Kyle King
Appearances
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Yes. And so in this context, not necessarily with the border nations, because to your point, if there was no other way to move the grain that was being produced out of Ukraine, for example, you would have those demand pressures that are on neighboring countries to produce to sustain the population in the conflict area.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
In this case, it was a bit unique because they were essentially flooding the market because it was typically going by ship into Africa.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And in this case, in many ways, for at least a short period of time, it reversed and then flooded into Europe, which then caused that market turbulence in terms of the local producers that were not able to sell their grain on the market for the prices that they had before. And so that was causing some problems initially.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But to your point exactly is correct, is that if you cut off production in one area, then you immediately put demand on the others that are producing. And that causes additional strain and use of resources in those surrounding nations.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Okay, thanks. Well, thanks for having me on the show. I really do appreciate it. I'm happy to be here as well. And to discuss what I think is a growing and important topic. I think it's something we've been dealing with for a long time in terms of food security, and it's getting a lot more visibility now.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I think you've emphasized a key point, which is, you know, the sort of systems thinking approach to this and how everything is connected. I mean, because food has been something that we, you know, humanity has been struggling with for forever, right? Yeah. And the challenge is you cannot just rapidly grow food. And so it's not easily replaceable.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
It takes time and it needs to be adaptive and it needs time and space to be able to do that. And so this is where it becomes a real challenge because if our environment is rapidly changing, You know, our food systems don't necessarily have the ability to change as rapidly as that. And so that's where we start to really have some issues.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And especially when, you know, in my line of business, we always say all disasters are local. And so if you take that premise and you say, OK, the local community is first and foremost impacted by a disaster. Earthquake, hurricane, whatever the case is, it's always the community that bears the brunt of that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And so you can extract from what you're talking about, what we're discussing right now in terms of these larger geopolitical tensions and war and conflict and food supplies at a global level, but you can push that down to a community level. How are our communities really prepared? You mentioned like in the US, you know, just going to the store and picking something up.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But what are the supply chains behind that? What's the food and safety systems behind that? How does that actually get into the store? And what are your alternatives as somebody who lives in that community to be able to have your own secure food supplies? And this is something that is becoming more prominent in our discussions because we can see.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
You can see the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You can see how they're trying to manage food supplies. You can see the restrictions on the imports and food production and the effect it's having on the communities. And I think just in the United States,
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But before we dive into that, my favorite food, you know, I would actually have to say, and this is going to be a terrible answer, but I'm going to have to default to just sort of a pizza. And the reason is because I've traveled internationally quite a bit. And, you know, the Italians do a pizza in a certain way.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
You know, specifically, we're very, very lucky in terms of geography and positioning in the United States that we don't necessarily have that issue. But at the same time, you know, if we look at our communities, we do have massive hurricanes, earthquakes and everything else.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And so there's still an adequate reason to be prepared and really to make sure that you at a community level have a diverse food supply. You're aware of what is there. You're aware of how to get food when you need it. And it is sort of adaptive and meets the needs of the community.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And if even inside Italy, you know, if you go to Napoli and other areas, they have different pizza styles and Sicily and everything else like that. But it is one constant, right? It is one constant anywhere in the world. You can always find a pizza. You can always have a slice of home, I guess I would say. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but it's something you can always rely upon.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Well, so in terms of the use of technology, it's complex, right? Yes, of course. Not just because it's technology, but because there's two different dimensions to this. And I see this a lot in our international work and then sort of answers your question and it doesn't. But the aspect of technology. So from a first world perspective, technology is super helpful, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So again, diversifying your systems, protecting your systems, and also, you know, sort of getting better crop yields and everything else that goes along with that. It enables us to be more efficient and scale in terms of food production and distribution.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But, you know, and I'm sure as you know, and I don't have the most recent statistic, but, you know, we lose, what, 30% or something like that or more on just food production, just in terms of distribution channels. And so that is, even though with the amount of technology we have, we still can't solve the problem on distribution channels.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And so that is a key issue because everything is perishable. And so that is something that is yet to be resolved. And then the other side of the coin is in much of my international work, when you go to these other countries and they might be more agrarian, right? And so they have a culture of farming and they have the production capabilities that are living from the land.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And then we come in and we say, no, but you need technology. Right. You need to buy this software and the subscription model and the GIS mapping and the drones and all that stuff. And just because you'll be better. And so that's that's the other aspect we often don't think about is if a community is fine with what they're doing, do they need the technology and do they need to produce more?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
