Beyond the Placement: An MDS Trainee at the Cambridge Forum

I recently had the privilege of attending the Cambridge Forum for Future Food Supply Chains at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing.

The day began with coffee at 8:30am and ended with a formal three-course dinner at the historic Peterhouse College. In between, I sat in a room with world-leading policymakers, economists, farmers, and academics, who were all brought together with one shared purpose: to understand the fault lines in our global food system and work towards fixing them.

Overview of the Forum

The event was not a passive experience of sitting through presentations. Every person in the room was expected to contribute. Keynote speakers included Dr Máximo Torero, Chief Economist at the FAO, who joined virtually to address how food security must be understood in the context of a deeply fragmented world, and Dr René Castro Salazar, former FAO Assistant Director General, who reframed food security as a matter of national security, and not just agricultural policy.

Closer to home, Paul Tompkins, Deputy President of the National Farmers Union, spoke candidly about the pressures facing British farmers and the importance of building a confident, future-ready farming sector that is shaped by those who actually work the land.

The key points of discussion

The morning and afternoon sessions covered six interconnected themes: global food security, inclusive supply chains, climate and nature policy, financing food futures, ESG reporting, and digital solutions. But threading through all of it were a handful of issues that kept surfacing:

El Niño and a broken agricultural calendar – traditional seasonal patterns are no longer reliable, leaving farmers increasingly unable to forecast and plan, which drives up risk at every level of the supply chain.

Fragmented value chains – speaker after speaker pointed to the lack of collaboration between stakeholders as one of the most significant barriers to building a resilient food system.

Regenerative agriculture: promising but undefined – Nicoline van Gerrevink from Rabobank and Beverley Postma of Grow Asia both touched on the challenge of financing and scaling regen ag when the definition of what it actually means remains inconsistent. If we can’t standardise our understanding, and importantly the metrics, how do we fund the transition?

Food literacy – an often overlooked dimension. More needs to be done to help consumers, farmers, and policymakers understand where food comes from, what it costs to produce, and what it means nutritionally and culturally.

Consumer behaviour as part of the problem – one speaker put it memorably: we need to get people eating “at the table, not on the screen.” Food is more than sustenance, it is a biophysical process, a means of connection, and a cultural act. Transforming the food system requires transforming how we think about eating itself.

The Highlight: Cambridge’s Global Food Supply Chain Observatory

My personal highlight of the day was learning about the Global Food Supply Chain Observatory, led by Dr Mukesh Kumar at Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing. The Observatory collects fragmented, dispersed data from across global supply chains to build a more complete picture of trade flows, geopolitics, and vulnerabilities. The power of this tool lies in its ability to remove blindspots– the gaps in knowledge that leave decision-makers reactive rather than proactive.

Reflections with my Member Company

One of the most valuable parts of the day was what happened after it; bringing these ideas back to my member company and bouncing them off my manager. One conversation in particular has stayed with me. We talked about the narrowmindedness of current buzzwords – regenerative agriculture, resilience and harmonisation – and what my manager felt was missing from the conversation: selectivity. The ability to use information correctly, to make discriminate, context-specific decisions rather than applying broad frameworks uniformly. As data and AI make it easier to act on granular intelligence, selectivity may well be the concept that shapes the next decade of agricultural practice.

Why Moments Like This Matter for MDS Trainees

The MDS programme is built on the principle that effective leadership in agriculture requires more than technical knowledge – it demands awareness, exposure, and experience across the entire supply chain. Days like this – sitting alongside FAO economists, NFU leaders, Rabobank financiers, WWF policy experts, and leading researchers – bring that into sharp focus. They reinforce the relevance of the work we do within our member companies and remind us of the bigger picture we are all working towards.