Ep36: Jason Clay on "Building and flying the plane as we go"

Episode summary

Jason Clay is the Executive Director of the Markets Institute at World Wildlife Fund. He comes with decades of unique experiences and a big picture view of global food systems. In our conversation we ask him how power needs to be shifted to transform the food system, what the future looks like for small farmers, and whether we should be intensifying agriculture and sparing land or extensifying agricultural production and sharing land with nature. Jason Clay also shares ideas around how to increase transparency for consumers, improve farmers livelihoods, and urgently scale up systems level solutions.

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About Jason Clay

Jason Clay is Senior Vice President, Markets, and Executive Director, Markets Institute, World Wildlife Fund. He leads the work of WWF-US on Markets and how companies manage supply chains and the Markets Institute whose goal is to identify and create awareness about global issues and trends on the horizon for food and soft commodities and then build consensus about how to best anticipate them. Dr. Clay launched WWF’s work on agriculture, livestock, aquaculture, finance and reshaped the WWF's work with the private sector and on fisheries. During his career he has worked on a family farm and in the U.S. Department of Agriculture; taught at Harvard and Yale; and spent more than 35 years working in human rights and environmental organizations.

Related resources

News article: Our Global Food Supply Chain Needs Urgent Attention (Jason Clay, 2021)

TABLE report: Primed for power: a short cultural history of protein (Tamsin Blaxter and Tara Garnet, 2022)

TABLE explainer: What is feed-food competition? (Helen Breewood and Tara Garnett, 2020)

TABLE explainer: What is the land sparing-sharing continuum? (Walter Fraanje, 2018)

TABLE explainer: What is sustainable intensification? (Walter Fraanje and Samuel Lee-Gammage, 2018)

TABLE blog: Spotlight on vertical, urban and indoor agriculture (Helen Breewood, 2018)

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