 But let's get started. My name's Owen Atkin. I'm the director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Agritechnology, which is an ANU Innovation Institute. Innovation institutes are sort of a vehicle by which the university can harness the full interdisciplinary capability of the university to address complex challenges out in society and industry. Now you couldn't think of more sort of complex challenges that will be facing us right now than some of the food security issues that the planet's going through, geopolitical war, climate change and so on, all affecting the supply of food. And there's obviously the technological issue as well in terms of how our ability to improve productivity growth of crops. So in that sort of context of understanding external challenges and so on, see it's been running a sort of series of conversations through the year in sort of spaces like this to understand the nature of those complex issues so we can best work out how the university and its partners such as CSRO can address those issues. And also we form networks. And one of those network sort of structures is having innovation fellows. And Alison Bentley, Dr. Alison Bentley, who's here today is one of those innovation fellows that we've established. And in that case with Alison, she gives us a reach into an understanding about how the global community is dealing with food security issues and the provision of seed, particularly to developing countries around the world to make sure that they've got the latest, best climate ready type seed in order to plant. So it's my pleasure to introduce Alison in a moment. But before we get to that, just an introduction to her there. She is the director of the Global Wheat Program at CIMIT in Mexico and is kindly spending a full week here and has been very busy. I think on the day you arrived, you had to do three interviews on the day that you got off the plane and then go to the dinner over at the Crawford meeting and then give a talk the next day, but first being woken up for another interview by radio. So Alison's been super busy on the day that she's here. But she is here until early next week. If there's anyone that would really like to have a chat with her about some of the things that you hear today, we might be able to find a spot in the calendar. So do reach out to the Seattle team. The last thing I'd like to point out about Seattle is we have a monthly newsletter and that newsletter is an opportunity for you to learn more about what we do. And so all you need to do is go to the Seattle website and you'll be able to find out how to do that. So Alex Sloan has kindly agreed to be our emcee for today, a very experienced journalist. So I'll pass over to you. Thank you. Thanks so much, Owen. I am delighted to be with you this afternoon. And yes, I actually started life in ABC Radio as a rural journalist. I came from a farm and I worked in Papua New Guinea for a couple of years as an Australian volunteer abroad, actually producing food, trying to produce food. So a little tiny bit of experience compared to all of you this afternoon. I'd like to acknowledge we're on Ngunnawal-Nambri country, land that was never ceded and thank our First Peoples for their past and ongoing custodianship of this land and that custodianship and the health of country is directly linked to what we're going to be discussing today just in terms of housekeeping. If you can keep your masks on, thank you so much. It's a new policy to keep them on. I know it's hot, but thanks for that. And also just make sure your phones are on silent. And if some people come in, there are still some seats at the front here. So just direct them up to the front. So very soon, the keynote address, as we've heard, will be delivered by Dr. Alison Bentley-Seat Fellow and Director of the Global Wheat Program, where she leads a team of international scientists developing and delivering new tools and technology to improve plant breeding and crop production. Dr. Bentley's address will then be followed by discussion with a really fantastic panel. We have Professor Mark Howden, climate scientist, health and equity professor Sharon Freel, and crop researcher with ACR, Dr. Eric Hutner. And there will also be time. So we'll have a discussion for about 25 minutes and then there's time for your questions as well. So just store up your questions, even write notes. And I'd like you right out of the box because the time is quite tight this afternoon. But now to our keynote address. And as you've heard, Dr. Alison Bentley is the Director of the Global Wheat Program. Her research combines genetics and genomics to develop and deliver new tools and technology to improve plant breeding and crop production. And she leads a team of international scientists developing improved wheat germoplasm. And prior to joining Simit, which was in November 2020, she was working in the United Kingdom focused on translation of fundamental scientific breakthroughs into tangible impacts for the agri-food sector. She has a doctorate in agricultural science and a PhD in agriculture from the University of Sydney. It's very, very lovely to have her back in the country. And please welcome Dr. Alison Bentley. APPLAUSE I've got one. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alex. And thank you, everyone, for being here today. So I'm going to talk about our Serial Foods production system and wheat in particular. And I'm going to talk about the importance of shock-proofing wheat for the future. So wheat is eaten by 2.5 billion people globally, so it's a really important in the context of global food security. The Ukraine-Russia war has also shown us the importance of wheat geopolitically, something we may have not been had at the front of our minds. It's also important that we remember that wheat is a foundational part of many of our agricultural systems, including here in Australia. And in our agricultural systems, we have to ask what's the role of wheat, what's the role of national, regional and international governments in ensuring wheat is produced for food security, but also to stabilise our global markets. So as Alex mentioned, I'll give a presentation and then we'll have a really fascinating panel discussion to dive into some of these issues. So why wheat? My title indicates staple cereals, and there are a number of staple cereals, wheat, rice, maize, that really sustain a large proportion of the population. And of those, wheat is really key. And this map here shows the countries in red are the countries in the world where wheat is the number one provider of daily energy for the population. So you can see a lot of red on this map, and that really indicates the role of wheat in stabilising food supply and food security. And many of the countries where wheat predominates are in the global south and the developing world. So wheat is really this important mechanism to alleviate global hunger. So then why wheat, as well as this source of dietary needs and food supply for much of the world's population, wheat is also incredibly versatile. So I'm sure many of us here have eaten wheat today. So we have this, what looks like a relatively simple grain growing in a field, everyone's seen a field of wheat, I'm sure. But the wheat that we grow in the field provides many different complex products to us in our daily lives. So you may not, yeah, even for those people who don't eat wheat, it's likely you eat something that might eat wheat. So we really have wheat as this very simple kind of thing from history, but that's actually really a foundational part of not only our agricultural systems, but also our food systems. So when the price of wheat increases, it typically translates to an increase in our household budgets, the cost to us as consumers. And in this part of the world, maybe it's a cost that we can each absorb personally. But when we look across the world and the different income levels that exist in different parts of the world, these rising food prices can have really dramatic and significant impacts on the livelihoods of communities. So in my title, I talk about shockproof staples. And this is because we see more than ever multiplying challenges impacting our food system, our ability to produce food, our ability to supply food equitably to the populations that need them. And these are multifaceted challenges. The Ukraine-Russia war has really had wheat at the forefront because of the impacts on wheat supply. And I'll talk about that a little bit more. But on top of this, we see growing reliance on food aid, so the need for people to be provided with their basic staple food stuffs because they can't be produced or made available at a high enough rate to meet the demands. Then we see the nitrogen, the inputs into our agricultural systems, becoming much less available or much more expensive. So we struggle to produce the same amount of crop and deliver that in a sustainable way. And then we also see heat and climate effects amplifying the already constrained agricultural productivity. And then a lot of social pressures as well and a really interesting framework around that in terms of how societies are changing, how our populations are urbanizing and what that means for the changes in the food that we eat and the populations around the world eat. So really we have this multifaceted challenge that's not going to be addressed by any single biological, genetic, agronomic policy intervention. And we really need a coming together of all of these different disciplines to think about how we deliver a more resilient agricultural system and a more resilient, particularly in my case, in the wheat system. So complexity and frequency of food price rises. I think we see these spikes and we call them spikes and say, okay, that was a food price spike. And then these food price spikes start happening at reoccurring frequency. So we can see here, we've got the 2008 price rises where the price of cereals, the price of oils and therefore the food price index which is very closely linked to this went up. Again, we saw that in 2011. And again, we're seeing that now as an impact of the Ukraine-Russia war. We can also see that if you look at the food price index, so this is the cost for people to buy food, it's