 I must say that now that the title for this section is Will New Seeds Conquer the New Climate and I must say in my research I heard a lot of people both in the field and outside the field when told that this was the topic. The sort of the knee-jerk reaction as well, obviously the thing to do is to develop more drought and heat-resistant seeds that we can plant. And Dr. Fedorov, you've written about that and may I call you Dr. Shear? Dr. Shear, you also have written about that from different points of view. So Dr. Fedorov, I think you actually wrote something a while back where you said that again looking at these trends that if we're not careful we could face as many as a billion people facing hunger and starvation in the years ahead. I think we're over that already. So why is it that you feel and what role specifically do you feel that genetically modified seeds can play as we face this challenge? I always get put in this box. So the first thing I'm going to do is climb out of it. Genetic modification of seeds, of plants is not going to rescue us. It's one in a very large array of tools. The reason it's not going to rescue us is because in fact increasing the salt, temperature, drought tolerance of our existing crops can move them a little bit, but not a lot. I don't think that will be enough. The crops that we domesticated are very water-thirsty, temperate crops. There are lots and lots of plants that evolved to tolerate salt, to tolerate high temperatures. We've never domesticated those and I think that's one of the things that we have to do. That's essentially what I'm doing in Saudi Arabia is looking at a class of plants called halophytes that evolved, figured out how to deal with salt. You go to any place that's on the seashore and you see lots of stuff growing, right in the salt water and you never give it a second thought. Those are halophytes. How do you spell that? H-A-L-O-P-H-Y-T-E. Is that something that, what would be a food that we could recognize that is halophytes? Probably the one that's most widespread in the food and feed supply is something called salicornia. You might have encountered it as sea beans or sea asparagus or some fear. Those are all names that are used. It's popular in European cuisine as well as Asian cuisine. But more to the point is you might have eaten salt marsh lamb, considered a delicacy in Europe or salt bush lamb in Australia. Those are fed on salicornia. That's a plant that grows on the edge of the ocean. So what we're doing now, because we live in the age of genomics, is sequencing the genomes of three species of salicornia. And then we're going to use that information to embark on a domestication program. So if you look at the closest wild relative of corn, it's called teosinti. It looks like a weed. It acts like a weed. It makes seeds that are hard as rock. And it's people that transformed this little inedible plant to this thing that makes this huge ear. I don't have time to tell you all that, but it's a remarkable feat, still probably the most remarkable feat of genetic modification that we've ever accomplished. And make no mistake about it. All of those, they're all underlying genetics. Before I turn to Sarah, let me ask you just one quick follow-up. What about the cultural side of this? Cuisine is so culturally based, and we have many examples in the past of people being given food, food aid, for example, that they didn't want to eat because it didn't taste good or it didn't fit their cultural. How are you dealing with that in the research in these new... Basically the way that I have dealt with it so far is to pick something that's already in the feed and food supply. And something new is not trivial. And it interfaces with people's tastes and it interfaces with the food technology industry and standards and all of that, not easy. The other thing is to avoid the food issue and look at where the real needs are. You said you acknowledged the effective temperature on our crops. A lot of the stuff we grow goes to feeding animals, whether it's forage or it's grain, domesticating things that can tolerate high temperatures, high salt concentrations and so forth to be good forage crops is a lot easier than introducing something into people's food supply. Having said that, I don't know about you, but I'm adventurous. I love to try new foods from everywhere in the world and there are lots of people that do. So there's a positive side to that and there's a negative side and it depends on how you handle it. I think I've said more than enough. Sarah, when I interviewed you for HOT, we talked about genetically modified seeds. You are not opposed to them per se. You think there is a role. But you argued that one of the problems is in the existing food system, the industrial agricultural system is based on maximizing volume. And so a lot of the research interest in genetically modified seeds is, as you put it, let's find a seed that we can plant over millions of acres to increase production, a drought tolerant or heat tolerant seed. And you think that that's a mistake. So expand on that, please. I really think that genetic resources is the foundation of agriculture and our ability to have high quality seed sources, diverse seed sources is absolutely essential. One of the concerns that I've had about the discourse over the last couple of decades has been the polarization of different approaches to increasing our food supply as though they were always enemies of one another rather than seeing this as a very, very large challenge that's going to be requiring inputs from many folks. The concerns that I've had about genetically modified organisms, and actually it also refers to the hybrid seed market, which dominates our commercial seed sources right now, are a couple of things. First of all, that too much is made of them as a silver bullet solution. No question that high quality seed is important to farming systems. We have the capacity today to dramatically increase production in very large parts of the world, particularly in those that are the most food insecure right now, with existing seed. A