 Again, David Bielow from Scientific American. And we are now joined on stage by Ed Carr, a former professor at the University of South Carolina. Oh, still. Sorry. Late-breaking corrections. Still a professor at the University of South Carolina and author of the book, the provocative book, Delivering Development, which kind of looks at the last 30 or 40 years of massive infusions of cash to the developing world that have pretty much failed to deliver development. So I want to get to your questions very quickly. But I want to start this conversation by responding to what you presented there and playing a little bit of the devil's advocate. Do we have a food production crisis or do we have a food distribution crisis? Oh, that's a very good question. We produce today 4,600 kilocalories per person per day. So if anyone tells me one more time that we need more food, then really I'm going to just blow the top off. Because what we don't need is more. We need it produced by different people in different places of different quality. This is what I mean. So it's not even a matter of the distribution itself, it has to be grown in different places. Europe, North America, do very well actually to produce a bit less. Why not? And afford it. More quality. And that's what we need. Because I don't think it's nobody's business or certainly not the U.S. or Europe's business to produce food for Africa or Asia or Latin America. They don't have the money to buy to begin with. So why not? And so I think we need to make sure that we, sure there will be time, we need some reserves, there's a drought or something. But you know, that cannot be the norm. And the India example was mentioned earlier. I mean, India produces more food than they actually need. And they have the most hungry people around. So again, you know, so we need to think about what do we produce where and by whom. And so Ed, I wonder if you can talk about what we produce where and by whom and how we might encourage a better distribution of that. Yeah. Well, I think there's two things. One thing I wanted to add on to is Hans, you might have been the first person today to actually talk about waste and loss in the system. And I'm actually a little stunned that we've had a conversation that's run on for this long today. And we're not talking about the fact that up to 40% of the food that is grown in this world never gets to a market. Much higher than that for some vegetables, lower than that for some grains. And of course, that's variable depending on where you are in the world. But we're talking about, you know, potential food crisis now, food crisis in the future, not having enough food. And 40% of it's being lost right now. We really need to be thinking about some of the efficiency in our own production systems. And I warn the organizers of this event, and I found out that I was going to be with Hans, that they weren't going to get an argument between the two of us because we actually mostly... As much as I might try. I'm going to try to provoke an argument. Do what you can. I don't know what's going to work. I'm a qualitative social scientist, so maybe we'll find something to argue about. But, you know, most of my career has been spent at the village level living in villages where, you know, subsistence production is 65, 70% of people's livelihoods. And I see exactly the kinds of things that Hans is talking about. I think my biggest concern is that we actually understand very little about how people actually make a living in most of the global south. I think we assume we know a lot about how people make a living. But the actual data points are very few and very far between. And the data, when you actually go to people such as myself who've been there and actually have information, it doesn't necessarily support a lot of the assumptions that we make about whether or not people are in crisis. The assumptions that we see as inefficient aren't necessarily inefficient at all. They're actually rather efficient. They're quite good at managing risk. And they sort of challenge a lot of the crisis narratives that I see emerging around this idea of this, in fact, this topic of this discussion today. It's not to say that climate change and food are not major challenges for us. I'm not a climate... I'm on the IPCC. I'm not a climate denier here by any stretch of the imagination. But I get really worried about what the crisis narratives that come out of this enable. It enables us, for example, to stop paying attention to local knowledge. Because we'll do things like say, well, these folks know a lot about their system now, but 20 years from now it won't look like that. And so what they know, what they've developed for 200 years will be irrelevant. We just can replace it all. This is completely erroneous, first of all. And secondly, politically I find it problematic, but if you actually look at the data, if you actually look, not at just trend lines of temperature change, but you actually look at the points of temperature and precipitation change, you see enormous variability. I spend most of my time working in sub-Saharan Africa, in mostly in West Africa, some in the Sahel, some down the coast. You see tremendous variability. Guess what? The variability, interannually, is larger than the projected change over the next 30 to 40 years in many cases. In other words, these folks are already coping with the future. They're already coping with what things will look like in the future. They have means of doing this. And if we don't recognize that and learn from that, we run a real risk of losing an entire reservoir of knowledge that exists out there, which I think would be a total disaster. And we run a real risk also of re-engineering what people do to wipe out the things that do work, the risk management strategies that are already there, and leave people more vulnerable than when we started, which is certainly not the goal that we have when we get into this kind of work. Right, and that's what Mark was referencing earlier with the trees and the fields. So is the answer to leave well enough alone and let Ghanaian farmers go their own way? No, but I think the fact that you mentioned knowledge is important because if you look at the acronym I-A-A-S-T-D, if you write it out, it's written