You know, technology is an enabler. It creates efficiencies and things like that. But is it required in every single community across the globe? No. Is it required in larger populations that have demands and needs? Possibly.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So, you know, if you're talking about a country of 330 million people like the United States, and then you go to another country that has 6 million and they're doing fine, what is the role of technology then? When is it too much, right? When are you over-engineering the problem, I guess? and a certain perspective is what I would say.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And so that's something that there's a role for technology and it is a key role. I think there's just a time and a place and level of implementation that has to be carefully considered. It's one conversation unfortunately in the US and then it's a different conversation outside the US.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I would just go straight with the pepperoni, but there's also, you know, sort of a diavola, which is with the peppers and more hot, I guess I would say. And then, yeah, just a standard sort of margarita as well, which is sort of what a lot of Europeans default to.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I think that there's, just to add to that really quickly, I think, so you're absolutely right when you say, do you want to introduce new risk? And that should be the first question. And then how much is enough? Like, is a community producing enough food? Is it fine? But I think there's another perspective in terms of technology that we have to really give careful consideration to in the long run.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And you've probably heard this as well, but I mean, nobody wants to be a farmer anymore, right? Generally speaking for the younger generation. So I know that's a broad sort of statement, but there's a labor and workforce requirement that's not getting filled, which is well documented across the board in most of the labor fields. You know, I live in Europe.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Try to find a carpenter that can get to your house within six months. You know, it's almost impossible. Or an electrician. So that's where it is. It's really there's a there's a labor force requirement that may necessitate the introduction of technology to continue with production. And so it doesn't sort of fall backwards.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I think that's a critical aspect that has to be considered in sort of strategy and planning domain. And so that is something that I think has to be addressed at the same time. And you mentioned it, you know, sort of teaching farmers to code or whatever. I had a similar discussion, I think it was over a year ago. I was talking to somebody who was a sort of a very well-known food security person.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And we were having a conversation essentially about the same thing. And the same topic came up, you know, what do you do with the labor market with farmers who need to move on with technology? Like, what do they do? And, you know, I just posed the question of like, why are we not integrating farmers from rural areas into cities and saying, help us develop a vertical garden program, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
mean you could i mean but generally speaking it's a safe bet is there a particular pizza place that you have in mind that you were thinking of when you said that well i mean not really there's some really good italian places that i've that i've been to that you know when you go in and you just have this giant they bring out a very thin slice or a very you know thin pizza and just it's tremendous in size it takes up sort of half the table and it's absolutely fantastic the only problem is you generally will go into a carb sort of coma after that yeah
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Or a vertical farming program. They know how to grow things. It's just they need help with the city environment, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So why not blend technology and the knowledge for people who are coming or coming from an agricultural industry and just say like change New York into a vertical farming area and then just like change the entire landscape and dynamic, like put your initiative into that and then just sort of, you know, change the entire profile of a city to where food is produced locally, transported locally, and then is used locally.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Obviously, that's a nice idea, and I'm sure it's way more complicated than that. But I think it's just a paradigm of how can we just shift our thinking and to use technology to enable and also keep that knowledge that we gained over the years. Because the other thing that I would be concerned about is where does that knowledge go if we've forgotten that, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
If we lost that generation of farmers, like, I can't grow anything. So I'd be lucky if anything survives.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I just changed my business to a vertical farming business. There we go.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Just to sort of play off that thought, you know, if I was on a university campus and I was a dean or something, I would say, okay, we're going in, we're diving in on vertical farming and you're going to produce your own food and I'll cut your tuition rates, you know, because then you produce all your own food locally.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