second aspect of it is that it is not enough. And some of those who've been promoting improved seed as the silver bullet have not been recognizing that it's a little bit like getting, in a lot of the places that I work anyway in Africa, Latin America and in Asia, it's like getting really high octane gas in a car whose tires are all punched out. We have 1.5 billion people in the world that are living in areas with very severe soil and water systems degradation. And one can adapt to those with improved seeds, but the underlying issue is we need to be reinvesting in the natural capital for those. The third aspect, and I think this speaks to the point that you were asking about particularly, is my concern that, and this is not just GMOs, but that the breeding programs that we are promoting have not been doing the innovative work that you're suggesting you're doing with aliphites. It has been around a very small number of species to be used in commercial markets for a agricultural production system model that, in my view, is a 19th century production system model. It's treating agriculture as something apart from ecosystems. It's treating, for a lot of economic reasons, I'm an economist and this is what I studied when I was in getting my PhD. In the 1960s and the 1970s, there were huge economic pressures for simplification of production systems and for simplification of marketing systems. That was the nature of where our technological breakthroughs were happening at that time. That has actually changed enormously. Both our capacity to handle diversity from a scientific and from a management point of view, our new computer driven information systems, refrigeration systems for foods that actually can handle lots of different species in the same transportation flow. We do not have those constraints anymore. Which enables us to move from what were very unstable, I would say, ecologically systems, which had just one or two crops that got industrial inputs that the crops were bred specifically so they would be responsive to those inputs with our high yield areas have either controlled water or they have good natural rainfall systems. So we were developing an intensification model around simplification of fewer and fewer products even though even from the food side we have there's about 3,000 species we could be developing for food. They would have a much wider range of agro-ecological systems. But the system, I feel that the research system has not adjusted to the changes in the reality of our needs within the food system for diversity and the ecological demands we have for diversity in our agricultural production systems. And the reason for that is that unlike 100 years ago, we now have something like 80 to 90% of the inhabitable area of the world is ecologically impacted by food production, either crop production or livestock production. More than half of the world's most important watersheds are almost entirely the vegetative cover is food crops and those so that agriculture has to play a critical role in watershed management. Agriculture has to, more than half of the world's wild species are present only in agricultural areas. So that agricultural lands need to play a role in wildlife habitat and then the point that you were making before, our agricultural lands are the only tool that we have at our disposal right now that through photosynthesis and through vegetation, through improved soils, we can capture greenhouse gases. So some estimates have been made that almost the entire amount of emissions from our transport sector, according to the IPCC, there is a physical potential to offset that through a sequestration in agricultural systems, feed systems, of rangeland systems. So the model we have of breeding around picking a few species, really investing in them, hoping that over tens of millions of hectares, we will be able to be growing those seeds, is a business model from the past. And I think we have not adjusted to a business model even for the breeding work that recognizes the imperative of diversified land uses, diversified food systems. And the fact that farmers need diverse seeds to handle the much, much higher levels of risk that are going to be in their production systems in many parts of the world. So I hear you saying that we basically need to upgrade the ecological capital. What I hear from experts all over the world is we've got very struck by your image of the car, putting super octane gas into a car with punctured tires when we really need to be making the soil much better. Dr. Fedorov, I wonder if you could tell us, since you have been an advisor to the last two secretaries of state, how, when you talk to them about this issue, of course, there's always lip service paid, yes, we want to help feed the world and all of that. But it seems, at least following the headlines, that that's not what really has a high priority within that. You're talking about money, yes. No, I was talking about actually decision making in terms of when the Secretary of State and the State Department and administration, whether it be Republican or Democrat, when they look at their slate of foreign policy challenges, how does food and agriculture, it seems to always be left behind. And after we had those food riots in 2008, a lot of people said, hey, we haven't been investing enough in agriculture for years. So how does that play out when you're sitting there across the table from the Secretary of State? It's actually changing. So the Feed the Future Initiative, Secretary Clinton saw this as a very high priority. Now, having said that, it could have been done better, it could have been funded better. But the point is that I don't think that it was swept under the rug. It was and continues to be a major initiative, which is now being implemented through USA. Tell people a little bit about what that is, please. Oh, Feed the Future is simply developing a strategy for helping less developed nations. One of the things that I personally disagree with is that there's a continued focus on the smallholder farmer. And unfortunately, what has happened in