In 2050, there will be 10 billion people on Earth.
Ten billion people that need to be fed.
Ten billion people living off the resources of a planet
that is already unable to sustain the 7 billion people living today.
Or at least not in the way we currently operate.
We all agree that to live, we need food, and, in particular, proteins.
With wild resources being limited and sometimes hard to obtain,
we farm: pigs, chickens, fish.
But to produce one kilogram of farmed fish,
we need to use five kilograms of wild fish as feed.
The consequence? Fish stocks are being depleted.
Same thing with chickens, which we feed with soy.
The more chicken we eat, the more soy we need.
And to grow more soy, we need to deforest areas, like the Amazon.
We are destroying whole ecosystems to produce more food.
And paradoxically, we don't eat everything we produce.
One third of the food we produce will never be consumed by a human.
One third.
We're producing waste and destroying our planet in the process.
So why am I telling you this?
My brother got married this summer.
I had the honor of being a witness.
On the day of the wedding,
before his friends and family, and before the mayor,
the marriage certificate was read out,
and the witnesses' names and professions were given.
Raphael Smia, fly farmer.
Yes, I farm flies.
To be more specific, I use insects to reclaim bio-waste
in order to produce proteins and lipids for animal feed and green chemistry.
OK, I've lost you.
What I do is gather bio-waste, like rotten apples from the supermarket
or food scraps from a restaurant.
We take all that, we grind it up, we mix it all up,
and we put it in our bio-reactors with insect larvae.
Our larvae love waste and rotting things.
To each their own. They eat, grow and fatten up.
And when they've gotten enough proteins and fats in them,
they're used as animal feed.
Chickens don't naturally eat South American-grown GMO soy.
No. They eat insects. Same thing for fish.
Yet, this is the model we've been given.
We grow grain that we feed to our livestock,
we harvest it, we turn it into food, we eat it, or we throw it out.
Farming insects makes it possible to recover the nutrients
which remain in this waste
and to reinsert those nutrients back into the human food cycle.
We go from a linear model to a circular economy.
So, who is this superhero of recycling?
Let me introduce to you the black soldier fly.
This shows that the flies in France aren't all white.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So a quick lesson on flies. A fly lays eggs.
Larvae hatch from these eggs.
If there's just one, no problem. But more than one, and look out!
The larvae eat, and when they've eaten enough, they become pupae.
A pupa is sort of like a cocoon for a fly.
After a few weeks, a new fly emerges from the pupa.
And this fly is the ideal farm animal.
First of all, it's harmless.
It doesn't sting. It doesn't bite. It doesn't transmit disease.
The adult fly actually doesn't even eat.
The only things it does is drink and look for mates.
Sort of like if you were to spend your whole life in a nightclub.
(Laughter)
And because adult flies don't eat,
they don't spread germs as they go from our garbage to our plates.
And also, they exist naturally in France,
so there's no risk of ecological disaster, like with the Asian lady beetle.
Lastly, and most importantly, black solider fly larvae are scavengers.
They can eat and process all different kinds of waste,
while creating none themselves,
since even their excrement can be used as fertilizer.
So, now you get it. These flies are perfect!
The only thing we needed was to domesticate them.
That's what we did with my associate, Jean-François Kleinfinger.
We built our first laboratory in the Loire-Atlantique department,
in a stable.
In it, we built a climate chamber,
which is a hermetically sealed chamber
in which we can control temperature, humidity,
and all that, inside.
I can tell you that for someone like me,
who has trouble putting IKEA furniture together,
this was a pretty big challenge.
We got our first larvae, we fed them,
and we waited impatiently for the first fly.
And here it is!
The first fly from the NextAlim laboratory.
I have to tell you my family and friends were wary.
Especially my grandma,
who asked when I was going to get a real job.
And I get where they're coming from.
I was digging through supermarkets' trash.
I spent my time watching and waiting impatiently
for flies to mate.
And I was putting larvae into different situations
to see how they would react.
For example, black soldier fly larvae behave in a peculiar way.
When they've finished eating,
they migrate out of their substrate, out of their food source.
This has its advantages and disadvantages.
The advantage is that there's no need to harvest the larvae one by one.
That's pretty nice.
The disadvantage is that they can migrate when we don't expect it.
That's what happened with our first generation.
We built them bins with ramps to facilitate their migration.
The ramps were precisely 45° from the ground,
like the literature said.
You can imagine the looks on our faces the next day,
when we found the lab littered with larvae.
The larvae had the brilliant idea of going up the vertical walls
rather than using our ramps.
Well, anyway, the colony is making progress.
And we even want to optimize our set-up,
like the number of matings, egg clutches.
This involves playing with different parameters:
light, temperature, and a bit of music.
(Barry White - "You're the First, the Last, My Everything")
No, seriously, music really works with flies too!
(Laughter)
We domesticated the flies, and with that success,
we were able to raise funds
from private partners and also from public partners,
who supported the project to the tune of several million euros.
What those funds, we were able to build a slightly more professional laboratory,
to conduct more thorough experiments,
and, most importantly, to determine the process and to draw up the plans
for the first industrial insect farming factory.
In 2017, we will be able to process 13,000 metric tons of bio-waste,
and to produce 4,000 metric tons of larvae per year.
And 4,000 tons of larvae, that's about 20 million times this.
And all that, with a single plant. But that's not all.
Bio-waste can be found everywhere in France.
We will set ourselves up as close as possible to bio-waste producers
to be able to produce local proteins.
But that's not all.
With one ton of bio-waste,
we can also make 300 kilograms of fertilizer, 75 liters of bio fuel.
That's a full tank of gas.
In 10 years, we'll be able to replace 50% of fish meal.
Still, insect farming isn't a panacea
that can save the planet and prevent the world's end.
But for a more sustainable, healthier society, every step counts.
Even the steps of flies.
(Applause)