very closely linked to the price of cereals. So we really again see this fundamental link between the cost of wheat, rice and maize, our basic cereals and the overall cost to a consumer of the food that they eat and the food that's necessary to sustain them. And what we know from previous food price spikes is they often lead to civil unrest, particularly in areas of vulnerability in the world where food insecurity is the highest. So we saw this with the Arab Spring and also with a lot of civil unrest in Africa in 2011. And this really raises the question when we start to see in the current situation these really high prices, what is really the impact for our greater society? So that's why wheat in the context of this societal challenge is hugely relevant. So what did we see in the wake of the Ukraine-Russia war? And why is wheat really a key part of this? So directly after the invasion of the Ukraine, wheat prices skyrocketed and have been highly volatile since then. And when the price goes up, the supply changes. And so we've seen a real constriction in the supply of wheat that was available in the global market. This creates vulnerability in the availability and the ability of people to buy wheat on the open market. And this brings this potential for instability in society as well. In addition, many of the governments in the global south in the developing world subsidize the price of bread. So this introduces additional costs on the governments of these countries. And we've been really highlighting that most of these impacts are inequitably felt. So by low and middle income countries with insufficient access to foreign exchange, US dollars to buy wheat at elevated prices, these impacts are really magnified on those communities. And then we see this is not just one part. We see this change in supply and demand. We see recent heat waves, reduced North American yields, limited access to fertilizer components, which also come out of Russia. And these are really all kind of magnifying components of an impending food crisis. I think in the Australian context, there's also the question of the recent bumpy yield. So Australia is one of the only countries seeing really high levels of wheat productivity this year. And this also raises some really interesting questions. What's the role of Australia? What's the role of a country that has a bumpy year in a time when prices are really high and supply is really low? What's the social and economic and policy direction that you take with that? And how does that play as global citizens in ensuring this food security geopolitical stability? So we've been doing a lot of work at CIMET to really try and highlight the importance of wheat as a source of food, particularly for vulnerable communities in the global South, as well as the inequalities that are coming about due to the current crisis. So we see these inequalities not only at the level of a country, not able to access wheat, but also at the level of a household. And we know, for example, that women have a tendency to personally absorb food deficits in food. And so we really see this inequalities across scales from the household, where decision-making income levels change, the dynamics of how food's available through to countries and regions entering really significant and severe food insecurity. And through our program, which operates with a mandate to provide wheat for the global South, we're able to start new work really rapidly, in this case in East Africa, to really look at how we address some of these issues on the ground, and this is really important. So if we just look back a little bit at why we're in this current situation, why the invasion of Ukraine by Russia led to this increasing, these increasing price, the price of global wheat. And what we can see is over the past 10 years, we've had a real concentration of supply of wheat into the global market. And the picture at the top shows the exporting countries, and you can only see a few bits of red color here. So there's five countries in the world that supply a very large proportion of the world's wheat, and this includes both Russia and Ukraine. So if you take those two countries out of the equation of providing grain, then you start to have serious problems. And if North America then yields at very low levels, you start to compound this with another stress on the system. We also know that many of the countries that import wheat, so import the wheat from Ukraine and Russia are in the global south, and therefore particularly impacted by this inability to purchase the wheat that they've been purchasing to date. And I wanted to talk a little bit about concentration of supply because I think we don't only see it in the agricultural sector, we don't just see it in wheat itself. So in many parts of the many different industries, we see a concentration of supply. And this is just an example of concentration of our retail buying. We used to potentially go to five or six stores to look for our Christmas presents and online retellings are now allowed us to go to just one place, which is able to provide for all our needs. So this is similar and different in many ways, but kind of indicates how we've really moved many parts of our industries and our supply chains into really concentrated supply. And we know what this looks like in terms of the retail environment. So we now all have the convenience of clicking on a button and having a centralized source of supply of all the consumer goods we could demand. But this has implications for the resilience of our retail sector. And this is similar in some ways to the case of wheat. And then when something's out of stock, suddenly we have no options. And this is really kind of very similar to what we see in wheat, but also in the microelectronics. So very similar case here with the concentration of supply which now has really significant impacts because we've introduced these vulnerabilities into our system. And if we look at the trends over time and across the world, we see that these again are unequal impacts. So if we look at Africa and Asia and the reliance on serial imports into these countries, we can see that these have been growing over time. So becoming more and more reliance on the availability of imported cereals. And this is really significant because again, if you're in Europe, potentially it's not such a problem, but if you're in Africa, your reliance on other people to provide a source of imports is quite significant. It's also important, as I mentioned at the start, that we see kind of shifts in the patterns of consumption of our basic cereal crops. And this graph here shows the difference between wheat production in Africa and the demand for wheat. So growing urbanization in Africa has really accelerated the demand for wheat as more urbanized. And a lot of evidence suggests that more urbanized populations have changes in food preferences. And here we see a shift to more wheat-based diets. And at the same time, production is staying stable or even reducing in some countries. So this gap between what a country or a region can produce and what it demands grows over time, really amplifying this need to have a source and availability of imports. And as I mentioned, in places like East Africa, this is becoming really significant. So if you're in Kenya at the port of Mombasa, this is the intake point for grain into East Africa, where you have very large tankers of grain available on your one-click Amazon analog, essentially. So a boat will come unload in the port. You have a highly sophisticated port infrastructure that's ready to take that cheap grain from Ukraine and Russia, process it, and convert it into food supporting the populations and the demand that exists. And we see this in the mills in East Africa as well, where there's up to 60% reliance on wheat, cheap wheat imported when it's needed, just on time delivery into the port, into the infrastructure that exists and ready to be available in the flour that's produced. So this is a really significant challenge because if 60% of your wheat, your flour components are not available, if there are no boats available to come into this port, then you really start to see some of the practical and real-time food security implications of the current crisis. So we've been trying to develop packages to address the short, medium, and long-term implications and potential to mitigate these. And I'll just talk about these in a few details. So in the short term, obviously, we need to secure access to grain, particularly for the most vulnerable populations. And we propose boosting of production is obviously one way to do this, as well as ensuring access through market controls, making sure grain's available for human consumption and that it's distributed equitably and that food aid programs can deliver the aid that's needed as a very short-term mechanism, as well as securing supply. And I'll talk about that a little bit. In the medium term, we look to targeting the expansion of wheat production in particular and building self-sufficiency pathways. Many countries want to be able to produce the wheat that's grown either in that local or regional area, as well as monitoring, which I'll talk about in more detail. And then the longer term, we obviously need to think about things like expansion and productivity within the ecological boundaries of our systems. I think many of us know or will have read about the fragility of our agricultural production and our natural environment and really about designing systems that can balance those two demands of having healthy environments as well as having sustainable food production for our populations. We also see a really big need to address the gender disparities that exist, particularly in cereal crop production and in our agricultural systems in general. And then increasing investment, we were at the Crawford Fund conference this week and this topic came up time and time again. Agriculture takes a long time. There's a long lead in time. Food production is really a foundation of society, yet we invest in it in one, two, three-year chunks of time. And then we look at how we do that and really develop a strategy for the resilience of our food systems. So this is obviously an