 I can just lead for a second and give a quick overview of what I was hoping to accomplish today and make with Sparks some conversation. The last two talks, especially, we got a chance to step out of the traditional science research discipline that I operated and try to think about what other sociological limits there are to making some differences in both food and environmental security in the world. You know, Melissa and her team gave a fantastic example of not only deploying agricultural innovations in new seeds and technology, but also new economic practices and moving that frontier from kind of spinning the research circles and preaching to convert it out to really engaging with partnerships. And I think the CGR centers both have direct access to the fields and to the farmers, but are important for partnerships or for research. And then Bob's trying to incorporate some of the ecosystem service values in part of our production stream. So in the slide you showed from Bill Foley where we're trying to not only optimize yield and maybe improve harvest index, so everything on that hectare of land is going right into grain. You can think about biomass as having a value and incorporating some metrics from ecology and thinking about not only goods that can be extracted, but services that flow through these fields. And that's really important in the small shareholders and developing systems where roots can, you know, perennial crops, for example, can sequester carbon and hold soil and improve fertility. So these additional values beyond just yield in export commodities, but services that improve water and carbon functioning of ecosystems, those are new targets really for breeders. And they might not be so far away from the wild varieties that we started with. So this might be a long way of sort of summarizing that traditional research focus has been improving yield in the narrow sense of the food production, sometimes at the expense of the environmental services. But going forward, as we hit these planetary limits in the full world, we not only have to produce more food, but we have to secure the environment. And that's where I think agriculture can make a large contribution. Maybe I'll leave it at that. We're going to have these two mikes going up. And we have a few mikes here as well, so is there anyone who wants to start off? Thanks. I had a question for you, Bob, because I really like the idea of a finite globe with our resources underpinning the economic development. My question was on the Bateman analysis of the United Kingdom. And I was wondering where the boundary was drawn for that consideration, because my understanding is that the UK has a huge water footprint that falls well outside the UK because it imports so much food. So, I mean, it's all very well to have a lovely environment for the UK, but what about the people of Africa where the food is actually being produced? That's a really good point. That's a very, very good point. How was that? Yeah, I'm not absolutely sure about that, but I think they probably ignored those imports. And I think that's all the more reason for doing these analyses at multiple scales, because if you just focus on the small scale or even the intermediate scale, you're sort of missing what's happening on these other scales, and often you can get the wrong answer. So, it's extremely important to do multi-scale analysis. And that's part of what we're proposing to do as part of this project that Justin and I, and other colleagues, have just sent in as a discovery grant. So, how can we utilize a small scale in a form of results, but also scale those up to the whole country and the whole planet? So, good point. I guess you could actually equally translate that to nitrogen and save the Netherlands and so they do exactly the same thing. Messaging imports of feed for livestock. And in the process, they have quality of living in terms of GDP, but they also have a real problem in terms of nitrogen and nitrogen budget. So, these aren't free transfers, each of those transfers has consequences. And the reason why we do it is because on balance, they meet the needs of those parties at the time. So, that's the basis you try. Except that, to internalize all those external costs, it's better to spend at the time, because you're not actually equal right in those things. So, as you're acknowledging the proofs and as you value certain changes, then the equation changes as well. Do you know what I'm going to do? Yeah. I'm going to bring up on John's work. The terminology is virtual water and virtual resources. So, that concept's been known since 2005 or 2006. This value here does not really become clear, but you've obviously got something there with the ecosystem. So, this is true because by the John's order, and it's relevant to Australia, we export water, because we're using our water resources. It goes in crops in other countries, get the benefit of it. Similarly, we may have an ecological cost in our country, but consequently, there's some sort of virtual transport where recipients don't bear that cost. I'm not sure what to say, but I've been in the room for a previous time. I mean, the ecologists really need to ask the question, how are we going to feed the world? Where are we going to produce the food? If you want to lock it up for recreation in the UK, or switching them like they're going back to museum farming, and any studies that don't look at the broader implications are a waste of time. They're basically a waste of time, I think. Ask the question, where are you going to produce the food? And how? And if you're looking at greenhouse gas potential, the intensive agriculture actually has the lowest in terms of the amount of greenhouse gas released per kilogram of food. So, it's enormous. Well, just to comment on that, I think that's, I think, making the same point that we're making. You can't just look at the natural system part of it. You can't just look at