 One of the most promising avenues for increasing food production and for decreasing the burden of disease is the exploitation of modern genomics and genetic technologies for improving livestock. We can do that in traditional ways through breeding once we've identified genetic markers or we could do it in more sophisticated ways and more rapidly by gene transfer type technologies. That of course is an extraordinarily difficult ethical issue if we're talking about human beings but if we're talking about livestock that's perfectly straightforward as long as we have the proper controls and safety measures. If we're thinking for instance of a disease like tryponosomiasis where certain strains of cattle are much more resistant than others and then wildlife such as wildebeest are even more resistant and will carry these diseases, there's obviously improvement for introducing new genes into the bovine pool to actually counter such infections. It goes beyond that of course because there are also genes resulted with productivity where we could produce more milk say particularly and milk is becoming of enormous importance in developing countries as a source of high value protein. We could produce much more milk by changing the genetic makeup of the livestock. The livestock themselves are not isolated entities, they exist within a landscape, they exist within a farming scape, they exist within a village and it's the interaction between animal and plant agriculture in a way that is sustainable and sustains the soils and the landscapes that are responsible for producing the food that we need that also merit substantial research and development and we need to do these things on the basis of evidence not certainly traditional practices can be enormously important and we can learn from them but that's not all there is to it because the challenges are greater than they've ever been before and we need new knowledge and we need evidence based insights as we do in all areas of human activity from medicine to agriculture to climate change and whatever is facing us.