easy thing to say, but a very difficult thing to do in practice. So first, if we look at boosting production, it's easy to say, right, we can just produce more wheat on the same land area. And that would be great. And that's really what we're proposing here because if we look at the productivity of wheat around the world, which is what's shown here, you can see that wheat can be grown in a lot of places and it is grown in lots of places. It's one of the few crops that can be grown across such a wide eco-geographical range. We also know from crop modeling data that most of the world's wheat production is below the theoretical maximum that is possible to be achieved. And this is shown by the red and orange points in this map. So even in Australia, we can see that productivity is below the theoretical maximum. And in some of the bread baskets of the world, so the northern parts of India, for example, we can really do more to increase the productivity. And increasing productivity is obviously not as easy to do as saying increase productivity, but we know a lot about the biology of the system. We know a lot about the physiology of the crop. We know how to apply, we know how to mechanize, we know how to apply inputs at the right time. And it's really about putting all of these things together and making sure they're available, challenging to do, but theoretically possible to boost production in these regions. We're also as part of this, and this is a really core part of what we do at CEMET in Mexico, is about accelerating the development of new germplasm, new varieties that can perform better at scale. And so this is some of our new infrastructure that we have in Mexico, where we can really supercharge the breeding process even further to produce material and get it out to farmers and producers even more quickly. In terms of securing supply, one of the current areas of work that we're currently exploring is the ability to blend wheat flour with the flowers of other cereals that are available in a local area. So in this case in East Africa, can we take just a small proportion of the wheat flour, so two to 5%, which doesn't sound like much if it's a one kilo bag of flour, but if it's a ton silo of wheat grain and blend that with millets and sorghums and develop products that are not rejected by the consumer. And this is a way to reduce the amount of wheat that's needed really at a scale that's potential. And so this is new work that started to really explore the potential for both utilizing flowers that are available, whether they be cassava, sorghum, millets, and blending them to reduce the amount of wheat that's required to provide to the needs of the consumer. Then if we look at self-sufficiency pathways, much like the map of boosting production, we can see in this view of the globe, the level of self-sufficiency in many of the wheat systems, particularly in the global south. And this level of self-sufficiency is very low. And again, we have biological agronomic solutions and we really propose to try and really get those out to people much faster. In terms of monitoring capacity, this is a really interesting area of work to say, can we take snapshots of the world at any one time and know what productivity looks like? Because vulnerabilities exist when you only know what's happening in your backyard and you don't know what's happening in the rest of the world. So NASA harvests have really pioneered this, being able to monitor crops across the globe and identify where vulnerabilities exist. And this is just one example that was from the February data, which starts to give warnings of different factors, biophysical factors like drought, as well as different geopolitical things like conflict. So to be able to kind of capture and share this data in real time, to know where in the world wheat's going to be produced this season, what are the risks? Who's monitoring them? How do we mitigate them? How do governments use this? How does the market use this information to respond? Another component of monitoring capacity is to say, could we use some of the technologies that we already have available to ensure that we move wheat around the world in a safe way? So wheat has a number of pests and pathogens that reduce yield. And what we don't want to do by starting to say, let's move wheat in different ways around the world, let's produce it in different areas, is start new pandemics or epidemics of wheat diseases. And we saw this risk when there was announced that new countries were looking at where to buy wheat and countries that had never imported from different regions because of the biosecurity risk said, well, we need the grain, so we're going to import. And this introduces a longer-term risk if you import grain and then some of that isn't, some of that has a biosecurity threat, then there's potential to create even bigger problems in the future. But we're now very good at genomics. Everyone knows what a PCR is. Everyone's done a COVID PCR test before they travel. The world now has access to thousands of PCR machines spread out all around the world. So what if we could turn all of those into seed testing facilities? What if we could say, okay, we probably don't need our COVID PCR testing labs anymore, let's use those to test grain, agricultural products that move around the world and use the power of genomics, which we now have to understand that that seed is clean and that seed can move either be exported or be imported into a country. So we really think there's potential to use available technologies and make these available for monitoring the capacity in our systems. And then I wanted to talk briefly about the climate change amplifiers that exist. So we've seen in the current situation a real geopolitical shift that's had a big impact on the market, on the grain market. But at the same time, we see also the real-time effects of climate change on wheat production. And we talked before about inequalities. And again, with climate change, we see a very similar picture. And this map on the top shows the areas of the world in 2050, so the wheat producing areas of the world, where we expect to see yield increases as a result of climate change or yield decreases. And you can probably notice that the blue and green colors are mostly in the global north, where we expect yields to stay the same. Production will shift potentially in geographical area, but yields will stay the same or even increase. Yet if we look in the global south, the bread baskets in northern India, also in Australia, we see a big expectation that climate change effects will seriously reduce yields. So we know a large proportion of the forecast yield decreases will be in the global south. Again, bringing this burden of climate impacts into wheat and really being important when we think about strategies to stabilize wheat, where do we expect to see the greatest impacts of climate change? What can we do in those regions to be ahead of those changes? And at Simet, we work a lot on the upstream understanding of heat and drought stress response. How do we develop these varieties for the future? And this is just a small component of how we address the fragility of our cropping systems in the face of climate change. And this was really brought home in the current season. So we already had the impacts of the Ukraine, Russia, war on global wheat. And India and Pakistan, South Asia, had forecast to have record yields. And everyone was saying, that's great. It's good that someone has record yields. The potential for that to fill export gaps is great. But then just at the end of the season, we saw really significant century high heat waves across Northern India, Pakistan, which led to very significant reductions in the yield that was forecast for those countries. And this led to an immediate shock again in the market. So we already had a real constriction of supply. We were expecting more grains to be produced. It wasn't produced. And then the market again went into turmoil as a result of this. And this is really happening now. And I think that's key, that these are things that are happening in real time. We talk a lot about climate change as a existent, I think still is an existential threat in some respects. But here we see really the impacts from one day to the next on a very significant heat wave. We've also been arguing that we need to focus on rural communities and the health of rural communities who produce the wheat that we're expecting to adapt to the future in hotter and drier environments. And I think this is a really important component to consider that wheat needs people to produce it, to harvest it, to process the grain. And we're expecting wheat to perform in hotter environments, but we're also expecting our rural labor force to be able to work and live in these more unfavorable environments. And I think it's really important that we consider all of these factors when we think about the impacts of climate change on our wheat production, both as a biological thing, we want grain, but we also want a rural labor force that's able to produce and have healthy and strong livelihoods. So in the CIMET program, we're trying to accelerate our biological and genetic offer to the world in terms of improved wheat germplasm that can grow and thrive around the world. And the program, Norman Borlog, who was the first wheat director and won the Nobel Peace Prize, accelerated the breeding process to deliver better material to farmers in South Asia and particular faster. And he did this by using the geography of Mexico to move material and achieve two breeding cycles a year. So this allowed the development of new varieties which was taken up by farmers. Now at CIMET in our program, we're trying to use artificial environments, controlled conditions to accelerate this breeding process even further. And really trying to shorten the time that it takes to get genetic innovations, exciting research bundled into a seed that can be grown in a farmer's field. We're also looking at the seed system. So can we accelerate both the breeding but also the delivery of that improved seed into a farmer's field? Because it's not enough to just develop a new variety. It has to actually be grown in the field in order to deliver