agriculture and food production. I think you have to look at the whole system. And you have to also consider, you know, what actually does contribute to well-being and sustainability. So, it's a much more complicated challenge, and certainly something that requires, you know, all academic, or many academic disciplines to cooperate in ways that they have traditionally been doing. But I think that's something we need to do a lot more of, is this more integrated systems level analysis. So, we can answer just that question. How can we produce the highest value, the highest quality of life in the landscape that can support people in all the ways that they need to be supported, which is not just food production, but it certainly includes that. And it's not just, you know, market-based consumption, but it certainly includes that. But it also includes all these other things. So, you've got to look at the whole picture. And over multiple scales, and over longer time periods. So, I was just going to basically agree with Tony. I think that a lot of the work out there is kind of missing these cross-scale interactions. And a lot of the work out there is probably guilty of just not fully appreciating how much of a moving target we have and how much historical success is by no means guaranteed going forward. So, I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of things that increasing productivity doesn't take care of. And there's a lot of reasons, you know, to change, there are measures of productivity to change how we approach things. But it's important to maintain improvements in the high production areas. And I think one of the risks of focusing, you know, I'm absolutely sold on the need to really make progress in Africa, especially because it, as the soils kind of deteriorate, it gets harder and harder. But if all of our effort, kind of globally, I mean, this is a characterization here. But if a lot of the effort is focused on very low production systems at the potential expense of sacrificing progress in the high production systems, it's not a good picture in terms of, in terms of low productivity gains. It's actually a pretty bad picture in terms of language change because you're improving productivity in the areas that are the most elastic in terms of their language. So, just to reiterate what Tony said, I mean, there's a lot of important decisions about accounting for sort of global impacts of making decisions locally that are restricting productivity gains. But also just in thinking about how the moving target requires progress, both at the low end but also at the high end. And I think it's important to not lose sight of how important continuing that past success is. One thing I wanted to add to that is, in some ways, it's a bit of a false choice to think that we have to do either further intensification of the high-value commodity crops in the high-value areas or, you know, bring up the bottom in the most needy areas. I think in some ways, the return on investment for certainly the public sector can be major gains in new crops that really haven't had any intensive breeding and also agronomic practices. So, in some ways, there might be a middle ground where we're not going to, you know, do advanced genomic breeding on 100 different species around the world for a lot of specialty areas, but we might be able to move out of the top five into the top 15 crops. And we were talking about quinoa and amaranth and maybe these next tier sort of orphan crops where, you know, a few million dollars of investment can lead to major gains in less than a decade. And that's where we can step outside of the traditional sort of elite plant breeding institutions into these, you know, seed centers of the world and start to work with farmers. The other thing is to do trials around the world in different areas sort of to get outside of Iowa and Illinois and even South Australia and Victoria as kind of the developed prime areas and try to make improvements in the marginal lands. And that was kind of where this bioenergy crops, if that remains for a while, they don't want to compete with food so they're going to be planted in the marginal lands and hopefully we move to more of a restoration of ecosystem services than a further extraction of biomass for energy and just bank that biomass in the ground. But that still requires sort of intermediate reversion to semi-wild and restoration type of crops that are going to be more climate-ready and resilient. And it might not be reflective of the original landscapes that were there, we're kind of at a time where whole ecosystems are changing and they're becoming more agroecosystems. So if we're going to breed for not only food but for environmental services then there's just a lot of room for progress in the near term before you open the portfolio a little bit. Just to jump in before Eric does, I just want to support what you've said. The approach of ACI is two-fold. It's very much agricultural intensification but it's also agricultural diversification and our problems are so complex we need a range of solutions and they're not mutually exclusive so a lot of the research that we're doing in diversification is actually increasing the yields of the five staple crops at the same time. And early on when you were introducing this session Justin you talked about what we're targeting and I think one of the things that we need to put on the table that we have to target is micronutrients because of the nutritional problems that the developing and developed world is up against right now. Now we call it the double burden you've got huge countries dealing with the effects of under nutrition and the cognitive impacts that's having on their communities which means they're not productive and it's just further developing the poverty cycle and then you've got countries in the developed world which are dealing with over nutrition and the huge costs to our society of dealing with non-communicable