You get them all involved in the production and community sort of resilience piece. And then you don't pay for food services like that, right? It's far more complicated than that, but I think you get the general idea is like, why not just turn your campus into a production facility? And then the students sort of live off their own organic food and then everything else that goes along with that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Of course, you still have to bring in food and everything else, but still, I mean, I'm sure it would cut your budget a bit.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
that's great and then your favorite food memory oh that's a great question i think you know for me personally i mean i'm originally from texas and originally from dallas and there used to be a restaurant in dallas that had this just infamously famous hot sauce and mexican food and it was absolutely fantastic and when you but when you go there it's sort of like a dive and you go in and the first thing they do is give you a giant glass of
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I don't think, at least from far as what I've seen, people are as for leaning into AI as... maybe the U.S. is and some other sort of maybe Western European nations. I think on the other hand, though, while we, you know, everybody looks to AI as being promising, I think that there's a real issue, you know, especially as we talk about advancing technologies.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I mean, and the way that we develop technology and the hazards that we're not necessarily aware of. And I'll use sort of the Tesla cars and things like that as an example, these lithium batteries that's It seemed great. And this just happened in Berlin, Germany, actually. And so they had a number of tax incentives to purchase all these cars.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And as soon as the tax incentives went away, then all the cars just dropped off a cliff and like totally stopped selling and nobody wanted them. And there was a number of reasons for that. And you probably heard about this too in the United States. But if you're in a colder climate, people are getting stuck on their car, trying to keep warm and they plug in their electric vehicle.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And they're just sitting there charging while barely being able to keep up with the heat in the car. So the infrastructure and the systems are not exactly in place to be able to enable a lot of this sort of implementation of technology. And I would bring it back to food security for sort of two specific things.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
One is how we develop the technology to be implemented within, you know, if we're talking about like tractors, things like that. From a emergency response perspective, these batteries are really, really problematic. It takes like 30 hours to put them out as opposed to like relatively, you know, 10 or 20 minutes with a regular battery, right? And a car fire. So it just takes forever.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And the water requirements are excessive to do that. It's like a thousand gallons of water for a normal car fire and like 30,000 gallons of water for a lithium battery fire in an electric vehicle. And so, you know, then you're the point being, if we're implementing technology as a solution, what are the actual long-term impacts? Because then we just create a water security problem.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
By creating this new technology. So then there's all sorts of environmental issues and sort of degradation and runoff and whatever happens when you contaminate the environment that goes along with that. So if that is the case, and then I think we agree there's a labor shortage issue and there needs to be something to fill that gap.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I think we have to give some thoughtful consideration around what is the technology that's being used to do that. and the vulnerability that we don't yet know. I'll use another case in point here is that the more IoT and connectivity that we have, as you've already identified, the more risk that we start to introduce.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Now, this may not be because we look at our own domain and we think IoT and we think, you know, sort of the systems that we have in place.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But if you go and you can just Google for the Chinese cargo ship that dropped its anchor in the Baltic Sea this year and then was dragging its anchor across the bottom of the Baltic Sea to try and pull up the major telecommunications internet connection cable between that connects to Europe and Northern Europe.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So they're intentionally trying to rip up this underwater sea cable that was a main communication line of internet to Europe. And so if all those systems go offline because of another sort of external national security issue, then all those systems are offline. So we sort of are then vulnerable to sort of outside actors as well, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Not even just from a hacking perspective, but just from a sabotage perspective as well.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
and pitcher of iced tea. And then the hot sauce was extremely hot, but the food was fantastic. And so that's something I always think about. I think it's closed now, but unfortunately that was always a good place to go for Mexican food back in the time when I was in the US.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Yeah, it's a nostalgia of the place. And then, you know, there's some for some weird reason. And you can sort of let me know if I'm right or wrong. But there's this correlation between going into a place that is rather simple by design, but has fantastic food. Right. And then if you go into a place that's sort of extravagant and the food is not great.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And there's a lot to unpack from that, right? Because, I mean, some of the things we just don't know. I mean, the world has changed in the last couple of years. We would have never thought that this would be the case with somebody dropping an anchor in the Baltic Sea. But that's just where the world is evolving to is into increasingly complex crisis.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And so I don't think that we know sort of what's next. I think we have some ideas and you could think largely worst case scenario. I mean, at the time of recording this podcast, I mean, there's like there's Russian ships off the coast of Florida. Who would have ever thought? you know, that that was going to be a thing, but you know, it is a thing as of today.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So now we know about the battery issues. Now we know about the connectivity issues. And as these things become apparent, then we just need to be able to plan for them and try and deal with them and mitigate them whenever possible.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Yeah, and it is really interesting, and I think that just comes down to sort of what we're talking about with the university level. If we could get away from the idea that a lot of these discussions around environmental issues and sort of self-sustainability are not, they're no longer sort of like drawn from the hippie era, and they're not some sort of conspiracy theory thing.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So for whatever reason, this place had just the lack of decor and the fantastic food just sort of stuck in my mind.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
