Industry Alliances:
Collaboration, Human's Competitive Advantage
Famous anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked, "What is the first sign of civilisation?" She did not answer "fire" or "tools“; she said, "A healed femur." She said it’s because a femur can’t heal without someone being cared for by their community for 3-6 months. In short, survival was collaboration.
Have times changed so much? Today, tribes (groups of people working together for survival) are called ‘companies’. But survival is still determined by people's willingness to organise and support one another within companies and across value chains.
We see this in the story about feed ‘competitors’ coming together as a feed community to ensure animals were fed.
The question today is how our industry comes together before the flood to prevent widespread climate-change-driven floods, droughts, and heat.
Humans (can) excel at collaboration, but it helps when we remember that collaboration is our true competitive advantage, not competition itself.
survival is still determined by people's willingness to organise and support one another.
TACKLING GROWING COMPLEXITY
As the global feed industry tackles growing complexity, from decreasing margins, commodity volatility, trade tensions, while also facing extreme weather and water shortages - it may be cliché, but 'collaboration' paves the pathway forward. A good example of this is the Global Feed LCA Institute (GFLI), which uses the FAO LEAP methodology to build a global feed LCA database, with regional data, to measure & benchmark the environmental footprint of feed ingredients.
The are major barriers to scaling necessary changes, and alliances can help overcome them. Alliances, as we will see, can mobilise capital, de-risk change, harmonise standards, organise supply chains, share data so its more valuable to everyone, and scale solutions that no one organisation could deliver alone.
Alliances, particularly when paired with public incentives/disincentives, can also drive pre-competitive action so that no one company must bear the burden of investments that benefit the whole industry.
Aligning feed companies with AMR goals helps mitigate regulatory risks, supports market access, and advances sustainable livestock production.
BRAZIL‘S ALLIANCE FOR THE RESPONSIBLE USE OF ANTIMICROBIALS
In September 2018, Brazil launched the Alliance for the Responsible Use of Antimicrobials, which brings together agriculture-sector stakeholders to address the growing global threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in animal production. Through a ‘One Health’ approach, the initiative covers responsible antimicrobial use in livestock, resistance monitoring, education, and coordinated policy. Let’s explore what this alliance is addressing. The broader AMR burden in Brazil is substantial: in 2021 alone, there were an estimated 31,700 deaths directly attributable to and 130,000 deaths indirectly associated with AMR.
For the feed industry, this alliance has substantial implications. Feed inputs, nutrition, and farm management recommendations all influence animal health and antimicrobial use: healthier animals require fewer treatments
GLOBAL DAIRY PLATFORM’S PATHWAYS TO DAIRY NET ZERO
A great example of an alliance tackling a massive collective challenge with unprecedented consequences for every industry on the line, the Global Dairy Platform (GDP) initiative, Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ), launched a global alliance to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the dairy sector. This includes the feed and nutrition side of the value chain. The initiative considers animal nutrition (forage, feed formulation, specialty feed ingredients) as pivotal to decarbonising dairy.
From a feed-industry perspective, this alliance promotes pre-competitive collaboration to identify nutrition-based strategies, integrate feed companies into sustainability frameworks, and help global feed producers align with dairy-sector net-zero trajectories.
Globally, as demand for animal products continues to rise, alliances like P2DNZ demonstrate how feed and nutrition players can join broader climate-action efforts beyond their direct operations to influence supply chains, feed resource efficiency, and nutrition-based emissions reductions
When Collaboration Doesn’t Deliver
Collaborations tackling complex system-level challenges often struggle because organisations bring misaligned incentives, timelines, and mental models. Each actor optimises for its own commercial, political, or operational pressures, producing fragmented strategies that don’t add up to collective progress. Resource constraints, shifting priorities, and unclear governance further sap momentum.
These are classic structure-driven failures: the system itself pushes actors apart even when they intend to work together. A common version of this dynamic is the accidental adversaries pattern.
For example, a feed manufacturer and farming customer jointly commit to reducing antibiotic use through new functional feeds. Both genuinely share the goal, but their operating pressures diverge. The feed company, eager to demonstrate early success, accelerates the rollout of its new health-promoting formula and encourages rapid adoption.
Meanwhile, the farming customer slows implementation to run careful risk assessments, validate performance under different production conditions, and ensure that animal welfare and yield are protected.
Each interprets the other’s behaviour: the feed company sees the farmer as overly cautious and delaying impact; the farmer sees the feed company as pushing change faster than is practical, increasing perceived risk and workload. The faster the manufacturer pushes, the more the farmer resists, and the more proof the manufacturer feels it must generate, creating rework and tension on both sides. The partnership stalls as both actors devote growing energy to protecting their own positions.