diseases which is apparently the greatest cost in terms of medical terms that we're currently facing. So agricultural diversification holds the key to that and the medical community is recognizing that the agricultural community is recognizing it and they're coming together to discuss non-pharmaceutical options to deal with nutrition. So it's not one or the other we have to have a range of options ahead of us if we're going to deal with the challenges. So I'd just like to make a small number of comments about all this. One to follow on, Tony said there is now an increasing attempt to make access to food a human right and so for example the Indian government has now taken the step to say that access to food is an entitlement for the entire population. Now if the price of food or the value of growing crops is less than the ecosystem services of that same land how are those poor people going to feed into a market system to make sure their entitlement is delivered? So how are you going to put those market values in a way that recognizes that some people with no market power have the right to some use of the land for their own purpose? Well if I can respond to that it's not an either or proposition. I think the challenge is designing agro ecosystems that produce a better balance of all of the services that humans value coming off of the landscape and part of that can be encouraged with economic incentives so we can pay farmers for producing not just crops but for other services and that can help to change the balance of the incentives in the appropriate way. So there's all kinds of interesting institutional design challenges here as well. There's systems design challenges how do you come up with landscapes that really are more valuable overall in a comprehensive way more sustainable but also how do you change the institutions to make it happen. And do you think that one needs to be good on the first one? Yeah well they're both important and I think we have to do them both simultaneously. Part of the way of doing that is to engage the stakeholders in the design process both the system design and the institutional design. That's been shown over and over again that's the only way to really get sustainable institutions to happen as well. You're probably familiar with Eleanor Ostrom's work on governing the commons and the fact that if you don't engage the stakeholders in the design of the rules and norms and etc. chances of having them actually work for a much reduced use or at least much more expensive for us. A couple of questions leading off some of the comments made so far. The first one is on the demand side and recognising that we've been talking about increasing supply and the yield and so on is there a case for overing the mix of human food consumption? In other words is there a only pricing protein at an economically sustainable level and what else might we do to remove the demand or manage the demand for increased crop production? That's the first question. The second question is what are the specific options where farmers can be paid for ecosystem services or management that are working in other... Well to the first one I would argue that the prices of everything are wrong. Because the magnitude of the externalities in the system today are so large that we're not incorporating all of those external costs in energy production and food production probably in terms of protein for sure. So if we actually paid the true cost of the things that we're consuming I think things would look very different and we'd be headed in a much more sustainable way and there certainly are efforts to try to estimate what those external costs are. How big are they? I'm involved with a company out of the UK called True Costs that does just that for all the major trade companies in the world. You know it's just the current prices are way off and you can't expect the market to give you any sort of efficient solution in the face of those large externalities where you have to do something about it one way or the other. What's the second question? Well I think Costa Rica might be one of the sort of poster child of the use of payment for ecosystem services where they pay farmers. Basically the opportunity costs to convert from cattle ranching to planting forests because cattle ranching in the way they had done it there was compacted with soil to run off of water and nutrients etc. So it was having a big impact on the ecosystem services and by paying them more than they could make by raising cattle to plant trees they managed to reforest the country essentially. That's one case. Many other examples of these payment systems that are kind of in a state of experimentation I would say in design around the world. One argument though I would make is that I don't think it's a simple market mechanism that you're actually shooting for. I think it's a little more complex and we probably need different institutions to manage these services because they're not private goods, they're public goods and so one idea is to have common asset trusts where the ownership of the resource is held in common so trust then can pay individuals for enhancing the asset and they could also charge individuals for depleting the asset. So some more radical institutional designs can really help to move forward. You might also not want to pay individuals for producing those services but pay the community in some way to enhance their welfare not by paying individuals directly. So there's I think a lot of design work that needs to go on, a lot of experimentation that will hopefully, maybe some of that can happen here in Australia. Jill has a question for you. Just following on from Melissa's just following on from Melissa's points about expanding the research from researchers to their end users and involving social scientists and that one of the main benefits major areas that needs addressing and there is a risk management because risk management is not