It's just really about community preparedness and community resilience, not even just preparedness, because preparedness gives a connotation of, you know, we're afraid of something and we need to be prepared. But, you know, just community resilience and self-sustainability.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And I think if we can adopt that sort of mindset and, you know, again, using this example of a university and you can sit there and, you know, grow your own food, repair your own stuff, and you can, you know, sort of understand and how to set up solar and build solar and all while you're studying at a university.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I think you're just going to be better off as a person, more well-rounded by the time that you finish your degree and move on. It doesn't mean you have to continue doing it, but I'm pretty sure that most people would retain those skills over their life.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Thanks. Yeah, so my name is Kyle King. I'm the managing director of Capacity Building International. It's one of our small consultancy firms, and we focus on international security, institutional capacity building, and with a specific focus on crisis management, planning, and resilience. And on the other side of that, we have Crisis Lab. I'm the founder of Crisis Lab.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Well, so first of all, I think, you know, if you want to get oriented around the international sort of environment and discussion on food, food security, NATO itself has a food and agricultural group that they have, and they get national experts from across the alliance to have meetings and discussions. But there's a lot of EU initiatives as well.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And I would sort of tune into those as well as the UN is obviously publishing a lot, but they're doing that around the idea of sort of food insecurity. But I think there's four sort of things that we look at from an information sharing and sort of a technology perspective when we are looking at food security.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
I'll sort of share those with you so that you can have an understanding of how we would view it from a sort of more strategic level. But, you know, when we're we're assessing, you know, food security and we're evaluating, I guess I would say we're looking at things like what are the data exchange platforms for information sharing and then and raising awareness about possible risks or dangers?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Like, how is that communicated? And how is that communicated across stakeholders in that food security domain? And how do we communicate the dangers to the stability of food and water supplies? How is that indicated? How is it detected? And how is it communicated? And then we ask questions about, is there some kind of early warning system then if you do find something? And who does it go to?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Especially if you're in the private sector, is it only the private sector? Does it go to any public officials in a local level? What about the national level? Does it feed into a larger mechanism to have a complete sort of national picture of food supplies? There's always a question because the U.S. has one approach and many other nations have a different approach.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But is your network, is it nationalized or is it private? Is it completely in the private sector hands? If so, that requires, let's say, significant regulation. If it's nationally driven, then that's generally mandated by legislation, for example. And then, of course, your stakeholders. I mean, where are your stakeholders and what role do they play?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
From your suppliers to your distribution centers to your maintenance and service technicians and also in your community. Are they a part of your data exchange platform? And where is this all integrated together to have that common operational picture that so many people look for? And there's lots of other things that go into that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
You know, we look at response capabilities, we look at training, we look at planning, and the planning is a big portion of it. And also in terms of assessment, because we're looking at risks, we're looking at stakeholders, when we're looking at the level of inclusion in terms of planning and across the community itself.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So there's just a lot from these sort of different dimensions that we're looking at. Food security and technology absolutely does play a role in that, especially as we've talked about in terms of changing in the labor market and technology itself and trying to get more efficient. But we do look at fundamentally at the end of the day, we're looking at can we enable and can we communicate?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Can we enable the information exchange? Can we communicate threats and requirements? And can we build a common operational picture so that we can play it ahead, which I think is one of the key things that we've been talking about today.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And so that's our online peer-to-peer professional development platform that's fully accredited. And that's where we are bringing international experts together to share their experiences, their ideas, and to be able to help us all be better professionals at the end of the day by expanding our worldview on the topics that we have to deal with every day. So that's sort of what I'm doing today.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Yeah, absolutely. And I completely agree, which is why we continue to say all disasters are local and even all conflict is local. Communities bear the burden. And if you just focus on your community and the next steps to have a more prepared community, then I think you're already on the right track. Exactly.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
