 And now it is my great pleasure to introduce Hans Herron, who has spoken up a couple of times in the questions, but deserves a more formal presentation here, partly because he won the World Food Prize in 1995 for averting the Mealybug Crisis in Africa's cassava plant, and he is, of course, the president of the Millennium Institute down the street here. But most important, and I wanna emphasize this, because it's not sufficiently recognized in this country, and especially in this city. He was part of probably the single most important report we have seen in the field of agriculture in recent years. It's gotten very little attention in the United States. Unfortunately, it does have a bit of a mouthful for the name. It is the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology. That's the formal title, and I think that the title on the cover of the book is Agriculture at a Crossroads. Came out a couple years ago. It was really a revolutionary document, and it is a true shame that it has not gotten the attention here in the United States that it deserves. As a shorthand, you might think of it as the equivalent to the IPCC reports that are done on climate science. It's that kind of document in agriculture. Hans Herron was one of the co-chairs of that procedure, and he is going to be sharing with us now some of the results there on the general topic of how to avert a food crisis. Hans Herron. Thank you, Mark, for the introduction. I also want to express my thanks for having been invited here today to talk about a little bit the I-STAT, but also, as we call it, the I-STAT, because it's such a complicated name. Also, some ways forward, because we actually know what to do. The question is, why are we not doing it? How does this thing go forward? Is there a gadget? Oh, yeah. I'll assume it's this one. Oh, maybe I pushed it the wrong way. Oh, voilà, sorry. So first, I was asked by Mark, too, just a few words about the process itself. I mean, we call it sort of the IPCC for agriculture, yes. What was different was it was a fully multi-stakeholder process. We had governments involved civil society, and among the civil society were the private sector, so we had actually... Big Ag was there, too, at least in the beginning, until they had enough of it. We had many groups, farmers groups, from around the world, and so 400 people actually wrote that report, 2,000 pages. 800 people actually helped prepare the questions which were asked in the report. So it was a huge process, which all together took almost eight years to be done, and it was commissioned by the UN organizations at the Joe Buck Summit in 2002. So that's also important to know, so that it has a broad support from six UN agencies and also from the World Bank. So what came out after all these years and this hard work? Well, a number of issues which we actually rediscovered because a lot of these things actually not knew, but I think they were put down on paper in this multi-stakeholder process, which is, again, we have said, totally unique. So since we published the book, Agriculture at Crossroad, so it is one global report and five sub-global reports, 2,000 pages with summary for decision makers, which of each sub-global has a summary for decision maker and also the global one of something less than 20 pages because we know that these people actually don't know how to read or don't like to read, so we made it very, very short. Actually, the essence of the recommendations are maybe out four pages or in one single table. So, but that didn't really help much. I also want to mention about what's going on here in the US, Canada and Australia, who did not sign along with 59 other countries actually who signed on. But here, people have decided, although they participated, I think it was something like 20 members of USDA were authors on the report. That didn't mean that you have signed on in it because they didn't like our biotech findings nor the trade issues we put forward in this report. All right, so what's the reality? So again, we have a lot of hungry people in this world. Probably the number is a bit overblown. Actually, there's been a report lately saying that we're repeating all numbers. Is it really a billion? I mean, not that it matters too much if it's 800 million or a billion, way too many. We should not have anyone hungry actually in this world if we want to do the right thing. Never mind the obvious, we heard about this and the diabetes issues which is growing exponentially, which will probably kill many of the economies around the world. Energy system, we heard about it. So we have a sort of a social issue. We have energy problems. We have the climate change issue also. We already way back 2008 mentioned that we need to change the system. We cannot continue on like this. That the natural resources are being overused. The soils are getting lost. The water is being overused. And that basically we are losing a lot of jobs. Replacing people with machine and oil and just adds to the cost. So basically we heard this this morning, most of it. And what we came down with in the end is business as usual is not an option. We need a change in paradigm in agriculture in order to move forward. And although we know this, although we even know the solutions, what's coming up? We heard it this morning by Nina Federov, which has been one of them going out there, saying, oh, we need biotechnology. So the narrow move forward, rather than the broad way forward, as we all know, is the one that's gonna work. So the right to move forward is a fundamental shift in agriculture and knowledge as a technology. That's very important. And also the policies which go with it. Again, we heard it. You know, if we don't change policy, we're not gonna go change anything. So we have to, the whole issue about subsidies, for example, which amount to more than one billion a day. So we say, well, we need some money to do things, but just take it from there. More than 380 billion every day are spent on subsidies to actually do the wrong thing, if anything. We need more capacity development. We heard the two, do two things differently is takes a lot of knowledge. It's easy to throw a bag of fertilizer out there and a few seeds on it, and then we'll just wait until it rains. To do things in a very ecological way, in a sustainable way, we'll take more education. So we need this transition. So we need to transition agriculture to sustainable, ecological, organic. I mean, there's a number of choices out there we can choose from, but it has to be in tune in harmony with the system. It has to be ecologically based. So what we, you know, people say, oh, we need sustainable intensification. I think what we need is an ecological intensification, if anything. We need an agriculture that's multifunctional because agriculture doesn't only grow food. We heard it also this morning. I think we do more than just grow food on farms. We make sure the water is there, the clean water for the cities. We make sure there's also air for people to breathe. For example, we maintain the biodiversity. We provide jobs and we could probably have a lot more jobs if we do things right. So again, I think we need to move forward. And the other one, the last point, again, the systemic and the holistic approach. Things are connected in the system and we cannot continue to ignore all the connections in the system. And I don't want you to read the details, but what we do basically also at the Milan Institute, we try to get people to think in system. So what you do something today here, it may have an impact 20 years somewhere else. We see it now with climate change. But still, people cannot imagine it. So actually, science has given