only a barrier to adoption but it's also a cause of a lot of environmental impacts. I was just reflecting while you were talking I'm lucky to work with a very diverse group of farmers I worked with some very wealthy farmers some of the wealthiest farmers on the planet and some of the poorest I worked with some common farmers in Australia so nitrogen management is such that what they're managing for is they have a particular amount of water per year they don't want nitrogen to be an issue so they apply much more nitrogen than what is necessary in order that that is not a risk. There are obvious offside effects of that but it's also a major producer of nitrous oxide 14 times whatever it is as a greenhouse gas the use of fossil fuel in creating nitrogen in the first place. Now I also worked with the other end of the farmers some very poor upland farmers in the Philippines they don't use fertilizer at all. That equally has hugely deleterious effects because they are now in a cycle of declining fertility they've exported fertility nutrients from that soil however long since it's been cleared and they're now getting to a stage where they cannot get economic crop and so they abandon the land and it becomes a grassland now they can't the problem there is simply risk they cannot afford to get credit in order to buy the fertilizer to get themselves out of that spiral of declining fertility so in both cases you've got problems created by risk where you're managing for short term risk but it's having long term implications Yeah I was quickly I was trying to make that point at the end of my talk with one of the challenges as production gets riskier in a lot of areas is that you either need to more environmental damage or you need to under investment or low investment in these inputs I mean I should say that I'm generally optimistic on nutrient management I think there's a lot of improvements in the case of Africa there's a lot of negative strategies to try to transfer some at risk or deal with some at risk and on a high end there's some strategies to try to be more responsive in the fertilizer use so that you are not way over applying in down years so I agree with you but I also am optimistic in general in the technology development on that front court and not just the physical technology but a lot of the business models Yeah I guess some more comments in support that's definitely front and centre and as David said there's quite a lot of innovative things happening to try and deal with risk because when you're living on the edge like that you've got zero resilience so it's not just that you're having environmental damage but there's human catastrophe and crisis happening too so it's really about helping the farmers improve their appetite or ability to handle risk and build some resilience so that when a crisis comes or a poor season or whatever you're not moving into humanitarian support and one example is we talked about it this morning for really poor pastoralists in Kenya and Tanzania livestock insurance schemes crop insurance schemes and I'm talking really really poor farmers and it allows them it allows to build some capacity for them to cope with at least one bad thing that happens in their family one bad season you know a death in the family whatever which ultimately benefits everybody in the long run so it's really that slowly I mean you can ever reduce risk but if you can improve the resilience then you can at least improve their ability to respond to that another area that we're looking to export a sort of idea of social capital that we are familiar with in Australia through the land care movement where you're building human and social capital to deal with in Australia NRM issues but we're looking to use it in Africa well it's being well used in Africa to look at market access and getting into the production system and being able to have access to credit and seeds and inputs and outputs at the same time so rather than operating in isolation these farmers are coming together as groups or sometimes they're called land care groups sometimes they're not but again it's about sharing the risk can I come over and give the two things in your talk I think you put up the most recovery and keeping that three trajectory what? what you had? so that would be better if that was a three-dimensional plot and with the third dimension being some sustainability index, ecological damage index ecosystem services index because if a policy person or a government person looks at that and they look at the one who's going like the European saying well that looks good if they look at the one with that well that doesn't look good but unless one has a measure of the ecological footprint or the sustainability of that then it's not it's a misleading diagram you didn't give it up here of that plot that's not actually a plot I actually did in my presentation I said you could argue that this should have other dimensions to it and I expressed the view that you could have a conservation dimension and so that was why I said this is a very simplistic representation of the issue but to actually populate those other dimensions you actually need some information in what I said because I don't think we have the information at the moment so if I had a problem to do not have the information someone gets messed out of the argument I have a question for Mary thank you for giving me some clear explanation of this information and I was especially pleased to see that you're going to be looking at natural variation and it occurs to me that one interesting area which would tie you into into justice commences in fact if we don't have any see-forward aqua crops many consulates around the world that would be a nice one for somebody to target like under the amaranthus but my question was the Holy Grail is variation in transpiration efficiency which is linked to variation of Pmax positively not negatively like we see within wheat and many other