No, thank you for the time. Really interesting discussion. I think if you want to learn more about sort of the work that we're doing and the things that we focus on, even though it can be very sort of strategic and abstract sometimes, you can go to CrisisLab.io. That's where we have our professional development platform.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And that's where we have lots of people from the international community who are presenting their views on what it means to be resilient. And so if you're a professional who's looking to expand your horizons and to widen your view of things that might be influencing your day-to-day work, then Crisis Lab is the place for you.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So if you have any questions or anything else, or if you want to reach out to me in person, you can reach me on LinkedIn. I'm there all the time and happy to answer any questions.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
My pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
In my past, I spent 17 years in the emergency services and the emergency response side of the house, specifically within the US Department of Defense. And during that time, I was very fortunate to start working overseas very young. And so then I was deployed into international operations or sort of DOD operations.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And so that was where I spent a lot of time in the Balkans during the conflict periods and then also two and a half years in Afghanistan. Took a break for a while and then ended up working for the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe for two years before the war in Ukraine started.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And also during that time before I actually went to Ukraine, I skipped over this, but I spent seven years as a civil emergency advisor supporting NATO operations. And so that was really construct behind all of this is bringing emergency services and crisis management and all these sort of resilience topics into conflict areas to try and create stability.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So that's one of the things that has been a key theme throughout my entire career path thus far. So that's a sort of a really quick sort of complicated overview of how I got here today.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Sure. So at this point in time, like most of our work is focused on supporting like U.S. bilateral efforts with partners overseas. And so we are working with partners in their various, let's say, government departments, agencies and entities that are responsible for various different aspects of resilience and civil security. So that could be in the topic for today, like food security.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
That could also be in water security, telecommunications. Overall crisis management. So we spend a lot of time focused on, okay, what is your national response plan? These FEMA-like organizations that are in different countries, how are they planning for disasters? How do they mitigate, recover from them? How do they respond to them? What is their crisis management framework?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
How is their constitution to the laws, to the various policies they have? How is that word designed and orchestrated? And how do they have and how they measure interagency cooperation. So a real sort of spoiler alert, everybody has problems with interagency cooperation, so it's nothing new for anybody. But, you know, how do these systems and structures, how are they established?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
What are the best practices? And how can we promote these different sort of best practices across the international community so that we're able to more adeptly respond to a crisis? And also, increasingly, how can we handle more complex crisis? Because as the world evolves, and we have seen in recent years,
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
You know, things are becoming more complex, more interconnected, and requires much more of a whole of government approach to addressing these problems than we do today. So day to day, it's really about sort of a lot of advising, mentoring, guiding, policy development. It's helping with the planning processes, a lot of discussion on interagency cooperation.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
We might get into technical details on say tabletop exercises or scenario based discussions and sort of at a practical level, especially if we're doing more community engagement aspects. Recently, I was in Latvia. We were discussing how can civil society and nonprofit organizations contribute to community resilience and thereby overall national security.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So there's different approaches that we take. We have a sort of a top-down approach, which is policy and legislation. And we have a bottom-up approach, which is through crisis level, we call our sort of our in-person labs where we work with community leaders to understand the changing environment and what they could do locally to have a greater impact with the resources that they have.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Sure, absolutely. So one of the things that we orient our work really around a couple of key themes. One is the perspective, because we do work sort of with one foot in the security environment and the other one in the crisis management environment. So we do orient our perspective around what NATO produces in terms of what they view as food security and in some cases food insecurity.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But I would say from a more civilian perspective, you know, we're really looking at having resilient food and water resources, you know, which really means ensuring those supplies are safe from disruption or sabotage. In the case of security incidents or even more concrete to the for the country to be able to provide sufficient supplies available to both civilians and military.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And this is where it switches slightly. And when we talk about food security, because from a military perspective, we're also talking about to be able to provide for the nutritional needs of military forces and avoiding putting limitations on military operations just due to food and crisis and a crisis in the population that you're working in.