in the National Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. The K was left out of the acronym before I joined as the co-chair, so I'm not sure exactly what then happened or how this happened. I guess it was too complicated to pronounce in one way or another. But I think it's significant that that report included the farmer's knowledge, traditional knowledge is actually included. And this is what created the most problems also with the industry and the academicians who said, where is this? This is not peer-reviewed information. So we battled two rounds of peer reviews, and we had to battle to keep the farmer's knowledge or the gray literature in this report. So just to say that how little it's been considered, and we tried to do that, but there were some costs. The costs also were that in the end, even the private sector moved out of the report. They didn't want to have the names linked to it, Crop Life International, to be specific, and Syngenta. So you can see that this knowledge issue is very important. And I think even IPCC did not have sort of knowledge according to it, it's only science. I think so, how broad this whole report was and why actually we should continue the process which basically has reached a dead end and I'm trying to revive in real. So my last question before I open it up to audience participation, so get your questions ready, is about empowering women. Pretty clearly empowering women in much of the developing world has some pretty significant positive benefits, but depending on how we go about addressing agriculture, we can either further empower or by accident, disempower women. And in fact, your book gets into this in some detail. So how do we, in a smart way, empower women? Smart way, empower women. If I had that answer, all right, in a dumb way. Well, in that case, I think what we need to do, especially in the context of, say, agriculture and climate change and thinking about developing contexts which are typically where I do my work, what we need to remember is that agriculture is not a technical sector separate from everything else in people's lives, that livelihoods are intimately connected to social roles such that you cannot understand livelihoods decisions unless you understand the social context from which they spring. So stuff that I've seen, for example, in Ghana and things that David's been kind enough to reference the book a few times. I have fantastic data, well, depressing, but very high resolution and therefore interesting data that can clearly demonstrate that men will constrain their wives' agricultural production. They are fully aware they are constrain their wives' agricultural production, which means they're limiting the amount of food being grown, they're limiting the household income. They know full well they're doing this, but they're doing it because they cannot stand a situation in which their wives make more money than they do because that would fundamentally challenge gender roles. It would challenge men's status effectively as good men, which interestingly has both a social impact as well as an impact on their ability to access land and therefore would impact their livelihoods. And their wives, in many ways, go along with this and it's an incredibly complex argument, but really that I don't have time to unpack here, but simply put, women's roles as a good woman are taking care of the household and when they start making a lot more money, people start questioning whether or not in fact they're taking care of the household. They can lose status as good women, which has a negative impact on them and meanwhile if they're challenging their husbands, again, they can lose access to land because their husband can't access land for them. What this basically means in a simple sense is when we talk about doing gender and agriculture work now or in a changing climate or anything else, this is not straightforward. This is not a simple technical fix. And in many cases, disturbingly enough, very blunt interventions to try to say correct gender inequality or gender injustice could actually totally destabilize livelihoods that right now actually work to take care of people. I was in Ghana in 1998 when the monsoon totally failed. No one starved in this area. This is an area that's all rain-fed agriculture. They're farming organically and not by choice. They just can't afford the inputs. And no one starved under this setup because the livelihood system was designed for this worst case scenario in so many ways. You don't want to blow up that system. At the same time, I'm not sure I want to just empower a system that while it works for livelihoods perpetuates gender inequality over a very long term because we do know there's so many benefits to empowering women. Subtract land from that equation and it's maybe not so different in the United States. Hans, how do we deal with the culture? Okay, very two points because nobody does organic farming in Africa by default because they cannot afford the input because organic farming actually is a scientific ability based and what they do is, don't call this organic. They just know input, low input of your input agriculture because organic actually takes a lot of inputs, certainly brain input. I have a good example to show but what happens with women, also women education because if you want to get involved in agriculture more it's clear that also you have to make sure that the girls get educated at the same level, maybe even more in boys, also in agriculture. We were working from the Millennium Institute in Bangladesh doing the system models to try to change policies or give them the tools to have better policies for the longer term. And one item we have there is education. So it's separated boys and girls, primary, secondary, tertiary. And so there were only men in the room actually and they said, but why do we spend all this money on girls? This is wasted money. They should stay home and do it. So since you can play scenario and look at the outcome, all right, that's all you want to know. We're not here to tell you what to do. We just give you the tools. Okay, they play this out. And what happened? Somewhere behind there, which you normally don't see they saw then, oh, the life expectancy of males was going drastically