species are you aware of any natural variation within a species whereby there's a positive correlation to in transpiration efficiency at the wheat level and Pmax I'm not aware of any particular examples of that within looking at cultivars I mean where you'd expect to find them is potentially under environmental conditions if we're talking about C3 plants as opposed to C4 plants in species adapted to hydro environments where they've had to cope with very different relationships that they need to establish that if you took those plants and looked at them under more messy conditions with higher transpiration efficiency and higher photosynthetic efficiency but I don't think that level of sophistication has been done in terms of looking for that I hope you do it well I need to talk to Graeme about that I'm tremendously stimulated by all those things that have been said here and a bit about the world and the possibilities where it's going to an exploding type of system of ideas but I think there's just two ideas I'd contribute that there's a question on this but one is there's a perspective missing here I think and that is a legal perspective you can have laws that are managerially enforced or you can have laws that rely a lot on voluntary compliance and I'm really thinking about voluntary compliance here that a central problem is how you marshal all these ideas all these disparate they appear to be disparate sorts of approaches to the end of food security and just guarantee there's enough food around for the planet and the environment is not being run down I think there's a good opportunity to formulate ideas under the heading of an act I think it could be called something like the regional sustainability and social equity act if you doesn't look like a legal audience but if you know how legislation works you would find that these are amazing sort of amazing ideas that are working to serve purposes you don't have sections and they set up things like this institutional things so I think there's a question here about anybody doing any inquiry or research on the legal framework that would work towards the ends of food security and environment protection so that's one question and the second idea to volunteer is that again it's not really being talked about here is that all of this good knowledge useful advice, guidance confidence building carrying forward historical knowledge through people through persons that impress other persons in some sort of professional client transaction so what I don't hear a lot of in fact I haven't heard any at all is about the central need for the strategy to achieve food security and environmental protection is the need for a professional, a new occupational role called a sustainability practitioner where you take all of these things that we've been talking about and they become formulated into like a clinical practice in particular areas you can have have to dry it on the model of for example in medicine all the colleges of medicine all the focus on practice the most evolutionary step I suppose in dealing with all this knowledge is to have a new powered practitioner just like in medicine you know took many centuries to start to think oh okay there has to be somebody here whose advice that we rely upon and it becomes a social institution and it becomes protected within society and you've got disciplinary bodies to make sure we take a line and all that sort of stuff and this should be again it comes back to the question anybody considering research in the training of sustainability practitioners and the sort of social institution well I would argue that they do exist there are institutes in schools that train sustainability practitioners the key word left out by this power sustainability practitioners you know having those sorts of services taking advantage of toward the ultimate goals and maybe that's more dependent on the first question which is the legal framework within which for this to happen I just reviewed a book by Mary Wood at the University of Oregon called The Teacher's Trust it's a new legal framework for the new ecological age and it's based on this idea of the public trust doctrine and that doctrine goes back to Roman times and it's been applied to open water and beaches in some areas but here I can use it he applied much more broadly to all of our common assets the atmosphere, the oceans certain ecosystem services and that it's the government's responsibility to protect those assets for public use and it cannot be privatized or deeded to private interests and I think that's part of the problem where the atmosphere is now being managed as an open access resource and so is much of the ocean so we really want to get a handle on those things we can't allow them to be open access resources and the longer they have to be they have property rights but those property rights have to be assigned to the community rather than private individuals there's actually some real movement in that part the state of Vermont has a bill that was pending last time I looked called the Vermont Common Asset Trust Legislation so there is some actual movement in that direction to create legal mechanisms to implement those kinds of ideas I just think one area to be aware of is not illegal development but there's a lot of certification schemes in many cases driven by market demand or driven by the private sector kind of anticipating for example the soybean case in Brazil and the pressures to avoid deforestation so there's lots of pretty strict certification schemes in place sometimes you could argue that they're not targeting the exact right properties but sometimes they are and that's I think a positive development but not quite what you're talking about and then I would just say that most good agronomists would consider themselves a sustainability practitioner and that they are advocating for improving soil quality rotating crops all of the things that we often talk about in