News

Creating Shared Value With Neem

Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers and Chemicals (GNFC) has been awarded the Porter Prize for Creating Shared Value, a prestigious award from the Institute of Competitiveness in affiliation with Harvard Business School, for their Neem Project. Successfully generating $3.9 million in 2016, the GNFC community initiative has provided employment for over 225,000 rural women in India. With plans to expand their operations from 4,000 village collection centers to over 12,000 across the country this year, the project has brought India closer to sustainability by using neem to naturally protect crops, improve soil health and reduce demand of urea – a synthetic fertilizer that is directly responsible for soil degradation and biodiversity loss.…

A Boost in Confidence for the Global Economy

The World Bank has published their latest flagship report on the state of the global economy – Global Economic Prospects, 2017. Here’s what you need to know:

Be Cautiously Optimistic

Increased manufacturing and trade, rising market confidence and stabilizing commodity prices around the world have the World Bank pegging their global economic growth forecasts at 2.7% in 2017. While this will be the fastest rate of growth seen in the last seven years, long-term global economic prospects remain clouded by political uncertainty and renewed financial market turbulence.

Accelerating Global Economic Growth

Source: World Bank (2017)

Think Carefully About the Revival in Global Trade

Healthier industrial activity, investment and commodity prices fueled a revival in global trade growth to 4% in 2017, from a post-crisis low of 2.4% in 2016.…

Pension Funding Gap Set to Overtake Global GDP

The World Economic Forum has calculated that pension systems across the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia will have a joint shortfall of $224 trillion by 2050. If you add China and India to the equation, the combined gap nearly doubles to $400 trillion. That’s five times the size of the current global economic output. Such a shortfall places severe risks on the incomes and quality of life of future generations while setting the industrialized world up for one of the most widespread pension crises in history.

The Global Pension Crisis

Source: Mercer (2017)

Funding this shortfall will not be easy with global debt levels rising to more than 325% of GDP in 2017, reaching an eye-watering $217 trillion.…

Cool Heads Will Prevail in Climate Change Disagreement

President Donald Trump has declared that the United States will withdraw from the historic COP21 Paris Agreement in its current form, as brokered by the United Nations Framework on Climate Change in December 2015.

With an objective to stem the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the landmark Paris Accord saw 195 countries set their own targets in mitigating the drastic impacts of climate change. Despite expert advice from global leaders and heads of industry to uphold the original agreement, President Trump has fulfilled a campaign promise to renege on the previous administration’s commitments to climate action and pave the way for new negotiations to take place.…

Ours is the Era of the Planetary Household

Throughout the 20^th century, the global economic system has prioritized one performance indicator above all else – growth in gross domestic product. In recent decades that focus has propelled the global economy to almost unimaginable heights, pushing inequality to unprecedented levels and intensifying the pressure placed on the world’s most essential resources. The current system, characterized by excessive resource extraction and consumption supported by years of quantitative easing and highly leveraged balanced sheets, risks both economic and ecological collapse. The make, use and lose philosophy for human development and prosperity is clearly unsustainable and demands a fresh strategy that meets the needs of mankind within the means of Planet Earth.…

The Financial Impact of Ecological Debt

Calculating the financial cost of climate change is no easy endeavor. While the impacts of rising temperatures on the foundations of the global economy are well documented, the financial implications remain to be fully understood.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has calculated that helping nations cope with climate impacts will cost the world half a trillion dollars annually by 2050. According to the London School of Economics, climate change is expected to cut the value of the world’s financial assets by $24 trillion by 2050 in the worst-case scenario. The best-case scenario, if efforts are successfully made to build a greener economy, will lead to the loss of only $2.5 trillion.…

The Need for Safe and Sustainable Packaging

There are only a few places in the world left untouched by human presence. One of these rare environments, an uninhabited atoll and UNESCO World Heritage site in the South Pacific called Henderson Island, has been overrun with an estimated 38 million pieces of trash. Every single day an additional 3,500 pieces wash up on this once beautiful shoreline. The major concern is that nearly all of the trash analyzed is made of plastic. What’s worse, these pieces come from many countries around the world.

The sheer amount of plastic waste is a global problem. Why? Nearly every single piece of plastic ever made still exists today and global plastic production has exceeded 300 million tons per annum, a figure widely expected to double in the next twenty years alone.…

A New Global Economic Order

If you spend any time reading reports from the United Nations, International Monetary Fund or even the Wall Street Journal, the year 2050 holds great significance. As an upper limit to most peer-reviewed forecasts, the next few decades are widely considered fundamental to solving some of the world’s most significant challenges. Facing an unprecedented increase in our global population, accelerating environmental degradation and the limited reserves of our most essential resources, we must adapt to strengthen our way of life now and for generations to come.

So what will life be like in 2050? Firstly, there will be considerably more people.…

Signs of Recovery for Global Commodity Markets

Although global commodity markets have been under stress for some time, investors are beginning to look at recent developments more opportunistically. According to the World Bank, prices for most commodities strengthened in the first quarter of 2017. Crude oil is expected to rise to an average of $55 per barrel (bbl) in 2017 from $43/bbl in 2016. Metal prices are projected to increase by 16% as a result of stronger demand in China and agricultural commodity prices are beginning to show early signs of recovery and growth. So why the positive forecasts when diversified commodity indices are down 5% so far this year?…

Building Meaningful Lives at the Milken Institute

We at Primal Group see profound value in driving a revolutionary transformation in business, one that is geared towards the adoption of innovative and exponential solutions to solve some of the world’s most significant challenges. Attending the 20^th Annual Milken Institute Conference over the last week alongside an impressive 4,000 industry leaders across finance, government, agriculture and healthcare, we had the great opportunity to explore the major social and economic challenges facing humanity.

The conference line up of 750 speakers included former President of the U.S. George W. Bush, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, President of the World Bank Taro Aso and Chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase Jamie Dimon.…

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Accelerating Global Economic Growth

Source: World Bank (2017)

The Global Pension Crisis

Source: Mercer (2017)