down. It's clear if you have people in the household who don't know what they were doing, things don't go very good. So then they decided, let's put all the money back into the education there. But you see, the only way, you have to be able to play this out. So you need this sort of community discussion dialogues where you can actually look into the future. And the people can realize, oh, maybe, again, in agriculture the same thing. Let's say we play this type of games with communities and show them, because the visualization is the important part. So we have about 15 minutes to ask questions about a food crisis. So I want them sharp and concise. And if you start making a statement, I will cut you off and move on. So with that, Proviso, let's go all the way to the back. Okay, I'll be very fast. And this is a question for Ed. I'm glad to see that we have a progressive voice in USAID pushing forward. I'd like to ask you a quick question. What is your advice for Rajiv Shah, the administrative USAID, on how to push forward some of these initiatives that both of you are talking about, especially this focus on, and Feed the Future, on focusing so much on smallholder farmers and keeping smallholder farmers on the farm. How do we move forward? What's the next step? So I will jump in there. Ed is here not in his role as an advisor to USAID, but in his role as a private citizen, as it were. And so I don't think he's the best place to answer that question unless you have any other comments. Yeah, I am not part of the Feed the Future initiative at all. I'm on the climate change team there. So I'm not well placed to answer that specifically. What I can tell you is that inside the agency, there's quite a bit of work actually going on. I mean, Feed the Future is a new initiative. The climate change initiative is relatively new. And there's all kinds of internal discussion going on around a lot of these sorts of issues. That it has not become publicly visible as more a function of how new all of this stuff is and how long it takes. So basically all I can say to you is stay tuned. I'm sorry, I can't be more definitive than that, but there are things coming out. I think it's actually right that they do concentrate on smaller farmers because we have more than 500 million of them and they ask, and then you look at how many people this means it's almost two and a half billion people who depend on that agriculture. The second point is that actually small older farms can be and mostly are more productive at a farm level than large farms. So I think we, so there's a number of problems here but there's a good reason why I think we should concentrate on smaller farmers. But what they don't do right I think and what he needs to be told also that it has, this has to be done with the participation of those smaller farmers in the decision making. What actually are we gonna change on those farms to make life better? And that's not something that comes from Washington or from Bern or from wherever. Or tractor sale companies. Yeah, I saw a question over here or months ago. Thank you. I'm David Andrews. I'm from Food and Water Watch. In 2008 I was on the Pew Commission which issued its report. Remember short and concise, get to the question. We came out with the same results as IASDAT. So I've been on Capitol Hill promoting IASDAT. So when I go to Senator Luger's office I'm told IASDAT is theology. When I go to USAID I'm told that IASDAT is faith based. When I go to the Department of Agriculture, the Foreign Ag Service, they say it's an ecotopian report. Why across the board in every office of this administration do we have that kind of response to IASDAT? Good job. There's an answer, there's an answer. There are vested interests. And until we stand up as consumers and we say what do we actually want in our plates? Do we decide or is it one or two or three corporations who decide what's in your plate? Or are you in your kids' plates actually, even more so? I think, you know, as I said before we can vote with our own, we go buy food. Because there's a clear connection between the consumer of food and the producer. Farmers would change what they do if the demand is different. But in addition, there's one more element which has to be put into this equation is until we have true costing, which means the internalization of externalities, we won't change the system. Because the big ag only makes money because they externalize all the costs to the society. What, healthcare, 142 billion? That's as much as the subsidies are in the US alone. So, but to play a devil's advocate there, cheap food, people like it. I mean that completely seriously. That's, it's a food justice issue, potentially. How do you bring, is the extra price in a gallon of organic milk, is that branding? Is that reflecting actual costs of production? Or what is the reason that I can buy a conventionally produced gallon of milk for maybe $2 a gallon, and I can buy a half gallon of organic milk for $5? You know, Hans is right. And I can speak about this in terms of, for example, the climate change side of it, right? Which is we externalize, you're absolutely correct. We externalize all these costs, which do get distributed and someone pays for, and they pay in all kinds of indirect ways, be it through taxes to short parts of infrastructure, et cetera, you pay in all these different ways. And I think one of the big challenges that's facing us in terms of thinking about these externalities right now is in fact the carbon impact of changes that we see in the global ag system right now. There's kind of two types of change happening. One of them is sort of indigenous adaptation. People aren't just sitting there waiting to die, they make changes all the time. Do not underestimate how smart farmers are in the global south, okay? They're really, really smart people who can make a living on almost nothing. They are adjusting their crops in response to changing markets and a changing environment. At the same time, we have development interventions, we have from all sorts of places in the world that also change what crops are being grown. This is land cover change. Land cover is one of the big drivers of climate change in the world. And one of the things that we have a huge dearth of information