terms of sustained agricultural basic not usually valuing some of the non-market goods but sometimes even those are brought into the picture but it's not not thought sustainability practitioners I think there's actually quite a large literature on this but it's quite dispersed and it's called different things in different places like adaptive governance literature etc which comes out of Austro's work amongst others but in terms of examples which perhaps a government led and then they don't quite mention what you're asked after but for example our CMAs that we used to have and sort of stood in their places we don't have that job of integration of production and conservation within those bounds for those. In the US there was the conservation reserve program which for a long time actually seemed to be pretty effective in terms of putting aside crop land and putting it under conservation management but that required continued government funding so as long as the government kept on topping up the funding bucket that was fine and as David just said is that when the price of the crop CMAs went up for biofuels and the people started trading out back into production another one would be the Euro system where they've got stewardship payments etc so there's a combination of production and environmental elements there that come into that again requiring types from the public purse and then along the lines of what David was just talking about with the certification you've got the sort of private industry footprint type schemes like Tesco and other supermarkets in the UK where they effectively try to inform the purchaser about what goes into that product and hopefully that they'll actually make better decisions which end up with the bio footprint in the shopping basket. Can we have time for maybe more or a few more questions here? So far I think your focus is more production level I know the information about the waste actually when I saw the huge amount of bread was dumped in the garbage because it can't stay in Australia because the food is they're what is it called? No, it hides any food standard it's a public safety reason it can't stay next morning so they have to stop I was so shocked to see it they actually stopped the food obviously when they see the figure of bread they have to go different channels and also when I was walking down the town hall last week the huge amount of food from takeaways shop they just leave outside so hopefully homeless people picked it up huge amount of waste and I think there is a good way maybe to tackle this waste and also another one is I found with the diet because huge amount of food like for example my original people indigenous people have their own diet no longer that those food now they move to the western diet so I think there were a lot of roadkill to travel Australia huge amount of food is waste from my point of view and so I think the way we can educate people eating diversity of food Well this gets back to the meat demand question as well and I think there's lots of interesting questions about protein it's important to remember that most of the demand increase is from the emerging economies where at least personally it's very hard to see them not wanting to transition to higher meat diets but I do think there are opportunities in the rich world for reducing because of health concerns or other concerns reducing meat consumption and then much better technologies to avoid waste like you're talking about at least in the US there are lots of kind of second harvest operations that are that are already large but continue to grow in terms of trying to make sure you don't have overly conservative food safety laws that prevent obvious transfers within communities I think there are huge opportunities for reducing food waste but the other issue we didn't really touch on is the whole distribution issue not only distribution of food but the distribution of wealth in general which has gotten really outpanned in some countries but their wealth distribution is so unequal that it's really having a deleterious effect on social capital which is having a deleterious effect on human well being going forward in sustainability and also the kinds of policies that we pursue so all these things are interconnected quite heavily and we have to bring in those sorts of considerations as well so it's not just increasing production it's how it's distributed how it's used more efficiently how equitably it's distributed around the planet we can certainly make huge improvements in all of those questions I suppose following up I'll talk about food wastage I suppose the other big dimension of food wastage comes in the distribution a global food supply chain I suppose my question will panelize it has there any work been done on modeling what sort of system would give less food wastage in the distribution stage whether it's a region on local food production and consumption or a globalised food production system I can say that food waste whether it be pre-harvest, post-harvest or well down the valley changing where the consumers in charge of it there's been quite a lot of work trying to quantify the cost of that and I mean the costs are just outrageous even when you just look at one or two commodities I mean a really conservative estimate is 30% on average along the valley chain for production from harvest all the way along and it depends where you are in the world whether that's predominantly post-harvest where you've got inferior storage options storage and transport options or in more developed countries it's at the consumer level there's been quite a bit of work and research being done at the post-harvest level in a lot of countries looking at the sort of regional food valley chains I don't know that there's a huge amount being done at the developed world but we're talking profits and we're talking food security so there's some pretty strong drivers behind that all right let's just thank you