Communication, Not Innovation Deemed Most Pressing Issue for Ag Industry

Jeff Simmons, president of Elanco, speaks at the CAST Communication Award Breakfast at the 2013 World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa

Dr. Carl Winter, director of the FoodSafe Program and 2012 winner of the Council for Agriculture and Technology (CAST) Communication award, said: “Rarely do you see the concept of communication recognized as an important element of science.” As an academic scientist, he explained, he has noticed that many times academia underestimates the importance of communication or allows others to do it for them.

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The problem with that, he said, is that it can misspackage the science by not allowing the scientist to demonstrate their passion to the audience. This problem is one he has noticed particularly recently in the area of crop genetics and the public’s response to genetically modified organisms.

The CAST Communication award, presented at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa was awarded to Jeff Simmons, president of Elanco. Taking the stage to a wave of applause and congratulatory remarks, Simmons explained that the industry’s ability to communicate with the consumers is key not only to profitability, but to fundamental issues like food security.

“We need to shift this conversation from a crisis to a solution,” he explained of the ag industry’s ability to feed the world by 2050. “People working towards a cure for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, they don’t have a solution to their crisis. We have one. We’ve got enough innovation, let’s take our pipelines and feed the world. We spend too much time going to events and leaving and not doing a lot.”

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His message was echoed throughout the World Food Prize Borlaug Dialogues with various events and speakers emphasizing the need to get the word out about the safe solutions provided by biotechnology.

Dr. John Soper, vice president of Crop Genetics Research and Development at DuPont hailed Norman Borlaug as not only a great scientist but a great communicator. “If you read the books, you know he had a lot of tough conversations. He talked to everyone from the poor farmers to the leaders until the science proved itself.”

The ability to allow the science to prove itself, Soper explained, will require private industries to be a part of the solution. “Political unrest happens, in large part, in countries where people are starving,” he explained. “We have technology that keeps people fed. The challenge we are facing,” he said, “is communicating the complexities of sustainability and feeding the world.”

Simmons echoed this sentiment in his acceptance speech, explaining that a Center of Food Integrity survey of global experts − including smallholder farmers to legislative decision makers − said that they believe the solution to global hunger lies in enabling technology that currently exists to be released and implemented around the world.

In order to help remedy these problems, Simmons said he would like to make it his mission, and the mission of those in attendance, to work on the following between by the 2014 World Food Prize:

  • Have 10,000 individuals sign up to make food security their cause
  • Receive 1 million positive impressions a week about food security
  • Identify and support innovation to feed 1 billion more people while using fewer resources

 

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