Festival Fellow Spotlight: Kyaw Thu Htet

Tell us about your big idea!

I envision a food-secure future with just, humane, and sustainable food systems thriving with resilient value chains. 75 percent of our food comes from only 12 plants (out of 30,000 known edible plants) and five animal species, while 600 million smallholder farmers produce one-third of our food globally. Involving smallholder farmers from developing countries in transitioning into sustainable food systems will solve key issues for the production of new foods while bringing about the democratization of supply chains and climate justice.

What needs to change for smallholders to participate more fully in this food-secure future?

Smallholder farmers in developing countries do not leverage scientific tools to make informed, data-driven decisions (such as soil fertility, quality, and safety) hence their productivity, efficiency, and market access have been poor. As a consequence, they have been under the triple burden of low profitability, limited access to finance, and self-imposed environmental impacts, putting them in the vicious cycle of poor livelihood. After working in Myanmar for a decade, I realized that these are education and access problems rather than resource availability problems alone.

Those same smallholder farmers hold the key to accelerate the sustainable food systems transformation, especially in the alternative protein industry, because large-scale farmers in developed, industrialized countries are already tied up to old supply chains in old food systems.

In food systems, producers such as farmers are closest to “action” level which could accelerate the systemic change we urgently need. However, many organizations, donors, and agencies working in developing countries are still struggling to work with them effectively to implement critical interventions. It is now time to lean into result-oriented actions rather than procedure-oriented formalities in order to work together with the farmers without the complexities imposed by stringent and demanding protocols.

How did you get involved in the sustainable global food movement? What led you to create MILS in Myanmar?

Myanmar is deeply affected by climate events like extreme temperatures, drought, and flooding. On the other hand, its geo-economic position between the two biggest populations on the planet, India and China, makes it a strategic country with the shortest food-miles to over 3 billion people around it. Its position of world’s second largest exporter and third largest producer of peas and pulses makes it a critically important country for plant-based food supply chains. Myanmar is a quintessential global-south country with strategic leverage points where a dollar invested in the system could yield significant social and economic returns not only for itself but also for global supply chains.

I founded Myanmar Innovative Life Sciences (MILS) to help food producers in Myanmar, including smallholder farmers, leverage technology to increase their productivity, efficiency, and profitability while mitigating the impacts of climate change. As a result, smallholders can improve their profitability, connect to emerging plant-based food supply chains, and help producers tackle bottlenecks to scale effectively and reach price parity with animal-derived products. My hope is to replicate this model in other developing countries to accelerate towards achieving sustainable development goals.

How can involving smallholder farmers help alleviate global food security challenges and adapt our food systems to a changing climate?

The Black Sea Grain Initiative highlighted how vulnerable our food and fertilizer supply chains are and how easy it is to weaponize food for political agendas. Diversification of food sources in global south countries via smallholder farmers, as I call “South-Shoring,” will deter the future weaponization of food and democratize supply chains globally.

Part of the climate justice debate is the conversation around the equitable distribution of resources, especially financial resources from global monetary institutions. Retrofitting or overhauling agricultural systems to be climate-smart is extremely financially taxing and very often developing countries cannot afford to do it themselves. If smallholders are assisted with mechanisms to connect to new food system supply chains, they will be seen more as opportunities and less as liabilities. As a result, more climate-smart agriculture funds will be allocated to developing countries. This is part of my work as a co-facilitator for the Obama Foundation’s Climate Community of Practice, together with other brilliant leaders and scholars collectively working on solving the most pressing issues of our time.

Our global economy is the most sustainable and equitable when it is inclusive. Developing countries, including those with predominantly agricultural economies, must be part of the conversations of the post-pandemic economic recovery and building resilience for future economic shocks. By working with developing economies via smallholder farmers, we are building resilience for future food security shocks from geo-political conflicts and polarities.

The views and opinions of the author are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Aspen Institute.