The COVID-19 pandemic is raising public awareness and concern about certain aspects of the wider procurement with purpose agenda, in particular those to do with our relationship with the natural, living world. Whilst at time of writing, the source of the virus is not known with total certainty, many experts believe it originated in the animal “wet markets” of Wuhan, in China’s Hubei Province. These sell a wide variety of living and dead creatures for food and medicinal purposes.
The treatment of animals in the food supply chain, hygiene around selling animal products, and indeed whether it is sensible or healthy for humans to eat certain animals, have all been questioned before, but this new disaster has pushed such issues to the forefront. There have been suggestions that the virus may have originated in bats, and then entered humans via an intermediate species, perhaps pangolins, scaly anteaters which are prized as a delicacy and for the supposed medicinal properties of their scales.
Whether or not this proves to be true, it has highlighted subjective and cultural issues here as well as some that are less contentious. In the west, most people find the idea of eating dogs, monkeys and pangolins unpleasant or even disgusting. Baby pangolins are incredibly cute, which adds perhaps to those feelings. Yet in the west, we cook live lobsters, shoot and eat wild deer or rabbits, and eat cute young lambs or pigs, which are as intelligent as dogs and can make good pets.
But some have suggested that the virus is in some sense the “Revenge of the Pangolins”, as the New York Times headline put it. That might be going too far; a pangolin is unlikely to be sitting in a James Bond-type villain’s lair, stroking its white cat and plotting the downfall of the human race. But more reasonably, some of the world’s most eminent bio-diversity experts said this, as reported in the Guardian.
“Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases.”
Actor Idris Elba, who caught the virus and recovered, described the virus as the Earth’s revenge on the human race. Whilst positioning the earth as a sentient creature that is capable of plotting and executing “revenge” is perhaps even more far-fetched than the idea of a pangolin uprising, many of us probably share has sense that something has gone wrong in terms of human behaviour. Perhaps we have exploited the earth and our fellow living creatures on it more than we should have, leading to disastrous consequences now for humans as well as for the animals.
That explains why the way we interact with the natural world is core to so many procurement with purpose approaches and actions. They potentially cover a vast range of issues including climate change, plastics in the oceans, animal welfare, loss of animal species and bio-diversity, deforestation and the devastation of the rainforest, how we treat animals in the food supply chain, the provenance of our food (understanding where what we buy comes from) and more.
These issues do have some quite different characteristics, even if they all relate to the “natural world” and these need to be understood by any organisation wanting to focus on this broad area as part of their procurement with purpose programme. Some are hard to address properly; others might be relatively “quick wins” for organisations. But we will come back to these topics, as it seems very likely that this focus is only going to increase in coming months and years.
(Photo credit to Tikki Hywood Trust)