something in terms of a livelihood impact. And in this process, this is trying to reduce this time as much as possible. We're thinking about some really interesting and new areas of work. And here at CIMET as part of my innovation fellowship, one of the topics we're looking at is the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. So if you know anything about vaccine development and many of us I'm sure didn't know much before COVID happened, the vaccine development process takes 10 years, typically 10 to 12 years. But in COVID-19, we saw that the process took a year. And this was, there were many factors which led to this, the obvious demand for it, the ability to invest lots of money, the open sharing of data, novel ways to generate and analyze data, and then the regulatory changes to the regulatory process which allowed it to be so quick. And now the aspiration is that that process could take 100 days. So that's phenomenal. We've gone from a 10-year process of producing a vaccine to an aspiration of 100 days. So that's really changed the game in terms of what's been able to be done in the vaccine development process. If we look at the development of the seed variety, it also takes 10 years. So we're asking what can we learn from this process, the parallelization of all of these different processes that enabled something that took 10 years before to now take 100 days. Can we use that, and any of that learning to enable us to produce seed varieties quicker? So what if seeds were vaccines? Can we apply these learnings? Can we apply the regulatory process changes to deliver seed faster to farmers? And really important in this space to have the ability to work across disciplines and to learn from different sectors in terms of innovation. We're also interested, I think maybe oh and less so, in the use of novel financial and digital tools for moving seed, particularly in hard-to-reach areas. So we worked for a long time in Afghanistan where it's very difficult to get new seed physically to farmers. There's not a formal seed sector which allows you to distribute it to a store, people to go to a store, you collect the data, you know how many people bought that bag of seed in that area and you can really nicely aggregate your market share information and provide statistics on that. So really looking at the technologies that we can use that don't require us to know the full chain, that don't require us to know every piece of information along the way, but to use some of these different technologies now available to understand and to move material. So just to come to a close before the panel discussion, I think it's really important that we really recognize that our cereal food production systems and most of our systems, our retail system, our microprocessor system have really a lot of vulnerabilities within them. They have not only biological or technological challenges of vulnerabilities, but also geopolitical challenges within them. So wheat is really important because it's crucial for the alleviation of hunger. It's eaten by a lot of people and a lot of people in the global South. When we see increasing costs, we see great food insecurity, but also an impact on consumers in terms of the cost of living even here in Australia. The current crisis was really this dependence on a concentrated source of supply and we are trying to propose some applied solutions to address this in future. And we see these amplifiers, particularly in this case of climate change, having a significant impact. And really excited because we also have technology. We have probably the most access to technology that we've ever had and the ability to harness this and apply it to develop applied solutions. So with that, I'll close. Thank you very much and hand back to Alex. Thank you. APPLAUSE Well, I don't know about you. My mind is reeling, so that was just absolutely fascinating, terrifying, but I think shot through with hope about there are solutions. And Austin's just given fast food a whole new meaning. If we can look at the COVID vaccine in relation to food, that really is fastening things up. So if I could get Alison to come and sit down now and then I'll invite up the panel. We've got a fantastic panel for you this afternoon. Professor Mark Howden, up you come, Mark, is the Director of the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions at the ANU. He's Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, and is Chair of the ACT Climate Change Council and Mark has worked on climate variability, climate change innovation and adoption issues for over 30 years in partnerships with many industries, community and policy groups by both research and science policy roles. Issues he's addressed include agriculture and food security, the natural resource space, ecosystems and biodiversity, energy, water and urban systems. Please welcome Professor Mark Howden. APPLAUSE Up you come. Professor Sharon Freel is Professor of Health Equity and Director of the Menzies Centre for Health Governance at the School of Regulation and Global Governments at the ANU and an ARC Laureate Fellow. Sharon's interests are in the governance and regulatory processes relating to the structural factors affecting health inequities, including trade and investment, urbanisation, food systems and climate change. She's considered one of the foremost researchers internationally in the social determinants of health and was nominated in 2014 by her international peers as one of the world's most influential female leaders in global health. Please welcome Professor Sharon Freel. And Dr Eric Hutner up you come is Research Program Manager for CROPS at ACR, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. He started his career in plant molecular genetics, working in Public Research Institute INRA, INRA in France, and has worked for more than 20 years in a range of private companies. He's also been involved in managing public private research initiatives in both Australia and France and was the founding partner and director of Australia's Cooperative Research Centre for Plant Science and a member of the Australian Biotechnology Advisory Council. He's a graduate of France's leading agricultural science school, the Institut National Agronomique. Just put up with me, Eric. Please welcome Dr Eric Hutner. So, look, I think we first come to you, Alison. Thank you so much and I was coming to you, you know, as a Sydney and I know some of your families here this afternoon, so welcome to them. But what a fantastic high school to go that had a farm part of the school. This is why we've got you now. How fantastic. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, you know, seeing is believing and the ability to do something in practice and cut a potato into five and plant it and see 100 potatoes grow. I mean, this is the transformative power of food production. And I think that's really important as we think about training the next generation as well. So I just wonder how many schools now have that component and perhaps we should bring that back. But Alison, as Australia's national university, what do you see as ANU's role in solving some of the challenge to global food security? And I know you're a fellow here at SEAT. You know, what can we do? I think there's probably three elements. And the first is about really the cutting edge of the science and innovation and the Australian National University and other partners have really the ability to drive that innovation, whether it be blue sky thinking, thinking cross-disciplinary and really trying to harness the latest science that's available and make it available, which is a crucial part of it and make it available in a shorter time as possible. I think the second element and part of what SEAT aims to do is also to develop some of the thinking around how we really approach these challenges. So they might be an agricultural challenge that someone in a different discipline has never thought about, but the ability to kind of convene and bring together different minds and different ways of thinking, whether they be from the policy space, from the biology space, from computing. I think that's a really unique position to be able to do. And then the final part is about training the minds of the next generation and not just training in the traditional sense. I think really being able to use the full extent of what's available in the innovation landscape to shape the minds of tomorrow and really get those minds focused on some of these big societal challenges. So I think those three elements are really crucial to what ANU can provide. So to the ANU and SEAT is really quite well placed because it's small, it's got contact across the disciplines. Exactly. Yeah, I think that convening power. So you don't have to have all the individuals any more sitting in one place. I think that's the beauty, right? You can pull those people together and really try and address some of these... These... On the face of it, a biological challenge. But let's put computing into that. Let's put different lenses into solving some of these challenges. So it's a mark to your climate change, you know, it's a tough one. And I know you constantly want us to stay positive and look to solutions. Climate change is highlighted as an amplifier of the current wheat crisis and is likely to continue to play significant pressure on global crop production, at the same time agriculture is a significant source of emissions. How do we address trade-offs in agriculture to achieve climate change targets while maintaining production to sustain trade and food? It's a... It's a juggle. LAUGHTER You can do it, Mark. Thanks, Alex, and thanks, Alison, for the presentation. That was great. And for the work of you and your team that you're doing over there. It's one of the fundamental challenges ahead of us. I actually think that in many ways the challenges of climate change are understated by analyses such as Alison showed up. And that's when you look at existing trends driven by climate change. They're actually much greater than most of those models. The future analysis are based on would indicate. And amongst other things, we see this increase in climate variability at different scales, which is potentially driven by