The Women in Food and Agriculture (WFA) conference in Amsterdam brought together practitioners, academics, and industry leaders to examine the forces reshaping the food and agricultural sectors. As a sustainability consultant, I left with three clear takeaways: that sustainable sourcing is becoming a genuine competitive differentiator, that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) efforts must be grounded in data and organisational transparency, and that - to no one’s surprise - artificial intelligence is expected to play a significant role in shaping the future of the industry.

Sustainable Sourcing as Competitive Advantage

One of the most compelling opening threads came from Belinda May Ball, Managing Director of Global Sourcing at ALDI SUD, whose personal leadership journey framed the broader conference conversation. The statistic she referenced - that 60.7% of professionals in global sourcing are women - was not incidental. It points to a meaningful shift in who is driving sustainability agendas within major supply chains, while also reminding us that fair representation is but one of the many steps to take towards real DE&I.

Ball's core argument was one we encounter often, though it’s rarely articulated with such clarity: sustainable sourcing is not a compliance exercise. It is a lever for long-term competitiveness and resilience, and it tends to be driven by leaders who hold genuine personal values around care for people and planet. This alignment between individual conviction and business strategy is not soft or anecdotal - it is increasingly what separates resilient organisations from reactive ones. Sustainability embedded in leadership culture performs differently than sustainability bolted on for reporting purposes.

DE&I: Moving beyond Headcount

The panel discussion - with the tongue-in-cheek title "Is DE&I Worth It?" - generated some of the most substantive conversation of the conference. The answer, unsurprisingly, was yes, but the nuance was in the how.

A recurring critique was that too many organisations still measure DE&I success through headcount metrics alone. The more meaningful indicators, speakers argued, are harder to quantify but far more instructive: belonging, psychological safety, trust in leadership, and whether employees feel a genuine safe space to speak up. Crucially, these are not soft impressions - they can and should be tracked through data. Senior leaders were framed as essential “bridges between insight and impact”: it is not enough to gather this data; it must be utilized to inform strategic decisions.

Two cautionary themes stood out. First, the danger of wholesale importing DE&I practices from other organisations. What works in one cultural or business context may be entirely misaligned with another's challenges. Effective DE&I strategy must be built around an organisation's specific friction points, not borrowed wholesale from industry benchmarks.

Second - a more obscure point that nevertheless should be front and center among senior leadership - was the concept of unmanaged exclusion. The speakers highlighted that organisations sometimes focus narrowly on the visible costs of DE&I investment while ignoring the far less visible costs of dysfunctional team dynamics that result from under-investing in inclusion. Diverse teams that are not actively supported in working well together do not automatically outperform homogeneous ones. The return on DE&I investment depends heavily on the quality of the inclusion (i.e. highly effective cooperation) work that surrounds it.

There was also a candid observation from academia: over the past two to three years, the term "DE&I" itself has attracted resistance in classrooms - particularly in the United States, but with ripple effects elsewhere. Educators are finding ways to continue teaching the substance while adjusting terminology to avoid triggering ideological resistance. It is a pragmatic response to a difficult environment, and one the private sector may increasingly need to consider as well.

Artificial Intelligence: Yield-Focused Today, Sustainability-Ready Tomorrow?

No conference in 2026 would be complete without a dedicated session on artificial intelligence, and this one delivered. Syngenta's contribution was both encouraging and sobering. Current AI applications in agriculture remain predominantly yield-focused - optimising output, reducing input waste, improving logistics. These are meaningful gains, but they capture only part of the value AI could deliver.

The more transformative opportunity lies in redirecting AI toward long-term sustainability outcomes: soil health monitoring, carbon sequestration tracking, ecosystem service preservation. The conference highlighted early-stage tools designed to track farmers' sustainability performance in real time - a development that, if scaled responsibly, could fundamentally change how we measure and incentivise sustainable agricultural practice along the value chain.

From the perspective of Covere2, this is where we see the most significant near-term opportunity. Organisations that begin integrating sustainability-focused AI tools now - particularly those that connect farmer-level data to supply chain decision-making - will be substantially better positioned as regulatory and market expectations tighten.

Leading with Purpose

What struck me most across the different discussions in our packed agenda, was the coherence of the underlying message: whether we are talking about sourcing strategy, team inclusion, or agricultural technology, the organisations making progress are those that treat data seriously, act on personal and institutional values in tandem, and resist the temptation of shortcuts. The food and agriculture sector faces profound challenges. The leaders gathered in Amsterdam are, it seemed, meeting them with the seriousness they deserve.