on is exactly how much carbon is sequestered by different crops because most of the actual sequestration of carbon is in the soil carbon we've heard about, soil carbon today. It's not in the plant itself, which has everything to do with soil quality and has to do with the way in which you raise the crop, which is incredibly locally variable. So you can't do a study in one part of sub-Saharan Africa and then generalize. It doesn't work very well. There are only a few studies on this which have tried to really reliably capture it. And what we see is little changes could have tremendous impacts. For example, the one study I've seen in Southern Senegal suggests that on mean, per hectare, a field of maize sequesters is about 7.5 tons more carbon than a field of millet. If Senegal was to shift 10% of its maize production into millet, and this is plausible given some of the temperature changes we're seeing and some of the stresses on maize, people may just make that shift. It would release about 900,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Make that same shift next door in Mali, it's four million tons. That's a coal plant. Those are two crops in two relatively small countries. We raise dozens of crops. All around the world we're seeing these shifts happen all the time. We do not have good information on what this means. It could be a net sink. It could be an incredible release of carbon. We don't know. In any case, there's a cost associated if there's a release of carbon. We're not capturing whether or not there is that release, what that cost is, and it's not being costed to you and your food. But you're paying for it, you're paying for it somehow. In the back, in the middle there. Back to Haiti. We have a big problem with not enough food for lots of people. Let's just leave it at that. What about creating a big data value chain project where we can actually look at very specific locations, the value chains that drive how food is produced, why it's produced the way it is, how it goes to market, and so on and so on. We really understand the local dynamics and can help people choose based upon local knowledge that's meaningful to them, rather than these giant programs that tend to break the local value chains. Yes, I think that we need far more locally detailed, I granted speak from interest here. Again, a qualitative social scientist, so more qualitative research in particular places. Again, because the intent of development programming is not to cause more problems than you solve. So if you're going into places in your breaking systems, we are doing it wrong and we don't want that outcome. On the other hand, it's been a long slog, both in academia, I think on the practice side, to think about doing long-term qualitative research. It's slow, it tends to be very locally specific, so you can't generalize easily to policy. People get sort of itchy about doing that kind of work, but I also don't think there's an alternative. I think we're getting to a place in terms of information where we have to have that information. Actually, it's interesting, the Einstein, one of the outcome was that every country should do an assessment of its agriculture and all its science and technology. Not one, as far as I know, has done it. And that was because so many people actually were participating, so that you have a few people in each country who could actually have gone home and done it if there were some support. It is actually also worthwhile to note that the FAO, you're an agency on agriculture, you all know it, who was part of the six agency who sort of commissioned the report, in the end never did anything with it. I never, nobody in my colleagues ever gave a talk in FAO about the ag assessment. And because the FAO, through its annual meetings, could have suggested to all the countries to actually do an assessment and help the countries do the assessment. That's the role of FAO. But guess what? The person who actually, who was responsible in the connection to the Einstein quit and it works for the Gates Foundation now. Prabhu Pingoli. Yes, right here in front. And I think this will be the last question. My name's Lee Yang. I wonder if you can address some issues related to this, maybe socialist or maybe land grabbing. If you do some research R&D, value of land would be higher, agricultural, product would be more speculative than oil, cause a lot of trouble in the crisis. And now they are Congress, they are leveling, they are communist. So do you think this kind of issue will be coming up more seriously? The land grab. You know the land grab, it just shows how some people are banking on other people's problems. Because if you think about it, what we want, we need more production in developing countries. And some people actually who buy land, have maybe some better pens than others. But most of these cases are really coming in, moving the people out and doing what? The type of agriculture which actually is a copy of an old green revolution which we had enough of. Rather than do it their smart way, maybe help local farmers who do not have access to land in many places in Africa for example, to acquire land on maybe a long term leases, train them and in particular the women in doing agronomic practices which will make sure that that land gets better over time rather than worse. So I think again, one can turn these things around in a different way. If people have money, they want to invest it in doing good, all right then go down and talk to the communities and come up with a plan which actually would help. But again, in these places where we today have a food deficit, I can tell you I've been there so many times, I've lived there, we can easily travel and quadruple the production for what it is today. The methods I showed you back there before. So we just have to go down and do it. But for that, we need to look at the last statement I made. You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. So can we now start to think different? This is what it takes. Thinking beyond the short-term profit, thinking long-term, it makes sure that our children have something to it. Thinking different, that's a good place to end, I think. So please join me in thanking these two panelists. Thank you both very much. Thank you.