us tools for that too. So system thinking is possible using modeling tools which I guess should be applied at government level, at research level, but it's not really done so. So that's one thing which is needed. And agriculture especially is very complex. It touches on so many different points. Way beyond actually what's even on this graph here. So I think thinking in system, I think is important if we want resilience because resilience is the long-term result of actually having a system or systemic thinking. So this transition. So we have to go from the high productivity or by a sort of high yield at least here, over and low sustainability to sustainable and again productive system, multifunctional systems. Now we heard, is there a depression when you go across or not? Well, it depends where you start. In most places, you go straight up. In some places where you have overdone it with fertilizer, everything else, it may take a year or two to actually move across. And that would be a good use for subsidies, for example, to be reallocated to the transition. And again, everything we have to do here. More pre-harvest losses, for example, a better agromy all this is non-agitensive and it has to be put into the system to move it up. And we'll show you a few examples. Now, the discussion always goes, well, organic cannot feed the world. Actually, there's an article in the Swiss newspaper a few months ago where Professor Federov says that it is dangerous to go organic every cut, to do organic every cut because people will go hungry. The problem is we have a billion hungry people today with what systems? So maybe that's the question we should ask. And so what do we need to change? So we need to change the present industrial system as well as also the traditional system. We have to work on both ends because both are actually not sustainable and we know what to do to transform both into the new path of sustainability we need to go to. So I think, again, I think we have to be very careful here to come forward with more facts. Now, the question is how many more do we need to actually convince the policy makers that Monsanto is wrong and that maybe Rodel is right? Now, an example. So the Casa Miliburg is getting an old example, but it shows what you can do if you do things right. And why? If this problem would be there today, let me do push this down a bit. This is the Casa del Tino Africa. Casa is Tapioca, as you know it here. Comes actually originally from Latin America. So some time ago, some people, scientists actually, I found out who it was even, took cassava cuttings, the planting material for cassava across into Africa directly. And they started the biggest disaster we could think of because on those cuttings there were bugs, millibugs, which people did not see. And eventually this spread across this area which is one and a half times the United States, the whole place. And basically cassava, the staple of tournament of people was about to disappear. So the idea was to go back and find out why is cassava growing well in America and no longer here? There must be something on this millibug which eats them and gets rid of the problem. So we went, looked around, found beneficial insects, released them across, oh, sorry, we released them across the continent after mass production, eventually solving the problem. So producing several millions of beneficials, mostly wasps, a few ladybugs, they were basically spread out across the continent and eventually also from the ground sometimes with local people. We trained more than 12, doesn't work, huh? We trained more than 1200 people across the continent in biologically controlled technologies. Something like what, 40 PhDs and 120 masters. So by solving a problem, we also trained a lot of people at the time. Releases were made from the ground, from the air, we developed new technologies in Africa to shoot good bugs out of airplanes, for example. Because we didn't have time, cassava is disappearing. 10 million people were eating that three times a day. And here, this is the suspect, the wasp which we found in Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia which was released across the continent and basically solved the problem on its own. The other two ladybugs eventually didn't make it. So obviously we followed up and we saw that before release, you have these high peaks. After the release, down basically, the problem got solved almost overnight. We could hardly, ourselves as scientists, believe our eyes how fast this actually had worked. And because that was, let me go back here. This is a normal cassava plant, these are the roots which people eat and this is one which had a mealy bug attack so you can see the difference is enormous. And when you look at the impact, okay, the cost benefit for every dollar invested on this project 243 came out. This is unseen in the analysis of international development. And actually that project alone is responsible for 85% of the return on investment in agriculture research in Africa, one. But you can see, we didn't go with fertilizer, seeds, I don't know what. We actually use nature to help us solve a problem. And we could do a whole lot more of these type of things in the future. So we tried, another problem is stem borers in maize, straga weed also in maize or corn. And again, big losses which can be solved in a natural way. The Gates Foundation is supporting a project in Africa to actually promote hybrid maize and herbicide tolerant maize when it could be done in a different way. These are local varieties of maize. They have the characteristic of being able to respond to insect attacks by signaling the beneficials to come to their help. Not a benefit that these traits have been lost in the new varieties. And so what these plants do, so we have this module here, this is a legume, feeds the soil with nitrogen, removes the weeds, attracts the beneficial insects and repels the bad guys too. So by knowing what those plants actually do or can do and rearranging the system, you can solve a problem where we call it push-pull. A lot of information on internet on push-pull. And that's the field which no fertilizer, not have any cover crop, which brings the nitrogen versus the normal control. As I said, the greener for what is knowledge intensive so we need to find ways of better spreading knowledge. So can it be done? So we actually use models, system models which I presented earlier, sort of connecting everything, putting numbers there. So according to what Nick Stern requested to put one or 2% in the green economy, we saw right, one tent goes into agriculture. Then we put it into pre-arvest losses, ag management, more research, food processing, all in the sense of a green agriculture, a green by design, not by greenwash, not have any. And so what happens? You can see that the production is up, this is business as usual, spending the same amount of new money into a brown agriculture, crop in billion year again is up. Employment is significantly up. Soil quality again is up. The water use is down. The deforestation again is down. And the last one, the calories are up, that 2,500 per person. So you can see it can be done. The question is, when are we gonna do it? So Rio, that's now 10 years after the original order or commissioning of the Ag Assessment, the Ag State Report. So we need to bring it back and ask for accountability. We spent 12 million dollars. The time of almost what, 1,200 people. And are we gonna ask a question, officially, what is happening to this report? Why are the findings not implemented, which are in there, which actually you played out with the simulation model can be done and gives the results you need. Thank you.