climate change, most likely driven by climate change. And that increase in variability by itself will throw challenges into the supply-demand equation, but also increased variability reduces investment. And so increased risk drives down investment in future technologies, in investment in nitrogen, fertilizer and similar things. And so I think the sort of compounding effect of climate change is actually underestimated in our current assessments. And that itself, I think, is a real problem. You combine that with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions down, you know, going net zero by 2050 if we're to keep things to 1.5 degrees. And when you look at our food systems, generally across the border, about 30% of our emissions globally. And so you see that agriculture is a big part of the picture, both in terms of being impacted by climate change, but also impacting on climate change. And so the way through this, I think, is through being smarter about how we do things. So it's actually about looking for technology which generates improved yield under stress, improved water relationships of crops so you can produce more crop per drop. And ANU is doing some great work on that and has done for a long time. There's also reduction in waste. And so a lot of the greenhouse gas emissions are from waste. So that's wasted nitrogen in the system where you go into the denitrification cycle and produce nitrous oxide instead of being absorbed by the plant. There's also waste on farm through crop losses and also waste in the food chain systems. So that's the food loss and waste equation, which in some places, 30% to 40% of total production. And so tightening up of those food systems and to support this, I think we need improved governance. And so when we go back to the work of Amarche Sen, going back now 50 years almost, demonstrated quite conclusively that the biophysical elements of famine were actually the minority. It's mostly about governance. And what we see globally is governance systems breaking down and in some cases, exaggerating and causing the problems rather than solving the problems. And so we need to pay as much attention to the governance side of things as to the biophysical. Alison, did you want to respond just in terms of just the underdone of the climate? Yeah, I think it's completely correct, right? We can use our current models and our current understanding of agricultural systems to make these projections into the future, but highly likely as things change and the temporal and spatial dynamics bring this complexity and are likely to be underestimated. And Mark's talking about governance being elevated. What do you think about that? Yeah, completely agree. We should have compared notes before. But yeah, I think the assuming all the solutions are going to come from the biophysical mitigation adaptation pathways is very unlikely. So the governance piece is huge. And I think it's an opportunity, again, to kind of, for more coming together of minds to understand how both of those together will provide kind of greater solutions than either individually. Now, I'll bring Sharon in here. It's health and equity. And there's so many questions flashed up my head while watching Alison's presentation there. What is and what should Australia do to support global crop supply in the short, medium and long term? And what is Australia's obligation in promoting equity through regulation and trade? Yeah, I mean, I think Alison just demonstrated so beautifully the sort of the contestation of values and interests that are at play in that global food system and crops in particular. And within a system like that where you have these incredible, and that is a governance challenge, when you have these incredible contestations of values and of interests, where does equity land when traditionally that's dominated by an economic productivity paradigm? And I would argue that for many, many years our agricultural policy settings being absolutely driven by such a paradigm means that we don't consider some of those equity and wider social and environmental issues. So vitally important for us here in Australia and across the world is to think about what is the mission of agricultural policy? What is the mission of trade policy with agriculture? Of course, vitally embedded within that. And if the mission is not simply about economic productivity and it's about environmental sustainability, it's about the sorts of access to healthy, nutritious food supplies, then it means we rethink the way that we do agricultural policy, I would argue. I came from a meeting just immediately before this with the, there's a trade agreement that's currently under negotiation, the Australia EU free trade agreement. And it is so promising. There is a sustainable food systems chapter being negotiated within that trade agreement. And so many of the things that you were speaking about, Alison, were in those discussions. The conclusion has been reached with the New Zealand EU trade agreement, which front and centre positions environmental sustainability, nutrition equity into the chapter around sustainable food systems and Australia is considering the same. So I take great hope from that. That's my glass half full. I'll come to the glass half empty in a second. But what it also begs us to ask, I think is, which I think it was so lovely, the way you demonstrated that, that concentration of supply and of control. Who controls the seeds? Who owns the seeds? Who owns the intellectual property of the seeds? And that gets embedded within trade. Every trade, as much of it, is about intellectual property. Intellectual property rights. And we know that part of the issues in terms of seeds and of global food supply is about the control of seeds by the big, aggregate businesses. And so how, if we're thinking about an equitable food system, then really a regulatory question has to be raised and has to be tackled around the regulation of big, large transnational corporations in the global food system. And that is a political hot potato that we have constantly shied away from. So I think what Allison's talk, well it really inspired me in so many ways, but that absolute essential conversation between technology, policy and politics is vital. It can't be a technology and then an add-on. What does it mean for policy? Because everything that Allison has pointed to is about policy coherence. How do the actions, so here in Australia, we have parts of the communities across Australia who cannot access nutritious foods? Not just in terms of food supply, but in terms of price, affordability and of course all of the marketing that goes with the crap food that's available. And so that's about the acceptability, the three A's of the food supply. Why can they not access food? It's a food supply issue, so it's a food policy issue, but it's also a social policy issue. It's about the affordability, it's about the amount of money that people have in their pockets and that's about social policy. So if we're going to think about an equitable, sustainable and healthy food system to address the sorts of issues that Allison has pointed towards and that Mark has pointed towards, then we've got to tackle the issue of policy coherence as well. So, great possibilities with trade right now. Trade and investment be part of those discussions and then we don't even have a national food policy for goodness sake, let's get a food policy that creates an authorising environment for these sorts of issues. There's an idea, Eric, to bring you into the conversation. Now, what about Australian Science for international benefit? And I guess this all links up. How do we balance between strengthening the local science for Australian benefit with local science for global benefit? Where should the international development focus be? There's plenty of things to say about that, but if you allow me, I would be happy to make a few comments about what was just said, including the right to respectfully disagree. So, an interesting aspect of the discussion around policy is obviously crucial for all the issues we are discussing. There's no doubt that the concentration in the trade area is a matter of great concern. I think the focus on the concentration in the seed business is slightly exaggerated and misplaced from my experience, in particular with regards to wheat, because Alison and her team produce international public good, which find their way to farmers all around the world. And from direct experience, you actually travel to research centers in the global south, and there are literally dozens, if not maybe a hundred, research facilities all around the world, which are actually developing the seeds from CEMET and the intellectual property embedded in this material is actually available free of charge. So, the development of those varieties and their accessibility to farmers is not constrained by business. It is actually made more difficult to disseminate in the absence of business in many cases. Now, of course, all details matter in this instance, and the situation with hybrid crops like corn, maize, is different because farmers cannot replant their own seeds. And therefore, they have to buy them. However, observation of what's happened in Africa over the last 20 years and in Bangladesh, where I'm quite familiar with and in northern India, the development of, and in places even more unlikely like Afghanistan, is that the development of the maize crop over the last two decades in this area of the world, which is unprecedented in the displacement of one species by another, has stirred the development of an industry which means farmers, even poor farmers, buy hybrid corn seeds. And so, I think the idea that the concentration of the seed industry is an obstacle to the equitable dissemination of innovation is to be blunt, a red herring. There are many other issues of concentration. Now, that's about seed. I want to provide an example of a sort of optimistic view of what Mark said about risk-reducing investment. That's absolutely problematic. That confronted to a risk of disease or climate, a farmer will be very conservative, avoid investing, and result into low and stable yield. But in some cases, innovation can help. So the release about 10, 15 