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Now, this has become increasingly important for NATO over the last few years. Really, since about 2010, it started to become an issue.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But most recently, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we've seen the impact and the sort of dialogue around food security and the importance of food security and how the lack of security can lead to food insecurity over time, especially if you are having conflict in a nation which is considered the world's breadbasket in producing wheat and grain.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And so this is something that NATO is focused on. We organize some of our work around these, what they call, NATO resilience baselines. Anybody can Google that. It's out in the public domain.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But that considers communications, transportation, water security, secure water supplies, secure food supplies, crisis management, mass casualties, population movement, all these things that nations traditionally deal with during a conflict. But it's also taking a step back, looking at what we're doing today. How are our communities prepared?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Because then we start leading into discussions about societal resilience. What is building a more resilient society? What does that mean? What does it take to do that? Well, food security is a component of a resilient society. We need safe and secure supplies of food.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
We need the ability to have secure supply chains and to be able to prevent any sort of sabotage or attacks on the food systems, the distribution systems that go along with that. And that is a key component. And so when we're not in conflict, for example, we need to be looking at these different thematic areas and then seeing how we can become more robust. How can we plan? How can we get better?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Because we know ultimately at the end of the day that there's going to be more crisis. It's increasingly complex. It's going to be more intertwined into the different aspects that we're dealing with. So it's not just food security, but then if it's food, it's probably also water, which means that's also going to be combined with energy security, which is another topic that we look at.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And all these systems are going to be tied together. And so responding to one is generally going to be responding to all. An additional sort of final thought that I'll leave you with is a long answer to your question. But is that, you know, we also look at it from the perspective of food insecurity and food insecurity driving things such as migration and mass migration.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So food security, you know, if you're looking at sub-Saharan Africa, if you're looking at recent population movements from South America, you know, you're seeing that climate changes could potentially lead. to food insecurity and then drive migration of mass populations.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
And this is something that has been trending recently in the last few years, but we're starting to really see in mass and in numbers. And it's something that we haven't really faced before in terms of migration of entire populations, because they're not able to say, grow the food that they need to sustain themselves.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Oh, yeah, there's multiple places that are impacted by food insecurity. I mean, look across the entire continent of Africa. And in many cases, you'll find, you know, sub-Saharan Africa and others that have just a long tradition of food insecurity, not being able to grow the amount of food that they need to sustain their populations.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
We, as I mentioned, sort of South America and the mass migration that we're seeing and population movement that we're seeing, which is the terminology that, you know, many international organizations use now is just population movement, not necessarily migration. It's is people actually just moving completely out of their country, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So it's a population that's just displaced and going somewhere else. And then you see, obviously, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then you saw production drop sharply in terms of the grain needed to support a giant swath of the globe and from Africa to Europe. And in that case, you know, that was very specific. There were many factors that contributed to that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
Obviously, the war and the invasion being one. But if you look at
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
the knock-on effects and the the connections to that then you start to see over time the impact on the black sea shipping lanes the ability to move and transport food just because the the threats conditions the mines that were not allowed there's also other issues in terms of wartime insurance and not being able to ensure commercial freight to be able to to be shipped across the sea because it's a wartime environment insurance companies don't want to do that so it's administrative hurdle they had to get through to be able to ship grain and then you see okay if they're going to transport it by
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
by road, then what are the connecting nations that border Ukraine? There's Romania, Poland and many others.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
But then you create an imbalance, an ecosystem where those that are producing grain in Poland and other countries would then are challenged, I guess I would say, in terms of selling their own crops because their market is flooded, because now things are not going to the Black Sea, they're going by border and into Poland. which then causes knock-on effects, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Food Security and Crisis Management with Kyle King
So then you have sort of political tensions, you have escalations, you have farmers that are blocking the borders on an entryway into Poland from Ukraine, and you have all sorts of protests that come from that. And that leads into instability over time as these pressures sort of compound and then spread because of one single action that's been taken.