Editor’s Letter – Aug/Sep 2024
As well as getting to profile awesome entrepreneurs, cool new products and technology, I have a strange side hustle. After watching some close family members in the Cook Islands suffer from non-communicable diseases and an underfunded healthcare system despite being surrounded by a wealth of natural resources, I became a bit obsessed with some of the causes and solutions.
As is often the case with these things, it is more an interconnected maze of dominoes. High rates of non-communicable diseases in the Pacific have a strong connection to a fall in local food resilience and a shift from localised food production to large trade deficits and importation of highly processed, sugar-laden foods. This flows onto other social factors, such as intergenerational wealth and leadership when life expectancy rates fall into the 50s. So what started out as a personal kind of family mission has broadened out to leveraging new remote sensing data sets and AI analysis for local agricultural efficiency, and new research for high-value low volume extracts to help develop more export revenue streams for local farmers in an effort to provide better capital support to rebuild local food resilience and bring more economic autonomy to small communities.
This has also seen us extend discussions with the EU and recently China, resulting in the partnership of a new Oceania Centre in the free trade port of Hainan, which aims to be a gateway for capital support for Oceania innovation and also a gateway for scale into one of the world’s biggest markets. The world seems to be a bit of a diplomatic, geopolitical, political, macroeconomic and economic hotbed at the moment with uncertainties also compounded by the existential risk of AI-fuelled job replacements to add to the mix, but I think there is a lot to be optimistic about.
I think that we are in an age where smart innovation, a global outlook and some structures that create community participation in local resources can shift the dial on some big issues that have taken decades to bed in and provide not only the pathway for nation-to-nation diplomacy, but some dignity and autonomy at a grassroots level.
Sorry, I couldn’t quite segue America’s Cup, luxury travel and timepieces into this note to create a relevant welcome for this issue, but I figure you don’t really need me for that.