years ago of a flood-tolerant rice variety by the International Rice Research Institute has been an extraordinary success of science, one of those things that we need to be aware of and celebrate. The only thing the variety dares is that when it's flooded up to 15 days, it doesn't die. And so if the flood recedes in time, the rice restarts and the crop is still there. Now, what Erie has observed is that, although the variety that's tolerant is exactly the same as the previous one, the yield is exactly the same, the farmers planting the new variety have a higher yield. And that was unexpected. And the reason they have is because knowing it won't die if there's a flood, they actually look after it better. So they invest. And that investment result in higher crop, everything else being equal. So I won't take more time, but that was... I can talk about international cooperation, which is what we do all the time. And the two-way street where Australian science and international science contribute so much to one another, there's plenty of example of that, obviously. But Sharon, did you want to respond? No, I mean, I'm fairly happy to be wrong on that. I suppose the work that I'm familiar with is something that we look at within the food systems and the inequities within the food systems as it relates to health. Not looking at the sort of the public access to seeds programs, but really just looking at that concentrated control by people like Monsanto, for example. And what we saw, I mean, Alison, when you were given the example with the vaccines, there were incredible regulatory shortcuts that were put in place that still allowed the intellectual property protections within that process. And we don't have equitable access to vaccines around the world. So we disagree. I think perhaps just the point for the discussion is being conscious of these different aspects when we're thinking about the global food system and the policy settings that get put in place that can either enable the sorts of things that you're more of what you're speaking about, Eric, rather than create some of the problems that I've been focusing on. And so there's a real possibility with this new trade agreement to actually do more of what you're speaking about and less of what I'm speaking about. So be at that table. And both Eric and Mark, can you come in on this? Dr Bentley talked about the example of the COVID-19 vaccine development. Is that just thrown in a whole new sort of baseline now? This actually can be done when we need it to be done with that kind of cooperation. What do you think about using that as an example of what we're capable of doing? I think there will be a lot to learn about COVID. The next 20 years, there are hundreds of PhDs will have to be written on the differential response of countries, the different outcomes, all sorts of things. You can look at it in really two different ways. The successful development of mRNA vaccine was both an overnight miracle, but also the result of 20 years of unheralded, unknown, obscure work. So whether this can be replicated is a good question. But the founders of fundamental research in this place and in others should think very carefully what they don't fund today, because it doesn't look like any prospect of any serious economic benefit in light of unknown unknowns that can happen in the future. So that's the first point. The second point, which brings us back to this trust of corporations, is that the development of the vaccine by Pfizer did not involve any public funding except a guaranteed client. There was a willing client ready to pay. Moderna was different. That was Scully Patton, wasn't it? They received a very large amount of public money to develop their vaccine. But there were differential models of development which show that there are multiple ways to get to the result. And we should remember that a third, quite large corporation, CureVac, tried the same technology and failed. And then that probably 100 initiatives to the same aim tried in good faith and failed. So I think there's a lot to learn there about the risk, about business investment, about past to markets, about the public-private partnership, about the role of fundamental research. There are many lessons of which I can't extract them all, but we need to have a nuanced view of those things. Mark, did you want to? I agree with some of the points that Eric's made. But I guess, for me, a couple of key messages. One is demonstrated the importance of science and technology and data, but also demonstrating that that is not enough. And so in terms of COVID and spread, it's clearly you need behavioural change, you need structural change as well as the science and technology. And to a large extent, the responses from COVID actually have resulted in partial behavioural change, but not the adequate structural change that drives the real future that where we need to be. Oh, it's fascinating with Alison saying the genomic testing centres could perhaps be used now for a different reason. Yeah, and I think that's, I mean, we just need to, you know, we need minds thinking about these things. You know, how can we deploy technology using infrastructures that are available at scale? But I also really like Eric's point about the landscape of fundamental research and the importance of science of the unknown unknowns. And I think, you know, everyone can write in their grant proposals now, you know, like in 20 years, you might, someone's going to need this, right? But I think that kind of the, you know, interesting to see governments kind of shifting from fundamental science to things that have to have an impact tomorrow or have to have like a really clear path to do something very tangible and the importance of really having this portfolio approach, having science on things that we might not ever need, but we also might be the thing that we needed a certain time in the future. Yes, you think, I mean, that is the, perhaps, the pollyannaish side of a terrible war of COVID, of climate change that governments will actually take this kind of science seriously, look to it, because at the moment, you know, it's just the Gates Foundation, isn't it, that will just commit long-term funding. It's very, very rare to get that kind of long-term funding. Will what we're going through at the moment perhaps be, I'm looking at through all, what do you think? Well, so I suppose in defense of health funding, so there's been consistent funding here in Australia, there's been consistent funding into medical research forever. There's not been consistent funding into prevention ever. And what we've seen with COVID is the absolute necessity to have an understanding of both the biomedical alongside the social model of health. And because COVID has identified all of the social conditions that sit around both our individual and the wider population health. So if I was going to, so I think it's been, I think there's been incredible investment in health research. And I do think, I do think COVID has created a rupture into the investment, research investment world. But I'm just going to make a plug for we actually need significantly more investment into the quote unquote, the softer side of all of that, which I think is what we're hearing and loading clear across all of our remarks to you. Mark, what do you think a $10 lettuce might be a spike for governments to iceberg lettuce? We've got to take fruit seriously, actually, cost of living. Yeah, look, I think the response will differ very much across different cultural groups. But I think one of the things that it's shown us, and Alison bought this out, is the fragility of some of our systems. So where we have just in time systems with long and fragile supply chains, in a sense, we're asking for trouble. And so I think some of the big corporations have actually realized that they've overdone the efficiency side of things and they need to step back and look at the robustness side of things a bit more. So I think that will actually drive some change. But the bigger change I think is actually cultural within our populations. And we've become so used to low cost, just in time, sort of product that there's an addiction element there and weaning people off the addiction is going to be tough. And the best way of doing that is actually giving people better alternatives. And at the moment, I don't see that in our discourse here in Australia. That contrast you had of the click of the button, everything's delivered. And then you're talking about in Africa, we're mixing wheat flour now with sorghum. And I thought, gosh, the contrast there between what we have and what other people don't. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think the just in time model has really kind of gone too far. And our addiction to trade, I guess, is at the high level, not just our consumer goods that we really like to have delivered tomorrow to our houses, but also our global commodities, right? Where we've become highly reliant on being able to just have those available just in time when we need them. Just a chance. Yeah, and I think it just sort of reminds us of, so the foods that we've been speaking about, really in the context of hunger or of under nutrition, at the same time, we have a global epidemic of over, well, not over nutrition, just of rubbish. And so with that, incredible levels of obesity of non-communicable diseases that's associated with the consumption of really unhealthy, not nutritious foods. And what we've seen so whilst all of what's been, as Alison described, what we've seen. And I don't want to sound anti-business. I'm looking at Eric. I'm not anti-business, but I am very mindful of how some of the large corporations operate because what we did see was a massive entry, even a ramping up of entry into the market of the corporations who supply high fat, high salt and high sugar. And we will see coming out of COVID a tsunami of non-communicable diseases as a consequence of that analysis that was done across Europe has shown this absolute addiction to Uber Eats, those types. Because COVID, we were locked down, we were all ordering online. So for those sorts of commodities, they became much, much more easily accessible. So we've got this double whammy of the problems of the global and the national food system. And here in Australia, that's our problem, is the absolute easy access and affordability of high fat, high sugar junk foods sitting alongside a $10 lettuce. It's a very rational decision by the cheaper per calorie product, which is not the $10 lettuce. It did buy it this week, the $10 lettuce. That is, let me open it up now to the... I just couldn't resist it. Let me open up now to the audience. And we've got about 15 minutes for questions. Are we... Oh, thank you so much. And our really lovely staff will get the mic for you. Yes, here. Thank you so much. Or you can use your outside voice, you know. Thanks so much. Firstly, congratulations to the panel. I love when there's a bit of controversy, right? So that's got to be like... And they're civil about it. Motor-soccer-randi, let's do that a bit more. And I think we disagree less than we look. