 My name's Charles Godfrey, and I'm here to talk about how to feed a population of nine to ten billion people sustainably. Probably throughout human history, the single thing that is most likely to have caused social disruption, riots and things, has been a shortage of food. In 2008, food prices began to rise, and we saw a series of social disruptions throughout the world. Food riots were one of the causes of the Arab Spring, just one of the causes, brought down a government in Madagascar. So I think we're beginning to get warnings that the food system is not going to be able to deliver. There are probably now about 800 million people who go to bed hungry at night, and maybe the same amount again, maybe even more, who suffer from some micronutrient deficiency. So there is a real challenge going ahead about crafting a global food system that provides affordable food for a population that's going to be somewhere around 10 billion people. And I think that the magnitude of that challenge is such, is that we're going to have to take action across the board. If we look ahead at the increased demand that is going to occur in the future, then logically there are two ways one could meet that demand. One could meet that demand by bringing more land into agriculture, or by increasing the yields of land that is already in agriculture, especially in places like Africa, yields are pitiful, largely because there's insufficient economic investment, insufficient infrastructure. Very often the people then have the skill sets, the human capital that's needed to produce those food. And I think we've ignored the importance of agricultural development for a long time. Now one of the things that worries me most is that if food prices begin to rise, there will be tremendous pressure on bringing land into agriculture, on cutting down rainforests, on draining swamps, of bringing grasslands that have never been in agriculture into agriculture. And I think one of the real concerns about that is that this will lead to an enormous amount of carbon dioxide coming into the atmosphere, really concerning for global change, for climate change. One of the things that concerns me at the moment has been the dash to biofuels. So at the moment we are using a lot of agricultural land to produce biofuels. Currently a lot of this is completely economic without a considerable amount of subsidy. It also worries me that you are making a link between energy prices and food prices. So as energy prices goes up there will be more impetus to produce biofuels and so that will then put pressure on food prices. Energy prices are so volatile I wouldn't want food to be linked to such a volatile market. One of the most important issues facing food policy people at the moment is meat. We know that some forms of producing meat have very major effects on the environment. They use a lot of water, they result in a lot of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere. Other methods produce far fewer negative impacts on the environment. So it's very wrong to say that all meat is bad or that we need to move outside of meat. That would be a very bad message to give to a pastoralist in where I work in northern Kenya where the local Takana peoples rely on their cattle for 90-95% of all their food intake. So there are some forms of producing meat that are really quite damaging and one should do the best to mitigate that or to move to other production systems. In general, and this is only a very broad rule of thumb, white meats, the chickens and the porks, tend to be less damaging to the environment than the red meats. But even within red meats, there's a huge amount of difference. For example, some of the things we need to learn from agroecological approaches to food production is how to be more efficient. For example, we need to learn from farms in southern China and in Vietnam where they grow rice and they have little ponds in which they grow freshwater fish and then they have chicken and pigs. And the waste products from one type of food production are used as the inputs in another. We need to learn from the wonderful success about some agroforestry schemes. We're going to have to craft a global food system that consists of a network of bread baskets so that if Australia suffers a very bad harvest, then it can be matched by production in South America or in the Ukraine or in North America. And certainly, if I was the prime minister or the agricultural minister of a country like Egypt, Egypt imports more wheat, I believe, than any other country, and I was looking at my risks, then I would really want to be assured that the global system in trade and these important commodities was able to give me the resilience that I required to feed my population. And I think in general, we need to make use of the comparative advantages of different countries, the Brazils and the Ukraine, that can produce far more food than their own population requires. My view is we don't have the luxury of abandoning any particular technique. We must use modern biotechnology, including genetic modification, but genetic modification GM is not a magic bullet. We need to spend as much time thinking about the low-tech effects, the low-tech techniques that have been pioneered in the organic movement and in agroecology. We need to bring what works best from those type of systems into conventional agriculture. So I see the challenges are so great we must investigate what works without knowing what the answer is in advance.