nation after nation that has become more successful in agriculture is that it has been done through science and technology that happened in the US. We've transformed our agricultural system over the past 100 years, 150 years. And that's through education and research and getting science to the farmer and mechanization and all of that stuff. While I sympathize in principle with Sarah's point, how you transition to an ecologically sounder approach to agriculture and at the same time figure out how you're going to make it more efficient because we have to maintain productivity if we don't want more people hungry. And it's always the poor. The food supply is global. Anybody that has money can buy it. And we tend to forget that the Arab Spring started with food riots that this issue doesn't go away for the poorest. But how to transition to a more ecologically sustainable agriculture and at the same time increase productivity and decrease our reliance on water is absolutely, as you said earlier, the challenge of the 21st century. And what I concluded in my travels around the world and over the past three years is that we're asleep at the switch. I mean, the word adaptation, managing the unavoidable, slips off everybody's tongue very easily. But where do you see it happening? I was in India two weeks ago. Not. I don't see our own Southwest really reinventing how it uses water. And it's on a collision course with them. So you're saying that it was important to the secretaries of state and yet at the same time we're asleep at the switch. Who is asleep at the switch? If it's not the secretaries of state, who is it? It is our entire society. So there is money going into it, but not a whole lot. You'd have to increase the investment in agriculture, whether it's in the US or in the developing world, by an order of magnitude, if not two. And again, we heard world leaders say this after the food riots, and it hasn't happened. No, it hasn't happened. Of course, we also heard the acknowledgement that we have to do something about climate change, and that has not happened. So it's very distressing to watch this all unfold. One of the things we're going to be getting into later, we talked a little bit about this for those of you who were able to attend the dinner last night, picking up on your point. And then those of you who want to ask questions, please prepare, because we're going to call on you in about one minute, is that as the studies apparently show that, and I heard this when I was reporting in China, thinking about one of their top agriculture scientists, Lynn Urda, who you may know, has joined with Greenpeace of all organizations, not exactly Beijing's favorite. But he has worked with them and has endorsed what he calls ecological agriculture, we would probably call it organic agriculture, as the best way to cope with climate change in the future. But the big question, and they cited studies out of Germany, and now there's studies here at the Rodale Institute in the United States, that when you transition from an industrial agriculture system to an ecological system, there is a drop off in production for three to five years. And that is a transition period, which as you mentioned, when there's already one out of seven people on this planet who are hungry, how do you manage that kind of a transition period? Is that the kind of risk that we are prepared to take? Well, my view on that is that it's not either or. Unfortunately, organic agriculture evolved in such a way that is now practiced by a set of rules. If I could take the principles and go ahead and use the most modern techniques, then I think we could manage that very well. I'll just give you one tiny example, and that is the greatest contribution to decreasing soil erosion the past 20 years has been the use of genetically modified herbicide tolerant crops, particularly soybeans. Everybody who is on the organic side says, oh no, that's terrible, but in fact, it works. And no-till agriculture is most easily practiced with herbicide tolerant plants, and that builds soil quality, that leaves the residue on the land. That's just one example. So using the ideas and the concepts that underlie organic agriculture, and moving ahead and using the most modern science in my view, the weight of the future. Do you share that view? Specifically about the herbicides? About the herbicides, we've actually just been, we just did a very interesting exercise a few weeks ago. We're part of a global initiative called Landscapes for People, Food, and Nature that's trying to find ways to address the multifunctionality of agricultural land uses so that they provide food, and they provide bioenergy, and they provide habitat, they provide watershed services, they provide pollinator services, they provide medicines and building materials for people, and all the things that human beings need from our agricultural landscapes. And one of the things that we did preparing for that was to try to find what are people doing around the world in this area where they're really trying to push for landscapes with those integrated functions, and we started to count, and we got to 73 different communities of practice around the world, whether it was agroecological landscapes, biological corridors, integrated watershed management, we can show you down, we went to 73 different terms. And what we realized is that people come at things with different entry points. So the integrated watershed management people, they look at the landscape and they say, we have to maximize water provision from this landscape, and they have a set of things that they try to do, and they evaluate what they're doing on the basis of whether they're getting the water they need, subject to other people tolerating what they're trying to do. The biological corridor people come in and they're prioritizing biodiversity management. Industrial, agro-industrial corridors that are trying to green themselves are focusing on how do we increase industrial investment in these areas in ways that won't hurt things. My reading of the no-till, the herbicide-based no-till, is