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's super. And then, Alison, if you went to Hurlston, we'll have notes to compare. And if you went to James Roos, we won't have so much to talk about. So, but I want to turn to investment, right? It's sort of been touched on. But what we know in the agricultural space, I reckon, is that we invest far too much in crops and we invest far too much in technologies around crops. And those other areas are really missing out. Social, environment, some of the forgotten areas that contribute to a nutritious diet. And the FAOs just come out and said, yes, 828 million people in hunger, but 3.1 billion people can't afford a nutritious diet. How do we change the investment paradigm that is, that's the fundamental bit, yes, policy governance, all that kind of stuff. But the investment paradigm is what's got to be changed to drive the innovations that are going to resolve these situations in future food systems. So how do we change that? Yeah, big question. And I think very, I mean, if I look at the... I'm going to have the fight of the Sydney ag plot soon. Yeah, I mean, I think if I look at the Global Wheat Program at CIMET, we're 50 biophysical scientists and two social scientists. And then we look, we say, okay, we want to make a real impact on consumers and value chains, markets and value chains. And we're going to do that from genetics. We're going to say, here's the best of the genetics. And if we look at the global wheat program at CIMET, and if we just make good varieties, people will grow them and that will solve everything. But I think that really demonstrates that disconnect between, okay, maybe really you should start with the consumer or the farmer. What do they want? What do they need? And for that, we need very different skills. We need to understand the socioeconomic context and understand what are the drivers of people's decision making and go back from that and design the biology. So as a plant breeder, I'm kind of to say, we need to take the money out of the plant breeding and into the kind of socioeconomic space. I'm probably not going to say that on record, but we really need to balance those things to have kind of an understanding of those full factors. And I think ACA has done some interesting new investments, investing in behavior, more in the behavioral, understanding the behavioral changes that lead to an intervention in the development context, becoming, being taken up and actually kind of becoming more widespread in the system, rather than relying on our kind of model as biologists, sort out the biology and then it will be so good, it will just go through the system. And I'm sure maybe Eric and Sharon probably have comments on kind of that, achieving that rebalance. Well, let me go to Sharon and then Eric, yeah. So I'm going to sound really alarmist and negative in this space because I think investment is where the game is at, but I'm thinking particularly about the sort of the private, the venture capitalists and the private money and in some of the work we are doing, we're looking at the financialization of the global food system and how three of the world's largest money managers, BlackRock, StateStreet and, and I always forget the other one, but there's the three of them. That one, the Vanguard, have significant shares in the global agri business world and in the global fossil fuel world. And so I imagine really been able to influence the venture capitalists. And of course, we're seeing a shift starting to, to say, to do the sorts of investment that you're speaking about. And I think we're starting to see some of that, although it depends what you read, but some literature will show how, on one hand, the positioning, the performance that comes from those money managers into the agri business world would be very supportive of this sort of discussion. And at the same time, they're still not requiring any of the companies that they invest in to do anything about fossil fuels and particularly around emissions from coal. So you've got this, well, schizophrenic thing happening, but I think there's movement in there. And again, I would say be, for people concerned about these sorts of issues, be at those tables, having these sorts of discussions within that level of sort of private investment is where it's really happening, I think. We've got it, Eric. I mean, I'm not here for you, so our weekends, we're gonna be really, because we are used to it. If I take it just at the opposite level, which is the investment at the farm level, I think we may, and I work towards that and we hope that we may see some shifts in crops which go in that direction. For example, the recent interest in pulses, you know, more legumes being grown. Now, there's a very complex set of influencers, drivers that go towards this, but that could translate into farmers investing in growing pulses when in the past they wouldn't have had because the return would not be good enough. And so that then we'll go to those corporations and give them something to work towards and that requires some of us to do some innovation, including technical innovation. But before that, there are lots of other policy aspects which are very intractable problem in parts of the world. For example, in South Asia, where most of the poor people live and most of the hungry people live still today, the government schemes, subsidy schemes to agriculture are so distorted, outdated, cause so much perverse effects and problems and are completely politically impossible to dismantle that I guess you experience the same. Some of us believe that too hard basket and we just keep breeding. Yeah. I think, and I have to preface my response by saying I'm not an expert in this area, but sort of with an overview of it, there's a couple of things here. One is the total quantity of R&D that applies to agriculture and food and that's been shrinking. And so that's the first point. So we've got, you know, recognisably increasing problems with supply, demand and variability that Alison was talking about, but less investment and that's not particularly rational thing to do. And so at the same time, we've got the trade-offs that we talked about before are actually increasing in their obviousness. So you can't produce extra food in the face of restrictive water, in the face of wanting to have good biodiversity, in the face of expansion of cities, which often are on good land and similar things. So we're coming to the point where all of our choices have increasing trade-offs and so one of the ways through that is by increased innovation and investment in that and we're lacking on that. So we need to fix up the quantum thing first. Secondly, there's an element of self-attraction of the funding. So when you have a big industry such as the weak industry that attracts scientists for career reasons, it attracts additional funding, so it grows bigger and bigger and so of that shrinking pie, you get bigger slices of the commodities essentially, which means that the other things start to shrink in absolute terms as well as relative terms. So that's the orphan crops and so at least CG has a program on the orphan crops but broadly the forces which generate the expansion of the big ones also press down on the little ones, all of the diversification factors which provide market niches or nutraceuticals or good food types in stressful situations and so all of those things are being pushed down and at the same time I think the points that Sharon's made about the food poverty issues in rich countries or even food poverty issues in the houses where someone's really well-fed and someone isn't well-fed and so that sort of multi-scaler issue has to be addressed by a combination of good social science and good policy development and again I don't see that being well integrated into the broader conversations about agriculture and food and just to give you some view that this is not the and this is not just the domain of the agricultural sort of province, if you look at climate change of the global investment in climate change virtually all of it goes into the big ticket items like the satellites and the ocean of graphic boys and things like that and the big supercomputers and sure we need those sorts of things but it's something like about 95 to 98% of the investment globally. Part of the rest of it goes to the climate adaptation stuff the things that really matter to people and a tiny, tiny fraction of that goes to the social science which actually connects that science with those people who actually need the science. So we've got big, big problems in how we run our science. So that's where I mentioned the governance side of things is really, really important. If we miss that, we miss solving the big problems. Out of work, yeah. Another question from the back there, thank you. Thank you very much for your talks. Two quick points. Eric made the first one about the importance of moving to pulses, I think. I mean, that makes climate change sense as we move our protein sources from animals to plants that makes and fertiliser sense, of course. It may require cultural changes and challenges but we know in Australia we've got some very robust, resilient rugged pulses that aren't very palatable but the research could be going into making those more palatable. So the second point is Alison is talking