A border crossing debate for a viable planet

There is only one earth, a planet inhabited by a wide range of living organisms. There is only one primary energy source, the sun. Thanks to the sun, the earth is able to renew its resources on a temporal basis. Some may describe this as a cyclic process. However, a better visual presentation may be a spiral, including both development capabilities of living species and self-organisation of the ecosystem as a whole to avoid non-reversible steps into the chaotic regime.

The earth and sun determine our playing field and its boundary conditions. They allow us to play a variety of games to challenge and please us. The number of games is large, but not unlimited. How large? That depends on our creativity and passion to play. However, we have realised that the number may decrease if we don’t respect the playing field and boundary conditions. An example of the latter is for example the continuous rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations due to our daily requests for more energy. Sea levels may rise and weather conditions may change more rapidly and extremely; con sequently, this will restrict us to where to live and what to do.

The limitations set by the earth and sun as well as the growing world population force us to become more and more creative in where and how to produce and transform renewable resources. Even though production and transformation are traditionally considered as two separate research domains – witnessed by the way research centres are organised – the integrated view on renewable resources is a prerequisite to fully exploit a viable earth potential.

Even more, a cross-sector approach is required in the near future, understanding the needs and opportunities for a range of applications of renewable resources. Currently, the European Technology Platform (ETP), like the one on Food for Life or Plants for the Future are sector oriented. For the near future, transversal ETP’s should be favoured, taking into account developments in the agri-food area, as well as in cosmetics, green chemistry, medicine, energy, automobile industry, ICT, manufacturing technologies, even aeronautics, etc. At least in the future, an exchange of views between the ETP Food for Life and ETP SusChem may lead to challenging new research and innovation trajectories. Both from a societal and scientific point of view, questions arising at the border crossing may be more challenging and permit us to come up with real innovations. For food companies, you may like to contribute to the debate stating new questions and elaborating on potential solutions with companies from outside the agrifood area such as from green chemistry; thereby providing the European Commission, other (inter-)national bodies and research organisations input for new bio-based oriented research programs.

In Europe, some of the first research centres are starting to work cross-border, often with industries. This also holds for IATE, the joint research centre of INRA, CIRAD, SupAgro and the University of Montpellier II in France. It is committed to finding creative research solutions for the full chain together with national, European and global partners. Here, the focus is on transformation processes for both food and material applications, starting with fractionation, fermentation, separation, structuring and incorporation into biomaterials (e.g. novel packaging materials) or food products (e.g. durum wheat based healthy Mediterranean diets). Moreover, research approaches are discussed in a wider context including plant production, environmental and socio-economic sciences.

On one hand, this may enlarge the complexity of research, including multidisciplinary, multi-national, multi-sector trajectories to understand the complexity of matter at large (e.g. interactions between lipids and proteins in all stages along the agrifoodbiomaterial chain). On the other hand, today’s complex societal demands require deeper insights in mono-disciplinary trajectories – areas such as the (non-food) matrix and soft matter. For the European Commission – with support of the ETPs and other agenda setting networks – this not only means coming up with a list of research topics but also interacting, large scale, research and innovation programs. The coordination of those requires skilled people who are able to recognise and respect the variety of expertises as well as building teams. Here, industrial partners may be of great support as well, because they are often dealing with large-scale innovation programs. Cross-sector training programs for seniors are highly needed.

There are many more new games to play around the theme of people, planet and prosperity. Why should we, together with colleagues in other industrial sectors, not allow ourselves to do so?

Biography

Hugo de Vries is employed by INRA as director of the Joint Research Centre on Biopolymers and Emerging Technologies in Montpellier, France. Previously, he has worked for Wageningen UR, The Netherlands and was coordinator of the European Integrated Project NovelQ.