that for one of the many functions that we need out of our landscapes, it has done a very good job. I agree that the soils in those areas are significantly better. The biodiversity is significantly worse. The diversity in those systems is significantly worse. If you look at the range of services that we want out of that landscape, I would say that that was a very partial solution. And that the next generation of innovation in those places is going to be able to produce the range of ecosystem services, if not from a particular field or a particular farm, but at a landscape scale, where we'll be seeing that if we're going to do that there, we better do an awful lot of other things in other parts of the landscape to make sure that water quality is okay, that biodiversity is protected. We need that biodiversity of soil microorganisms and of what we're calling weeds or related things in those systems. Thank you, and let me quick, if I ask a question, there's a gentleman right there who will be brought a microphone. Stand up, please. And then over here, next. And please be quick, and I will... Thank you, I'm Leon Wanchop, University of Wisconsin. I'd like to ask a question if you, Mr. Herzgaard. I was struck by your remarks about farming practices in Niger and Nigeria. And I would like to ask you specifically, what was the rationale behind the practice in Nigeria? Specifically, you mentioned legislation against such farming practices. And does this opposition represent an aberration and isolated instances, or is it a trend that we really have to watch? I'll be very quick. I did not say legislation, but it is de facto outlawed. And the reason is that basically in Nigeria, as a holdover from the old colonial system, farmers do not own the trees on their own land. It's owned by the state. And by contrast in Niger and in other places, they changed the law so that farmers owned their own trees. When farmers did not own their own trees, they saw no point in having them grow. And once they owned their own trees, and the military couldn't go in there and cut them or beat up the farmers and steal them, they had an economic incentive to do that. So did the Nigerian government set out to say, no, you can't do this intercropping? No, but because they want to keep all the resources for themselves, that was the de facto result of their policies. Yes, here. No, the gentleman in front of you, sorry. Please stand up. Thanks, my name is Emmanuel, I'm from Oxfam. I have two questions for both of our discussants. The first one is for Nina. Please hold the mic a little closer to you. Okay, so at one time I worked on a research station and I was doing breeding. And what I actually observed is that it would take us about, well, I mostly joined breeding programs that had started, but had taken about 10, 12 years before the variety we had intended to develop eventually comes. But by the time we would develop it, the strain would be the problem or drought or disease or pest would be breeding against had involved. So do you see conventional breeding methods accelerating the rate at which they're delivering the technologies? And how would probably, what type of policies would be needed maybe to support that? And then the other question is for Sarah. So you talked about one of the problems with GM crops that they tended to breed for, from very few crops. And while not emphasizing a lot of genetic maybe diversification. Now, and it's the same approach that you would find in Feed the Future. It turns out that when the breeding company... I'm gonna get to the question because we have two minutes here. Okay, sorry. Okay, sorry. What is the question? So my question is what role does the government have in promoting diversification because private breeding companies are there to promote varieties from which they can make profits? Okay, Dr. Federer. The breeding question is interesting because the most sophisticated breeding done today is done by biotech companies. That's a whole big issue that I don't have time to address. But it's a combination of molecular markers and building on what you already have. That's why GM is really important because you can reach into wild strains and pick out, increasingly pick out characteristics such as disease resistance you want. If you do a cross, you have a mess and it takes years of back crossing and so forth because you mix a lot of genes in that you don't want. So using what you already have and then adding to it through science and knowing what the genes do and how you want to modify that is really the way of the future that does accelerate the ability to release varieties. But much of that is not done in the private sector because it's so underfunded. And very quickly, is it that corporations only breed the things that they can make money on? That is definitely true. They breed only the things that they can make money on but I think it goes well beyond that. The public sector over the last 20 years has basically abnegated its responsibility to take leadership in agricultural development and agricultural science, both the investment side and the development of improved systems. We need a completely re-engineered system for promoting agriculture, I agree. It's one to two orders of magnitude increases in the investments that we need. A small part of that will be research, a lot of it will be investment in land, it'll be investment in tenure systems, investment in support systems for dispersed farmer and community innovation in the face of climate change but we need to have government leadership because the private sector's only gonna do certain kinds of things and the rest of the agenda is gonna have to be either led by and helped finance by the public sector or find other incentives for the private sector to be producing the kinds of things we need. I have to stop you, I'm sorry. They are holding up the sign and pretty soon the music's going to come but you'll have a little time in the break. Please buttonhole either of these two brilliant ladies and ask your questions then. Thank you very much and let's switch to the next.