about international policy and multinational agreements on food security. It seems to me that all of that requires some sort of agreement on population size. All the efforts will be cut short if the population is not somehow controlled in a sort of a gentle, meaningful, and responsible way. Want to take that? I mean, Norman Bullock, well, Nobel Peace Prize winner, I mean, talked about the population, monster and the need to look at that alongside food security. So I think there's no debate that the things are interconnected. I think obviously hugely complex to have those dialogues. Even complex to have the dialogues about whose responsibility is global food security. So I mean, we're really a long way away from those, the point where we can have those discussions. I think the UN did reach a deal on exporting grain from Ukraine, which was a major breakthrough. But we're at that level, I think. Whose responsibility is it? Whose responsibility is to do that? Yeah, I mean, I guess that's the big question, right? Who's gonna do it? Who should do that? Who is it a United Nations convening power to be able to do that when at the moment we don't have market assurances, market controls, any agreements on Australia could feed all of their bumper yield to pigs. That's, there's no framework for preventing that. So, very big question. Anyone? Can I say something about population? I hate to look like the optimist which says don't worry, it will sort itself out. But let's just look at what actually is happening in the world in real life. The population growth is slowing down. It's often slowing down. It's always slowing down in connection to one of the most robust indicator is girls' attendance to school and female literacy. And apparently it explains all the movement. It's often correlated to the economic development. And there are case studies to learn from. So Bangladesh and which was East Pakistan until 1971 has actually managed to control its population pretty much, getting there anyway, whereas Pakistan hasn't and they were the same country only 50 years ago. And they are culturally very different. One is Bengal, okay, and the other Urdu. Nevertheless, there's something to learn there. I'm not sure the United Nations can go and tell people that they should have less children, but certainly getting people out of poverty is a way to get people to have fewer children. And there is an argument that there are certain people who use an awful lot of resources. Yes, so. That may be more of the problem than that. We haven't gone there yet. Flying people to the moon and that sort of thing. Mark, did you wanna respond at all too? No, no, look, I very much agree. So the best contraceptives are education, wealth and female reproductive rights. And you do that and solve the problem. Fantastic. Look, I think we're probably at the time, Owen, do you want me to knock it off? Oh, you wanna take one more question? One more question. Who's got a question? Hey, we've got, I can't choose, so. I'm sorry about that. Maybe quick on back to the investment point, like Alison, you had three kind of short, medium and long-term pillars, and that seemed addressed. Investment was like on the last square and diversity and resilience. So how are we gonna address, how can we make any progress on the short-term goals if we don't address those long-term goals? That's my question. Yeah, exactly. And I think in that context, the long-term goal is to have long-term investment. And I think it's just acknowledging that getting that in the short-term is problematic. But really, we need to see the, I think we need to see the investment portfolio move from very short-term political cycles to these sustained commitments that allow us to address things in the short and medium, but with a longer time horizon as well. So I think it's a long-term aspiration that we have a recognition that these kind of resilience or preventative food and agriculture as preventative medicine requires a sustained investment over a long period of time. So it's definitely not to reflect that having that in place in the short-term is a priority, but I think the reality is it'll take a longer time until we kind of finally accept that and get to that point. Any other responses to that? Sharon. Can I just, I suppose, on being positive for the change, being positive? So just within the UN, there's increasing attention being given to what's been referred to as the mission economy. I spoke about mission a while ago. And I see that being picked up. It's been picked up in the environmental space. It's been picked up in the investment space. It's been spoken about, you know, the World Economic Forum if we pay any attention to that. So, and the idea of the mission economy is that exactly that sort of point of what's the long-term objective that we're trying to work towards and then working out that portfolio for that combination of approaches to get there. Recognising, you know, if we think COVID has created the rupture that it could be, recognising that the short-termism has been one of the, so the sort of the new public management model that's been adopted wholeheartedly in high-income countries and exported to low and middle-income countries has failed because it's been based on short-term efficiency. So I take comfort from that. The World Health Organization is currently embedding a mission approach to its work. And that, I think, that's coming from the highest levels of the UN. So, we need a whole other session about the role of the UN, but I'd see some positive signals starting to come through there. Can I just remind ourselves? So, the inequity of the COVID vaccination is hard to contest in one way. But on the other hand, if three years ago, we would have said that planet Earth had the capacity to vaccinate half of its population in 18 months, three billion people, 12 billion doses. I mean, who would have believed that the international system managed to vaccinate one billion rich and two billion poor living for on the side, which is a problem, which is, you know, whether it may not be good enough, but not reflecting on the fact that we've achieved that, I was a young adult at the beginning of the AIDS epidemics and I witnessed the development of the anti-retroviral and all that therapeutics and how long it took to get equitable access of these drugs to the people who really needed them. And having observed as an older adult that success, it may not be good enough, but we can't completely discount that we've achieved that, which I think we should sort of, you know, think about it. And exactly as you said, the Ukraine has been, we've managed to restart the exports, which again, three months ago, I actually made a bet that we would, but that was, you know, an act of faith, but the system has managed. I think that probably brings us to anyone else. I wonder, did you want to, okay, look, I think, is there any take-home message? I mean, do we take Eric's hope and do we leave it there, Mark? Did you, any take-home message? Sure. Well, yeah, you've got to have hope, but you actually have to have hope is not just blind. You actually have to have some basis for hope. And that is, I think, about our ability as a species to be innovative, to actually organise things in ways which actually benefit the majority eventually, maybe not initially, and to actually start moving towards a more equitable distribution of wealth and wellbeing. Perhaps we could share. Yeah, look, this is an amazing, and Owen, does that mean you're popping up? Just say. Okay, look, this, I think, Siat is an amazing example within this university of what can be done, and it's really fantastic that Dr Alison Bennett is, Bentley is a fellow and wonderful to absolutely have you here. So it was, as I said, inspiring to hear you speak. So thanks so much to Dr Alison Bentley, and also thanks to our incredible panel, to Dr Eric Hutner, to Professor Mark Harden, Professor Sharon Freel, give them a big thank you. APPLAUSE And I would like to thank Professor Owen Acton and his team at Siat for doing this vital and fascinating work. And there will be some drinks and refreshments afterwards, so a lot more time to chat as well. But I think Owen is just going to leave us with some words. There's one thing I just wanted to say, and that, look, in some ways there's a focus there, just to very end, in terms of Siat, but Siat, I want to just point out, is a community component that's merged from many folk that are in this room. It's interesting, if you look at the title of it, it's Agri Technology, it was very narrow in its focus, and that actually reflected a journey that I think that many of us were on. It came out of plant sciences, agriculture, it was coming out of a very crop-centric sort of perspective about what could be. But it was interesting over the last three years how it has evolved. We've sort of realised that the potential is to deal with agri-sector challenges, big societal challenges, and it's actually, therefore, branching right in across the whole university. We've heard a lot about social policy, regulatory space and so on. So don't be fooled by the title of the name of the Centre as an Innovation Institute, because I think in many ways what the offering here is around the way in which the university can harness its full capabilities to deal with all of these issues. And the mission space, which is a really important one for us, which is what we think is a real opportunity, is the way universities more broadly across the country can use their full interdisciplinary capabilities to deal with these big challenges, define the outcome, assemble the teams and get on with it. So, and I think that could underpin some of the R&D deficiency that's occurring and so on. So I think the journey that we've gone on ourselves is reflected in now this breadth of conversation that was here today. So thank you very much to everyone. And the last thing I just want to say is there's an awesome team of people that make this sort of thing happen. So the SEAT team and everyone else that's associated with it, thank you very much. And also all those who have been involved in the building of SEAT over the last few years, thank you for coming today and also for all the work you've done.