargo and data more efficiently seldom get out of the existing moulds of moving shipments.

Taking a step back from the silos within organisations and industry, let’s begin looking at the macro level environment of nation states. It is here that societies, and the governments that they support, begin to influence the future shape of the world.

Nation states like organisations can either stifle innovation or support innovation. Through history, we can see that innovative nations have moved technology forward globally despite the fact that some nation states work to stifle innovation internally. Time and time again, the reason for innovation’s spread is global trade.

Global Markets Boost Innovation

The food researcher who was a panellist at Singapore Design Week’s event is Nathan Laurenz of Insect Feed Technologies. He had a keen observation during the panel discussion at the library. He said that for innovation to develop – policies made by society need to support it.

For Nathan, Singapore is supporting it. Singapore wants to have as many food technology companies as it can. The innovation part comes in play because not only does Singapore want to reduce its own reliance on imported food, it also understands that the regular land and waste intensive agricultural practices done overseas simply cannot work for Singapore. So, if it wants to make more of its own food locally and hope as well to export unique technologies in the food industry, alternative methods for producing protein are needed.

Insect Feed Technologies promises a solution that can answer that need. It researches how to raise insect protein, which can produce edible protein that is many times less carbon intensive and resource hungry as traditional livestock For the tropical areas around the world where land is being burned to support cattle and crop industries, insect farming could radically reduce the amount of damage that is being done to the environment by replacing huge cattle farms with much smaller insect farms. Commercially producing insect protein and its edible products needs development, and it needs at least a few international markets in which to sell its new systems too.

Of critical note here, the state in the USA where Nathan started his study on insects did not support commercialising insect farming. It only wanted to support traditional agricultural industries.

Global Markets Negate Protectionist Zeal

Capitalism is often seen as the cure to state controlled monopolisation and by connection developmental stagnation. That can be the case up to a point. Capitalism itself is not without oligopolies, monopolies and industry created blocks to innovation. These structures seem to naturally evolve in capitalism especially in “home markets” and when this happens, they can block innovative ideas and startups.

If one reads the news today, there are many stories about how protectionist barriers are being erected. In the worst case, protectionist barriers go up simply to help native industries from having to innovate their processes and products. In situations like this, the global marketplace is coming to the rescue for innovation.

Global marketplaces today exist in a multi-polar world. Investment for innovative technologies moves over borders. In this way money can still funnel to innovative projects no matter the location if there is a market somewhere for the final product. For Nathan’s insect farm dream that means there is capital to finance products that can change the world for the better.

Great Logistics Supports Innovation!

Selling and improving products created by innovators like Nathan is important to sustain our growing populations as well as preserving our natural environment. This is where we in the logistics industry come into play. We get to try and ship these new products to the final consumers in the most efficient way.

Be it via air or ocean, moving new products to expand the market for goods is what we do. Only our expertise can navigate products into new markets so that companies can grow from being local ones to global one. It’s an aspect of our work that can get lost in the KPIs and internal company targets, but it is in a very real sense the true legacy left by our day-to-day logistics work. Perhaps successful market penetration for innovating companies should itself be a KPI! Now there is an innovative idea!